Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 4hI included the reasoning traces in that one for some of the calculations, to show how the LLM handled long addition 2130
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 4hI tried running it again with Qwen 3.8 27B on reasoning effort "medium" - just one run per calculation (not 30) because they took a lot longer It got them exactly right 167 out of 169 times, so the chart is pretty dull looking! Full details here: gist.github.com/simonw/8ef79... 1171
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 13hI was inspired to try re-running your experiment with a local, open weight model - Qwen 3.8 27B Q4A_K_M - here's the result 5512
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 28/09/2026And my closing thought on how this stuff impacts our lives as software engineers, with a quote from cycling champion Greg LeMond 120
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 28/09/2026Here's how I define "Fable class models" - first Claude Fable 5, now Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-Astra 6 and maybe GPT-5.6 Sol as well 240
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 27/09/2026JPEG XL looks not to have good browser support yet, but it looks like AVIF became usable around 2023 caniuse.com?search=AVIF 120
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 27/09/2026I just exported 69 slides from Keynote - as (reduced quality) JPG: 10.4MB, as PNG: 100MB, as WebP: 4.1MB Quality looks great, this 1920×1080 image here is 58KB 6260
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 27/09/2026I included a few references to this year's record-breaking Kākāpō breeding season in a talk I gave yesterday, and since Claude Opus 5.5 is surprisingly capable at pixel art animation I had it create this celebratory video for my closing slide 6835
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 14/09/2026Built a little local web app to help edit commit messages for a repo simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/14/... 7594
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 12/09/2026Anthropic had previously attacked PyPI, but this OpenAI attack on RubyGems was a whole lot more aggressive www.anthropic.com/news/investi... 1494
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 09/09/2026Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/o... 1129052
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 06/09/2026It was part of my subscription, but according to AgentsView th pelican transcript would have cost $4.24 at API prices 010
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 05/09/2026I rotated the image in Blender to check and... yeah 1380
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 05/09/2026New TIL on using Blender with coding agents on macOS: til.simonwillison.net/llms/blender... GPT-6 Astra (medium): > Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle > OK add a background and a lot of flair > OK make it a whole lot better Result: 2740630
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 04/09/2026Here's the gpt-6-astra one at full size (with alt text generated by gpt-5-astra) 11380
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 04/09/2026Got access to GPT-6 Astra. Want to see some pelicans? Yeah you want to see some pelicans... here's a grid comparing Astra to GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/... Transcript from generating the Astra pelicans here: tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg... 192069
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 02/09/2026I'm delighted to report that the Claude system prompt now includes suggestions to draw a skateboarding axolotl, should the user ask for a picture of Sonic the hedgehog (it's not a pelican riding a bicycle, but axolotls are cool, too) 2132
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 02/09/2026A few notes on Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 - with Max thinking level I got the best SVG pelican I've had from any Anthropic model (at a hefty cost of $3.30!), which I then had it animate simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/c... 2036222
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 01/09/2026Just noticed the ChatGPT desktop app (previously named Codex) bundles a full copy of the LibreOffice open source office suite, tucked away in a hidden folder in the ~/.cache directory 1818123
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 31/08/2026In local news, the tunnel between Pacifica and Half Moon Bay had some maintenance recently and now it screams 4331
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 31/08/2026Here's my attempt at explaining what ChatGPT Work can actually do - it's a deeply confusing but extremely powerful tool with a whole lot of useful features that aren't available in regular ChatGPT simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/30/... 1113320
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 28/08/2026My LLM cliché highlighter is up to 38 patterns now tools.simonwillison.net/llm-cliche-h... 2350165
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 18/08/2026I've looked into this in the past and I haven't managed to get to 100% confidence that it's necessary to destroy the books simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/a... 340
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 18/08/2026You mean the thing about how destroying the books might be a necessity to count as "transformation"? They mention that in the article 290
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 17/08/2026Took it over an hour but here it is! tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg... 060
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 17/08/2026I've been enjoying that so much - I tried "render an svg of five intersecting squares. don't overthink this" at one point and yeah... 140
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 15/08/2026I bumped up the context limit and let it have another go and it sure did produce a beautiful (animated) circle gist.github.com/simonw/39977... 6490
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 15/08/2026... disaster! I forgot to bump up the context length from the default and the server rejected it before it could draw its no-doubt beautiful circle 1510
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 15/08/2026Qwen 3.8 27B in its default reasoning settings in LM Studio of "extra high" is a chronic over-thinker and I kind of love it 141716
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 15/08/2026Got a photo of Morris, a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet in the entire Pacific Ocean simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/15/... 4632
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 14/08/2026The new Qwen 3.7 27B, running as a 17GB GGUF in LM Studio on my M5 Max MacBook Pro, just drew me the best pelican riding a bicycle I've seen from any model that runs on my laptop 1218314
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 13/08/2026Karen also made this mug, to commemorate a special visitor we had at Pier 39 earlier this year 1180
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 10/08/2026Karen currently only has one remaining kakapo item on her Etsy store - this spoon rest. But she has plenty of delightful items featuring other sorts of animals www.etsy.com/shop/KarenJa... 1220
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 10/08/2026... Karen made a set of Kākāpō nesting bowls, and they are AMAZING 1150
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 08/08/2026Here's where things get really fun, at 24m50s www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Dy... 1341
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 07/08/2026I had Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra try the same prompt and the result was a better game - it understood the "heist" and "team" aspects better, you have to rescue your two raccoon crewmates and then stack on top of each other to steal the Golden Sardine from a museum simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/7/m... 1211
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 06/08/2026One of the things the pelican benchmark is still useful for is visually representing (to a tiny extent) the improvements in a single model family Here's Meta AI's Spark (8th April), Spark 1.1 (9th July), and Spark 1.2 (today, 5th August) simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/m... 3363
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 05/08/2026Four years ago today I tweeted a concept for a "Raccoon Heist" video game, product description generated by GPT-3 and concept "art" created by DALL-E Today I fed those assets into Fable 5 and had it build full working game, single shot prompt, no feedback from me simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/5/r... 10816
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 05/08/2026Apparently peak golf course construction in the USA was in 1999, with 509 golf courses opened in that single year! archive.lib.msu.edu/tic/holen/ar... 2162
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 04/08/2026The MiniMax-H3 video generation model is a lot of fun - here's what I generated on my M5 Pro Mac for the prompt "a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket" (~115GB model download, took around 45 minutes to generate) - notes on how I ran it here simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/m... 4894
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 03/08/2026One of the scents was hidden in the "L" on this sign! 0191
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 01/08/2026Got a disappointing pelican from DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 at default reasoning mode - on the left - but then I bumped reasoning up to high (via OpenRouter) and got the much better one on the right simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/... 6685
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 31/07/2026On of the hardest parts of the project was figuring out the vocabulary! Here's what I settled on 2201
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 31/07/2026Your infrequent reminder that if you live near the San Francisco Bay Area you should go to Moss Landing (south of Santa Cruz) and rent kayaks there, because the estuary is full of sea otters and you will encounter dozens of them 1215910
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 29/07/2026A new TIL on adding custom MCP servers to both the ChatGPT and Claude regular chat interfaces - it's a little less obvious than I had hoped, but I got there in the end til.simonwillison.net/llms/mcp-in-... 8521
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 23/07/2026Tucked away in this article is an appeal to the AI skeptics to PLEASE stop writing off stories like this OpenAI accidental exploit of Hugging Face as a dishonest marketing trick Frontier models can find and exploit vulnerabilities now, it helps nobody to pretend that they can't! 108910
Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 22/07/2026Today at Pier 39 in San Francisco I learned that if you want to take a good photograph of a sea lion, you should aim to get their teeth 4920