Build Your Own 100% Local AI Second Brain
How the best builders in tech are all converging on AI second brains
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Breaking news: “they hadn’t figured out how OpenAI would pay for it”
Sign of things to come?
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llm-gemini 0.31
llm-gemini 0.31
Release: llm-gemini 0.31 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview. Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then. Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms
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Big Words
Big Words
Tool: Big Words I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide. Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/big-words?text=simonwillison.net&gradient=1&size=9.5 Double click or double tap the page to access a form for modifying the different options. Tags: vibe-coding, tools
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Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are very good Just a few months ago, AI-generated security bug reports to open source projects were mostly known for being unwanted slop. Dealing with reports that look plausibly correct but are wrong imposes an asymmetric cost on project maintainers: it’s cheap…
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Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal
There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that's the one with the particularly bad environmental record. The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifying…
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AI #167: The Prior Restraint Era Begins
The era of training frontier models and then releasing them whenever you wanted?
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The Best Risk Mitigation Strategy in Data? A Single Source of Truth
The Best Risk Mitigation Strategy in Data? A Single Source of Truth
Every data leader has a version of this story. A regulatory audit surfaces a metric that doesn’t match across systems. A board member catches conflicting revenue numbers in two reports presented back-to-back. An AI tool generates a recommendation based on data that hasn’t been governed since the analyst who built it left the company two […]
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GitHub Repo Stats
GitHub Repo Stats
Tool: GitHub Repo Stats One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt: Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats Example output for simonw/datasette and simonw/llm. Tags:…
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Build a Deep Researcher That Beats OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity
...using a 100% open-source, self-hostable stack.
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Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026
Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026
I'm at Anthropic's Code w/ Claude event today. Here's my live blog of the morning keynote sessions. Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, claude-code, live-blog
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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work. One thing I really enjoy about podcasts is that they sometimes push me to think out loud in a way that exposes an idea I've not previously been able to put into words. Vibe coding and agentic…
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Eating My Own Dog Food: How I Used the Framework to Write the Post About the Framework
In “Don’t Automate Your Moat,” I argue that engineering organizations should match AI autonomy to two independent dimensions: business risk and competitive differentiation. I used AI Gateway cost controls as a worked example throughout the piece because a single feature touches all four quadrants depending on which piece you’re building. A piece making that argument […]
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The Organization Is the Bottleneck
The Organization Is the Bottleneck
Everyone is adopting AI coding tools. Engineers are writing code faster than ever. But are organizations actually delivering value faster? That’s not obvious. I wrote Enabling Microservice Success with a big focus on engineering enablement, guardrails, automated testing, active ownership, and light touch governance. I didn’t know AI coding agents were coming, but it turns […]
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