Simon Willison's Weblog

I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none).

Here we go again...

The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out.

GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS" - I've not tried it yet mys…

Release: llm-openrouter 0.7.1 Performance fix for loading OpenRouter models.

Release: llm 0.34 One new feature: llm logs --usage Markdown output now includes the response duration in milliseconds and as a human-readable duration. llm logs --short includes a new duration_ms field. #1653 Plus several contributed bug fixes, and a sig…

Release: llm-anthropic 0.28 Claude Fable 5.1, reasoning traces are now displayed by default for models that support them, plus a new llm_anthropic.ClaudeRefusal exception for when Claude throws a refusal.

Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version.

Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code).

Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use.

Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day.