Simon Willison

Independent AI researcher, creator of Datasette and LLM

Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/

Articles & links

After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots simonwillison.net/2026/J…

Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive simonwillison.net
View on Bluesky · ♥ 156 ↻ 24 ↩ 20 · 4 from the directory shared this · 27d ago

Supposedly Anthropic are set to have their first profitable quarter. WSJ this time: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mind...

wsj.com
AI Weekly's analysis
  • Anthropic projects $10.9B in Q2 2026 revenue, more than doubling Q1's $4.8B in a single quarter.
  • Claude Code surpassed $1B in annualized revenue within six months of its launch, driven by enterprise developers.
  • An expected $559M operating profit marks the first quarter Anthropic covers costs without relying solely on outside capital.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 11 ↻ 0 ↩ 3 · 2 from the directory shared this · 40d ago

The most interesting Fable tip I've heard so far is to let the model use its own judgement as much as possible I told it "For all coding tasks use your judgement to decide an appropriate lower power model and run that in a subagent" and it seems to be saving tokens simonwillis…

Fable's judgement simonwillison.net
View on Bluesky · ♥ 139 ↻ 10 ↩ 16 · 3 from the directory shared this · 5d ago

Notes (and a Pelican) on Claude Sonnet 5 - the new tokenizer makes it ~1.4x more expensive for English, ~1.33x more expensive for Spanish but roughly the same price for Simplified Mandarin simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/30/...

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 simonwillison.net
View on Bluesky · ♥ 67 ↻ 5 ↩ 7 · 3 from the directory shared this · 8d ago

Recent commentary

Hacker News has an alarmingly high tolerance for slop content these days It also has social norms against accusing something of being written with AI, which means the community has trouble strengthening its immune system against that slop

View on Bluesky · ♥ 178 ↻ 6 ↩ 23 · 37d ago

In Simon Willison's orbit

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