Featured
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a7
- Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models.
Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a specific model with temperature set to 0.5.
Release: llm-echo 0.5a0
- New
-o thinking 1option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher.
This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this:
uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with llm-echo==0.5a0 llm -m echo hi -o thinking 1
This will fake a reasoning block to standard error before returning JSON echoing the prompt.
Tags: llm
So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.
— John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI
Tags: openai, y-combinator, ai, john-gruber
[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access.
And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland.
— Andy Masley, pushing back against the "land use" argument against data center construction
Tags: ai-ethics, ai, generative-ai, andy-masley
I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.
In this month's newsletter:
Here's a copy of the March newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Tags: newsletter
Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo
If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail.
I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack of support for backtracking.
Tags: security, python, regular-expressions, c, ctypes
We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships.
— Anthropic, How people ask Claude for personal guidance
Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, claude, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms, sycophancy
I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt.
As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive pages, and in site search results.
I back-populated over a decade of iNaturalist sightings, which means you can search for lemur you'll see my lemur photos from Madagascar in 2019!
Tags: blogging, photography, wildlife, ai, inaturalist, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code
/goal and Codex will keep on looping until it evaluates that the goal has been completed... or the configured token budget has been exhausted.
It looks like the feature is mainly implemented though the goals/continuation.md and goals/budget_limit.md prompts, which are automatically injected at the end of a turn.
Via @fcoury
Tags: ai, openai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, system-prompts, codex-cli, agentic-engineering
Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities
The UK's AI Security Institute previously evaluated Claude Mythos: now they've evaluated GPT-5.5 for finding security vulnerability and found it to be comparable to Mythos, but unlike Mythos it's generally available right now.Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-security-research, gpt
It's a common misconception that we can't tell who is using LLM and who is not. I'm sure we didn't catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It's like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn't smoke instantly knows it.
I'm not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house.
— Andrew Kelley, Creator of Zig
Tags: zig, llms, ai, generative-ai
We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps
Matt Webb:I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?)
The lesson here is that when vibe-coding accelerates app development, apps become more personal, more situated, and more frequent. Shipping a tool or a micro-app is less like launching a website and more like posting on a blog.
This inspired me to have Claude add an Atom feed (and icon) to my /elsewhere/tools/ page, which itself is populated by content from my tools.simonwillison.net site.
Tags: atom, matt-webb, rss, ai, vibe-coding
Release: llm 0.32a1
- Fixed a bug in 0.32a0 where tool-calling conversations were not correctly reinflated from SQLite. #1426
Tags: llm
Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.
— OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5
Tags: openai, ai, llms, system-prompts, prompt-engineering, codex-cli, generative-ai, gpt
Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money.
Tags: agentic-engineering, vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, ai
Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices
I just encountered this feature via a "try this out now" prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked!This is Google's implementation of the ultimate sci-fi translation app, where two people can talk to each other in two separate languages and Meet translates from one to the other and - with a short delay - repeats the text in your preferred language, with a rough imitation of the original speaker's voice.
It can only handle English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian at the moment. It's also still very alpha - I ran it successfully between two laptops running web browsers, but then when I tried between an iPhone and an iPad it didn't seem to work.
Tags: google, translation
@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark:
I feel like we need to stack these tests now
I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and it did - the prompt Scott used was:
Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other
Tags: text-to-image, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai, generative-ai, slop, chatgpt
Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore.
GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer.
— Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model
Tags: generative-ai, gpt, openai, ai, llms
Release: llm 0.31
- New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model:
llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418- New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models:
-o verbosity low. Values arelow,medium,high.- New option for setting the image detail level used for image attachments to OpenAI models:
-o image_detail low- values arelow,highandauto, and GPT-5.4 and 5.5 also acceptoriginal.- Models listed in
extra-openai-models.yamlare now also registered as asynchronous. #1395
