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June 2026 newsletter

June 2026 newsletter

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…

Simon Willison's Weblog
llm-coding-agent 0.1a0

llm-coding-agent 0.1a0

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-repository GitHub template repository, then ran these two prompts (here's the Claude Code for web transcript): Write a spec.md for this project - it will depend on the latest “llm” alpha from PyPI and implement a Claude code style coding…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts

Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts

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 asynchronous research task in Claude Code for web using Claude Fable 5: Pip install the latest Datasette alpha and datasette-agent and dspy - then figure out how to use dspy to evaluate and improve the main system prompts used by…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Understand to participate

Understand to participate

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 need to avoid taking on cognitive debt as your understanding drifts from how the code actually works. His argument is that you need to understand the code to a depth that enables you to participate further with the model:…

Simon Willison's Weblog
2026 BAIR Graduate Showcase

2026 BAIR Graduate Showcase

Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their work spans the breadth of modern AI — robotics and embodied intelligence, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, human-AI interaction, AI for science and…

BAIR Blog
Nano Banana 2 Lite

Nano Banana 2 Lite

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…

Simon Willison's Weblog
What's new in Claude Sonnet 5

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5

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 to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices". The system card helps explain how they were able to release the model without being blocked by the US government: Sonnet 5 is significantly less capable at cyber tasks than…

Simon Willison's Weblog
MIRI Newsletter #126

MIRI Newsletter #126

Announcing: AI StopWatch In our last update, we mentioned we had something new in the works: a dedicated channel for news and analysis about AI. Subscribe to AI StopWatch An experiment from the writers and analysts at MIRI, AI StopWatch posts news and commentary seven days a week. You can read our commentary as it’s […] The post MIRI Newsletter #126 appeared first on Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

MIRI Blog
The AI Compass

The AI Compass

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,…

Simon Willison's Weblog
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