The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. [...]

There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.

— Steve Yegge

Tags: steve-yegge, google, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Research: Exploring the new `servo` crate In Servo is now available on crates.io the Servo team announced the initial release of the servo crate, which packages their browser engine as an embeddable library. I set Claude Code for web the task of figuring out what it can ...

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.

As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.

— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost

Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \ mlx_vlm.generate \ --model google/gemma-4...

SQLite 3.53.0

SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me:

• ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this.
• New json_array_insert() function and its jsonb equivalent.
• Significant improvements to CLI mode, including result formatting.

The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: sql, sqlite

Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo

See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.

Tags: tools, sqlite

Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots!

Tags: kakapo

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If you ask ChatGPT voice mode for its knowledge cutoff date it tells you Apri...

Tool: GitHub Repo Size

GitHub doesn't tell you the repo size in the UI, but it's available in the CORS-friendly API. Paste a repo into this tool to see the size, for example for simonw/datasette (8.1MB).

Tags: cors, github

Release: asgi-gzip 0.3

I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was incorrectly compressing event/text-stream responses.

asgi-gzip was extracted from Starlette, and has a GitHub Actions scheduled workflow to check Starlette for updates that need to be ported to the library... but that action had stopped running and hence had missed Starlette's own fix for this issue.

I ran the workflow and integrated the new fix, and now datasette-gzip and asgi-gzip both correctly handle text/event-stream in SSE responses.

Tags: gzip, asgi, python

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago. It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required)...

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.

— Giles Turnbull, AI and the human voice

Tags: ai-ethics, writing, ai

Research: SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume

Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News about whether two SQLite processes in separate Docker containers that share the same volume might run into problems due to WAL shared memory. The answer is that everything works fine - Docker containers on the same host and filesystem share the same shared memory in a way that allows WAL to collaborate as it should.

Tags: docker, sqlite

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper. It's available via OpenRouter so I asked it to draw me ...

Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing. The model is a general purpose model, similar to Claude Opus 4...

Google AI Edge Gallery Terrible name, really great app: this is Google's official app for running their Gemma 4 models (the E2B and E4B sizes, plus some members of the Gemma 3 family) directly on your iPhone. It works really well. The E2B model is a 2.54GB download and is bo...

Release: datasette-ports 0.2

• No longer requires Datasette - running uvx datasette-ports now works as well.
• Installing it as a Datasette plugin continues to provide the datasette ports command.

Tags: datasette

Release: scan-for-secrets 0.3

• New -r/--redact option which shows the list of matches, asks for confirmation and then replaces every match with REDACTED, taking escaping rules into account.
• New Python function redact_file(file_path: str | Path, secrets: list[str], replacement: str = "REDACTED") -> int.

Tags: projects

Tool: Cleanup Claude Code Paste

Super-niche tool this. I sometimes copy prompts out of the Claude Code terminal app and they come out with a bunch of weird additional whitespace. This tool cleans that up.

Tags: tools, claude-code

Release: datasette-ports 0.1

Another example of README-driven development, this time solving a problem that might be unique to me.

I often find myself running a bunch of different Datasette instances with different databases and different in-development plugins, spreads across dozens of different terminal windows - enough that I frequently lose them!

Now I can run this:

datasette install datasette-ports
datasette ports

And get a list of every running instance that looks something like this:

http://127.0.0.1:8333/ - v1.0a26
  Databases: data
  Plugins: datasette-enrichments, datasette-enrichments-llm, datasette-llm, datasette-secrets
http://127.0.0.1:8001/ - v1.0a26
  Databases: creatures
  Plugins: datasette-extract, datasette-llm, datasette-secrets
http://127.0.0.1:8900/ - v0.65.2
  Databases: logs

Tags: datasette

Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI Lalit Maganti provides one of my favorite pieces of long-form writing on agentic engineering I've seen in ages. They spent eight years thinking about and then three months building syntaqlite, which they describe as "h...

From anonymized U.S. ChatGPT data, we are seeing:

• ~2M weekly messages on health insurance
• ~600K weekly messages [classified as healthcare] from people living in “hospital deserts” (30 min drive to nearest hospital)
• 7 out of 10 msgs happen outside clinic hours

— Chengpeng Mou, Head of Business Finance, OpenAI

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms

Tool: Syntaqlite Playground

Lalit Maganti's syntaqlite is currently being discussed on Hacker News thanks to Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI, a deep dive into exactly how it was built.

This inspired me to revisit a research project I ran when Lalit first released it a couple of weeks ago, where I tried it out and then compiled it to a WebAssembly wheel so it could run in Pyodide in a browser (the library itself uses C and Rust).

This new playground loads up the Python library and provides a UI for trying out its different features: formating, parsing into an AST, validating, and tokenizing SQLite SQL queries.

Tags: sql, ai-assisted-programming, sqlite, tools, agentic-engineering

Release: scan-for-secrets 0.2

• CLI tool now streams results as they are found rather than waiting until the end, which is better for large directories.
• -d/--directory option can now be used multiple times to scan multiple directories.
• New -f/--file option for specifying one or more individual files to scan.
• New scan_directory_iter(), scan_file() and scan_file_iter() Python API functions.
• New -v/--verbose option which shows each directory that is being scanned.

Release: scan-for-secrets 0.1.1

• Added documentation of the escaping schemes that are also scanned.
• Removed unnecessary repr escaping scheme, which was already covered by json.

Release: scan-for-secrets 0.1 I like publishing transcripts of local Claude Code sessions using my claude-code-transcripts tool but I'm often paranoid that one of my API keys or similar secrets might inadvertently be revealed in the detailed log files. I built this new P...

Release: research-llm-apis 2026-04-04

I'm working on a major change to my LLM Python library and CLI tool. LLM provides an abstraction layer over hundreds of different LLMs from dozens of different vendors thanks to its plugin system, and some of those vendors have grown new features over the past year which LLM's abstraction layer can't handle, such as server-side tool execution.

To help design that new abstraction layer I had Claude Code read through the Python client libraries for Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini and Mistral and use those to help craft curl commands to access the raw JSON for both streaming and non-streaming modes across a range of different scenarios. Both the scripts and the captured outputs now live in this new repo.

Tags: llm, apis, json, llms

[GitHub] platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

— Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub

Tags: github, github-actions

Vulnerability Research Is Cooked Thomas Ptacek's take on the sudden and enormous impact the latest frontier models are having on the field of vulnerability research. Within the next few months, coding agents will drastically alter both the practice and the economics of expl...

A fun thing about recording a podcast with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's one he shared on Twitter today which ended up attracting over 1.1m views!

That was 48 seconds. Our full conversation lasted 1 hour 40 minutes.

Tags: ai-ethics, coding-agents, agentic-engineering, generative-ai, podcast-appearances, ai, llms, cognitive-debt