The people do not yearn for automation
This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket.
It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about f...
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash.
Both models are 1 million token context Mixtur...
This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.
russellromney/honker
"Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it.
The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this:
import honker
...
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports
It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.
The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the C...
Serving the For You feed
One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts.
spacecowbo...
LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js.
Spati...
GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ...
[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.
Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model
Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model:
Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B act...
As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]
Our experi...
Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans
On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing.
Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their cha...
Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it's already reverte...
OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here's how I put it to the test.
My prompt:
Do a where's Waldo style...
AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality.
I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata().)
Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them.
As far as I can tell Claude Opus 4.7 is the first model to change the tokenizer, so it's only ...
Headless everything for personal AI
Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common:
Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for t...
Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it's always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models.
...
Anthropic publish the system prompts for Claude chat and make that page available as Markdown. I had Claude Code turn that page into separate files for each model and model family with fake git commit dates to enable browsing the changes via the GitHub commit view.
Agentic Engineering Patterns >
Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a lot of work done in a single shot.
First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effecti...
This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon has come to the US West Coast since...
Release: datasette 1.0a28
I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly:
Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_wri...
New model: claude-opus-4.7, which supports thinking_effort: xhigh. #66
New thinking_display and thinking_adaptive boolean options. thinking_display summarized output is currently only available in JSON output or JSON logs.
Increased default max_tokens to the maximum allowed for each model.
No longer uses obsolete structured-outputs-2025-11-13 beta header for older models.
For anyone who has been taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic.
Here's the Qwen 3.6 pelican, generat...
Tool: datasette.io news preview
The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this:
- date: 2026-04-15
body: |-
[Datasette 1.0a27](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/chang...
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