Archive

Just published a bunch more notes on this on my blog https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/the-browser-is-the-sandbox/

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

If you've been trying to figure out DSPy - the automatic prompt optimization system - this talk by @dbreunig is the clearest explanation I've seen yet, with a very useful real-world case study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtkgYZnOw

My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/4/drew-on-dspy/

One of the new skills required to get the most out of AI-assisted coding tools - Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc - is designing agentic loops: carefully selecting tools to run in a loop to achieve a specified goal. Do this well and you can solve many coding problems with brute force.

I'm trying to get into the habit of producing more video, so on the spur of the moment I made a 7 minute video showing how I used Claude Code to put together a simple GitHub Actions workflow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC6dmPcin2E

Fascinating Hacker News comment from Tom Gally, a professional translator (Japanese to English) who uses LLMs as part of his workflow, which he describes in detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897856

Wrote a bit more about this on my blog here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/workflow-for-translation/

Wow there's a lot of hard-won actionable advice in this! Posted a few of my own notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/30/llm-as-a-judge/ https://twitter.com/HamelHusain/status/1851645681150382103

What are some very short (1-3 word) prompt fragments you find work well?

A few of mine:

"Be concise"
"Try harder" (for disappointing initial results)
"Use Python" (to trigger Code Interpreter)
"No yapping"
"ELI5"
"Give multiple options"
"Explain each line" (for code)

Command R+ (and Command R) are now available in my LLM CLI tool using the new llm-command-r plugin

pipx install llm
llm install llm-command-r
llm keys set cohere
<paste Cohere API key here>
llm -m command-r-plus "Say hello from Command R Plus" https://twitter.com/cohere/status/1775878850699808928

Wrote up a TIL about my new private daily planner tool, which uses a Frankenstein combination of GitHub Actions, GitHub Issues and GitHub Pages to let me create a new issue every day to track my goals by hitting Command+N (new browser window) in Firefox https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/daily-planner

This demo is amazing - "search by vibes" against Wikipedia using language model embeddings, running entirely in your browser (~100MB download) - details here: https://www.leebutterman.com/2023/06/01/offline-realtime-embedding-search.html https://twitter.com/leebutterman/status/1697645296963006698

What are the best Python-based LLMs for running on an M1/M2 Mac right now?

I'm particularly interested in models with weights that are available to download without having to click through a license or similar

The PaLM 2 paper is a really interesting read (OK, I skimmed it - it's 91 pages long) https://t.co/Fk8xYTsKEv

Required reading if you're running a community Mastodon server that might be hit by DMCA takedown requests https://t.co/UVod7jTksW

Someone on Hacker News asked what the killer app for @datasetteproj is - a question I find surprisingly difficult to answer, at least not in less than seven paragraphs

So I replied with more than seven paragraphs: https://t.co/Y5oP70wWIG

If someone gives you a CSV file with 100,000 rows in it, what tools do you use to start exploring and understanding that data?

Example comment: "Regarding large models and why the work, while it started off quite controversial, more and more researchers are subscribing to the lottery ticket hypothesis proposed in: https://t.co/LPTyaAyOjf"

The stuff happening on the Stable Diffusion subreddit right now is pretty wild - since the model can be run by anyone on their own machine if they have a decent GPU https://t.co/pJnR4czUlG

Released a new tool this week: google-drive-to-sqlite, which authenticates against your Google Drive account and builds a local SQLite database containing metadata about all of your files https://t.co/phLOn658rO