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...
This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie.
Release: datasette 1.0a27
Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern browser headers as described by Filippo Valsorda.
The second big chang...
The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts.
It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview as the model ID, but can only output audio files.
The prompting guide...
I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal, as when Meta hires human beings to review the decisions of automated moderation systems. It may be external, as when lawyers are penalized for submitting LLM lies to the court. It may involve formalized responsibility, like a Data Protection Officer. It may be convenient for a company to have third-party subcontractors, like Buscaglia, who can be thrown under the bus when the system as a whole misbehaves.
— Kyle Kingsbury, The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs
Zig 0.16.0 release notes: "Juicy Main"
Zig has really good release notes - comprehensive, detailed, and with relevant usage examples for each of the new features.
Of particular note in the newly released Zig 0.16.0 is what they are calling "Juicy Main" - a dependency injecti...
datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection
Datasette has long protected against CSRF attacks using CSRF tokens, implemented using my asgi-csrf Python library. These are something of a pain to work with - you need to scatter forms in te...
Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense
OpenAI's answer to Claude Mythos appears to be a new model called GPT-5.4-Cyber:
In preparation for increasingly more capable models from OpenAI over the next few months, we are fine-tuning our models specifically to enable d...
Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now
The UK's AI Safety Institute recently published Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities, their own independent analysis of Claude Mythos which backs up Anthropic's claims that it is exceptionally effective at id...
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