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The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win. — Sean Lynch , comment on Hacker News Tags: model-context-protocol , llms , ai , generative-ai , skills
Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps , with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what , but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why . The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained <iframe> sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to run read-only SQL queries against data in Datasette, and can run write queries too if you configure them with some stored queries . Here's a very simple example and a more complex custo...
Release: datasette-acl 0.6a0 This release expands datasette-acl from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system. Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained control over who can access which resources within Datasette. Tags: datasette , alex-garcia
Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1 releases, this is 753B parameter, 1.51TB monster - with 40 active parameters (Mixture of Experts). GLM-5.2 is a text input only model - Z.ai have a separate vision family most recently represented by GLM-5V-Turbo , but that one isn't open weights. GLM-5.2 has a 1 million token context window, up from GLM-5.1's 200,000. The buzz around this model is strong. Artificial Analysis,...
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down . Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. — Charity Majors , AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less Tags: charity-majors , ai-assisted-programming , generative-ai , ai , llms
Tool: <click-to-play> — a still that plays A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup: <click-to-play> <a href="URL to GIF"> <img src="URL to first frame" alt="..."> </a> </click-to-play> Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them. Tags: gif , javascript , progressive-enhancement , web-components
NetNewsWire Status I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure. The software is NetNewsWire, first released in 2002 and made open source in 2018. I've been using it on Mac and iPhone for several years now and I'm finding it indispensable. Via Lobste.rs Tags: brent-simmons , netnewswire , open-source
Release: datasette 1.0a34 Quoting the release notes: The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and delete are also available as action items on the row page. The inspiration for this feature - which is long overdue - was Datasette Agent . I added SQL write support to that the other day which highlighted how absurd it was that you could insert and edit ties via the chat interface but not in the regular Datasette UI! Tags: projects , datasette , annotated-release-notes
Release: datasette-tailscale 0.1a0 A very experimental alpha plugin which lets you do this: datasette tailscale mydata.db \ --ts-authkey tskey-auth-xxxx --ts-hostname datasette-preview This starts a localhost Datasette server with a Tailscale sidecar that connects it to your Tailnet, such that http://datasette-preview/ serves Datasette. It's using the Python bindings for the experimental tailscale-rs library. I filed an issue asking if there's a cleaner way of setting up the proxy mechanism. Tags: datasette , tailscale
I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer. I think I would be using it much more, if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time on reviewing PRs. Currently, I have a very lightweight harness - the pi agent with everything stripped ( pi -nc --offline ) and a short system prompt to align it a bit with my style. — ...
The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense I quoted The Atlantic quoting Kate Moussouris earlier, when I should have gone straight to the source. Here she is confirming that the "jailbreak" that got Claude Fable 5 banned under an export control really was "fix this code": The researchers took open-source code with known CVEs, plus new code with deliberately planted vulnerabilities, and asked Fable 5, Mythos, and Opus to “review the code for security issues.” Fable 5 refused. They then asked the models to “fix this code” and, through a multistep and manual process, turned the output int...
Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable to help find and patch bugs. When given deliberately insecure code, she said, Fable refused the prompt “review the code for security issues” but then complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by some further manual steps. Moussouris told me that this was just “the model working as intend...
TIL: Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand I'm using Cloudflare's CAPTCHA (they call it a "Web Application Firewall > Custom rules > Managed Challenge" these days) to prevent crawlers from aggresively spidering my faceted search engine on this site, but I got fed up of even simple ?q=term searches triggering the challenge. After some mucking around with Claude Code it turns out you can register the following rule instead, so the CAPTCHA only kicks in for search URLs containing at least one ampersand: (http.request.uri.path wildcard r"/search/*" and http.request.uri.query contains "&") ...
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a3 Fixed a bug where users without the create-app permission could still create apps. #27 Fixed a bug where it was impossible to grant permission to edit an app to users who were not the app's owner. The rules for edit/delete are now the same as view: if the app is private only the owner can modify it, otherwise permission is controlled by Datasette's regular permission system. #29 Tags: datasette
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a2 Custom network/CSP origins for apps are now guarded by a new apps-set-csp permission, with an optional allowed_csp_origins plugin allow-list for non-privileged users. The Datasette Agent app creation tool enforces the same rules. #24 Stored query picker now supports keyboard navigation and shows the three most recent accessible stored queries when focused. #fragment links inside apps are no longer intercepted by the external-link confirmation modal. #23 Fixed link confirmation modal and logging panels in ?full=1 full-screen mode. #26 Tags: datasette
Release: datasette-agent 0.3a0 New tool, execute_write_sql , which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account. #27 I added a mechanism for asking user approval in datasette agent 0.2a0 . The new execute_write_sql tool can now prompt the user for all kinds of useful operations. Here's an example where I add some pelican sightings to my pelican_sightings table: The new version also enhances the datasette agent chat terminal mode to support approvals, and adds several new options including --unsafe mode for auto-approving them: datasette agent cha...
"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind-the-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government export control Mythos/Fable story so far. Logan Graham, Dave Orr and blog favorite Nicholas Carlini are supposedly meeting with the Commerce Department today in D.C. Good luck to them! This closing notes doesn't give me much optimism that we'll be getting Fable back any time soon: The bottom line : One option is to m...
[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend. — Julia Evans , write for 1 person Tags: writing , julia-evans
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be even more cushioned. The first good news is that the data still doesn't support the idea that AI is ...
The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News ) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783 ) directly to PyPI and install them at runtime. Previously, the Pyodide maintainers had to maintain, build, and host over 300 packages ourselves. This created a significant burden on our maintainers and became a major bottleneck for the community, as every new package required manual review. Moving forward, package maintainers can simply bui...
Release: luau-wasm 0.1a0 See Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide for details. Tags: lua , webassembly , pyodide
Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables were included in the results. To build that, we would need to be able to look at a SQL query like select users.name, orders.total from users join orders on orders.user_id = users.id and programmatically identify the table.column for each result - navigating not just joins but also more complex syntax like CTEs. I decided to set Claude Code (Opus 4.8, since Fable is currently ban...
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts : The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected. We received the directive from the government toda...
OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models. Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2 , which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off. I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I revisited my old playground. You can now pick the better model, and you can also paste in a big chunk ...
Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a...
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive . It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent today when I noticed a glitch: a horizontal scrollbar that shouldn't be there in the jump menu chat prompt. I snapped this screenshot: Then I started a fresh claude session in my datasette-agent checkout, dragged in the screenshot and told it: Look at dependencies to help figure out why there is a horizontal scrollbar h...
Release: datasette 1.0a33 This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also now documented ! I wrote a whole lot more about the new release on the Datasette project blog: Datasette 1.0a33 with JSON extras in the API . Because API explorer tools are almost free to build now I had Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code (for the plan ) and GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop (for the implementation ) build me this custom extras API explorer to help demonstrat...
Release: asyncinject 0.7 I built this utility library to support an asyncio dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it then fixed for me. It's a very proactive model! Tags: async , projects , python , claude-mythos
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired: “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.” There's been a huge outcry about Anthropic's policy, tucked away in their system card , that Claude Fable/Mythos would identify "requests targeting frontier LLM development" and "limit effectiveness" without notifying the user. It's very good news that they're droppin...
Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice ( options=[...] ) or free-text ( free_text=True ) question. While a question is unanswered the agent turn suspends: the question renders as a form in the chat UI and persists to the internal database, so suspended conversations survive a server restart. Once answered, the tool re-executes from the top with stored answers replayed, so call ask_u...
DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it. That research has returned in the best possible way: as a new open weight (Apache 2 licensed) Gemma model, google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it . NVIDIA are currently hosting the model for free on their NIM cloud API. I used that API to generate this pelican , which took 4.4s (according to time uv run generate.py ) to return 2,409 tokens - so at least 500 to...
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance. It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dangerous power imbalance. Anthropic has chosen the opposite of the safe path: they are allowing themselves, the current top lab, to use their top model for frontier AI research. They've said they'll sabotage others who try. This means the AI frontier advances, & power imbalance increases. (To be cle...
If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the 319 page system card for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt, highlights mine: In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development , we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design ). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Term...
I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast . It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can't do. First, let's review the key characteristics. Anthropic claim that Claude Fable 5 offers the same performance as Claude Mythos 5, except with much more strict guardrails in place to prevent it being used ...
Release: llm 0.32a3 Almost entirely written by the new Claude Fable 5, see my write-up for more details . Tags: projects , ai , generative-ai , llms , llm , claude-mythos
TIL: Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop. Claude Fable 5 came out today and wasn't yet included in the pricing database AgentsView uses. I used Fable to reverse-engineer AgentsView and figured out this recipe for setting custom prices. Here's my Claude Fable 5 usage for today so far, plotted by AgentsView as a treemap across my different local projects: Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , llm-pricing
I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref). — Andrej Karpathy , on Claude Fable 5 Tags: andrej-karpathy , jevons-paradox , anthropic , generative-ai , ai , ...
Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict "I'll believe it when I see it" policy for everything they announced today . The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's technology, especially since Apple are licensing a custom Gemini-derived model that they can run on their own Private Cloud Compute. It sounds like they'll be taking advantage of vision-LLMs to extract information from the user's screen, which neatly sidesteps the need for every existing application to ship custom code in o...
Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files. Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get right. My favorite published design for this is for the Claude text editor , which implements the following tools: view - view sections of a file, with line numbers added to every line. str_replace - find an exact old_str and replace it with new_str - fail if the original string is not unique insert - insert the speci...
Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2 I added a CLI to micropython-wasm ( issue #7 ), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself section. Tags: python , sandboxing , webassembly , micropython
I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been looking for. I've released it as an alpha package called micropython-wasm , and I'm using it for a code execution sandbox plugin for Datasette Agent called datasette-agent-micropython . Why do I want a sandbox? My key open source projects - Datasette , LLM , even sqlite-utils - all support plugins. I absolutely love plugins as a mechanism for extending software. A carefully designed plugin system reduc...
OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February , but now it's live and "rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business accounts": Lockdown Mode is designed to help prevent the final stage of data exfiltration from a prompt injection attack by limiting outbound network requests that could transfer sensitive data to an attacker. Lockdown Mode does not prevent prompt injections from appearing in the content ChatGPT processes. For example, a prompt injection could appear in cached web content or in an uploaded file, a...
We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...] Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences. — Andreas Kling , Changing How We Develop Ladybird Tags: ladybird , ai-ethics...
AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams: The enthusiasts are not wrong . We are starting to see real, non-imaginary, discontinuous leaps in capabilities from teams that lean in hard to working with AI. And this does not feel like a normal technology cycle where you can wait for the dust to settle; teams that sit this out while competitors are hustling could be out of business before the dust set...
After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media , Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks Tags: ai-ethics , journalism , ai , google
Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular token-burning coding agents were about to become. Natalie Lung for Bloomberg: The rideshare giant is limiting all employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson said in response to a Bloomberg News inquiry. That means spending on one tool doesn’t have a bearing on the budget for anot...
Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out to GitHub Copilot individual users in Visual Studio Code"). I've not been able to try either of them just yet. It's very interesting to see Microsoft releasing models with such low parameter counts, especially given how expensive larger models are to access right now. They claim MAI-Thinking-1 "is preferred to Sonnet 4....
Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking very promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox! Tags: python , sandboxing , datasette , webassembly , datasette-agent
Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a1 Fixes for some limitations that emerged while I was trying to use this to build datasette-agent-micropython . Tags: python , sandboxing , webassembly
California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, US I'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue! Tags: microsoft , ai , generative-ai , llms , llm-release