Welcome to the Datasette blog We have a bunch of neat Datasette announcements in the pipeline so we decided it was time the project grew an official blog. I built this using OpenAI Codex desktop, which turns out to have the Markdown session transcript export feature I've always wanted. Here's the session that built the blog. See also issue 179. Tags: ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, codex
“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing. — Boris Mann Tags: ai-agents, ai, agent-definitions
Tool: CSP Allow-list Experiment An experiment that shows that you can load an app in a CSP-protected sandboxed iframe (see previous note) and have a custom fetch() that intercepts CSP errors and passes them up to the parent window... which can then prompt the user to add that domain to an allow-list and then refresh the page. I built this one with GPT-5.5 xhigh running in the Codex desktop app. Tags: content-security-policy, iframes, security
Release: datasette 1.0a29 New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating "_r" dictionaries. #2695 Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701 Fixed bug with display of column actions dialog on Mobile Safari. #2708 Fixed bug where tests could crash with a segfault due to a race condition between Datasette.close() and Datasette.close(). #2709 That segfault bug was gnarly. I added a mechanism to Datasette recently that would…
Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everything. And he's gonna say, what's a Ralph loop? And you will say, give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I'll show you. Now you won't actually do anything, because you can't do anything.…
The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that "AI strategy" is most important? McKinsey said "context" needs to be managed? Well, "Context Engine for…
Release: llm 0.32a2 A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one: Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of /v1/chat/completions. This enables interleaved reasoning across tool calls for GPT-5 class models. #1435 This means you can now see the summarized reasoning tokens when you run prompts against an OpenAI model, displayed in a different color to standard error. Use the -R or --hide-reasoning flags if you don't…
GitLab Act 2 There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era. They're "planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams". One of the most interesting things about GitLab is that they have employees spread across a large number of countries - 18 are listed in their public employee handbook but this post says they are "operating in…
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. [...] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double…
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particularly liked his use of the term "Zombie Internet" to define a different, more insidious alternative to the "Dead Internet" (which is just bots talking to each other): I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are…
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News: But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simplest, which takes advantage of LLM fragments: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle But you can also incorporate tool calls using the -T name_of_tool option: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -T llm_time -f Write a…
Learning on the Shop floor Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start working in. I myself work with river in #tobi_river channel and many followed this pattern. Every conversation is therefore searchable. Anyone at Shopify can jump in. In my own channel, there are over 100 people who, react…
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. [...] He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech. — New…
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a…
WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depend on rapid back-and-forth, so pausing to wait for audio is unacceptable. …but as a user, I would much rather wait an extra 200ms for my slow/expensive prompt to be accurate. After all, I’m paying good money to boil the ocean,…