Tool: github-code Web Component

An experimental Web Component built using GPT-5.5 and the following prompt:

let's build a Web Component for embedding code from GitHub

<github-code href="https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-ast/blob/437c759129154f05296324a7f82aa1246340dd14/sqlite_ast/parser.py#L9-L18"></github-code>

It takes URLs like that, converts them to https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/sqlite-ast/437c759129154f05296324a7f82aa1246340dd14/sqlite_ast/parser.py, then uses fetch() to fetch them and displays the specified range of lines - with line numbers, no syntax highlighting though

Show me a preview web browser so I can see your work

Here's what it looks like embedded on this page:

Tags: github, web-components, gpt

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0

See sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations for details.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc4

The last RC before the 4.0 stable release. Mainly implements feedback from a detailed review by Claude Fable 5.

Tags: sqlite-utils, claude-mythos-fable

This morning I released sqlite-utils 4.0, the 124th release of that project and the first major version bump since 3.0 in November 2020. In addition to some small but significant breaking changes (described in this upgrade guide), this version introduces three major features...

tencent/Hy3 New Apache 2.0 licensed model from Tencent in China: Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 21B active parameters and 3.8B MTP layer parameters, developed by the Tencent Hy Team. Following the Hy3 Preview launch in late April, we gathered fe...

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc3

I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger.

The biggest new feature is support for introspecting and creating compound foreign keys - a feature that involves a subtle breaking change to table.foreign_keys and hence needed to land for the 4.0 stable release.

sqlite-utils also now follows SQLite's convention for case insensitive column names, which turned out to touch a bunch of different places at once.

Tags: projects, sqlite, sqlite-utils, annotated-release-notes, gpt, claude-mythos-fable

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc2

See sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25).

I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 stable release that I felt truly comfortable about, since I try to keep to Sem...

Building a World Map with only 500 bytes

Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data:

The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't know you could use fetch() with data: URIs like this:

fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
  r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
).then(
  s => new Response(s).text()
).then(
  t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
)

Via Hacker News

Tags: ascii-art, javascript

Better Models: Worse Tools Armin reports on a weird problem he ran into while hacking on Pi: The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The...

Open Source AI Gap Map Current AI is "a global partnership building a public option for AI", founded as a non-profit at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and backed by serious capital ($400m already committed). They launched their Gap Map a couple of days ago - ...

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year. There are likely a lot of reasons fo...

One of the most interesting tips I got from the Fireside Chat I hosted with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at AIE on Wednesday was to let Fable (and to a certain extent Opus) use their own judgement rather than dictating how they should work. The exampl...

The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

This month:

• Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, and US export restrictions
• GLM-5.2 is the new best open weights model
• Tokenmaxxing is so over
• Datasette Apps
• sqlite-utils and shot-scraper and Datasette
• Miscellaneous WASM projects
• Other model releases
• What I'm using

Here's a copy of the May newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

Release: llm-coding-agent 0.1a0 Another Fable 5 experiment. Now that my LLM library has evolved into more of an agent framework it's time to see what a simple coding agent would look like built on it. I started a new Python library using my python-lib-template-reposi...

Research: Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts One of this morning's AIE keynotes covered dspy, which reminded me I've been meaning to see if it could help me improve the system prompt used by Datasette Agent - so I fired off an asy...

I saw Geoffrey Litt speak at AIE yesterday, and one framing he used particularly resonated with me: Understand to participate Geoffrey was talking about the challenge of collaborating with coding agents as they construct increasingly large and sophisticated changes, and the ...

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

— Anthropic, on Twitter

Tags: anthropic, claude, generative-ai, claude-mythos, ai, llms

Nano Banana 2 Lite

Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the "fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale".

I used AI studio to run this prompt:

Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio

I like that one better than the results I got from the other Nano Banana models when I tried this back in April. It spelled Forest Festival wrong in two different ways though.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, text-to-image, llm-release, nano-banana

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning. I always head straight for the "what's new" developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close...

The AI Compass

This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit.

I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself!

It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code.

Via @erisianrite.com

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

shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to record a video of that routine. I've written before about the importance of havi...

Release: shot-scraper 1.10

The big new feature is shot-scraper video storyboard.yml, described in detail in Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video.

Tags: shot-scraper

Tool: HTML table extractor

Yet another in my growing collection of paste-conversion tools. This one accepts pasted rich text from browsers (with embedded HTML tables) and converts them to HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV or JSON.

Try it out by selecting everything on the Wikipedia List of cities and towns in the San Francisco Bay Area page and pasting it directly into the tool:

On a similar note, I recently rebuilt my Rich text to markdown tool to add support for tables and generally improve the UI.

Tags: html, tools

Tiniest TIL, using AppleScript to count the number of open browser tabs in Safari:

osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to count tabs of every window'

Tags: safari, til, applescript

Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce. [...] with variants including 9B Dense, 31B Dense, 35B MoE, and 397B MoE. Built on top of pretrained Gemma 4 and Qw...

Human Agent in the loop

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]

Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.

— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”

Tags: jon-udell, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Hack Your Summer I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning: It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want to build something real this summer. You’ll learn how to identify a proje...

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics: Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, ...

This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do.

— Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no learning curve

Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai