Simon Willison (@simonw) header
Simon Willison (@simonw) profile picture

Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: https://nitter.cf/t.co/t0MrmnJW0K Bsky: https://nitter.cf/t.co/OnWIyhX4CH

San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2006
Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)
Fascinating case study of the sharpest edge of what you can do with agentic engineering in the Fable era - my eyebrows raised at least a dozen times while reading this
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Inspired me to try out spawn.co on my phone. Here's me flying a dragon around a castle, I prompted both the castle and the dragon into existence using the in-game "Savi" chatbot
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the secret to becoming an expert is embarrassingly boring: build in public, write down what you learned and the process behind it, teach all that to someone, help them ship repeat for a few years, and you're solid – at Weehawken, NJ
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Simon Willison retweeted
very weird thing happening rn technical people are sad, they think their skills are now useless non-technical people are desperately wishing they were more technical so they could use agents better
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These ones are pretty great!
Replying to @benjedwards
Apple II Agent (Opus 5.5) drew a pretty good pelican riding a bicycle (cc: @simonw) on the Apple Ii Seen here in both color and monochrome
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Pretty solid pelican tools.simonwillison.net/mark…
Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro: our most capable 3T-class open-weight model. 🔹 1M-token context, 2.8T total / 104B active params (MoE), Multimodal. 🔹 Full-project coding: games in Unreal, Unity & Godot. 🔹 Excels at parametric 3D modeling in Blender & CAD. 🔹 More reliable at finance work: Accurate modeling with hallucination down by 65%. 🔹 Matching the strongest proprietary models across coding, agentic and knowledge benchmarks. Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed (2–3× faster) are now live on Kimi.ai, Kimi Work, Kimi Code, and the Kimi API. Open weights by Nov 4, 2026. 🔗 API: platform.kimi.ai 🔗 Tech blog: kimi.ai/blog/kimi-k3-1-pro
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More notes on Kimi K3.1 - this one is I big deal, first time an open weights (well, soon-to-be open weights) model has competed this credibly with the current frontier simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/2…
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Given the current vulnerability apocalypse, is there anyone left who thinks holding assets in cryptocurrency - where mistaken transactions are irreversible - is still a good idea?
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Spotted a familiar creature at 00:45s in this new music video for FREEDOM by De Staad youtube.com/watch?v=hKO4pQtI…
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Simon Willison retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
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Simon Willison retweeted
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins.
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There's a French fork of Battle Drones with new models and music (and a cinematic intro video) and it is SO cool! menufactory43.github.io/pana… Here's the old v.s. new Goliath model
Merci @simonw! 🎩 I forked Battle Drones into Panache: a French Belle Époque RTS, with dirigibles, steam tractors, clockwork soldiers in képis and Gargantua, a walking steam fortress. Fully in French, built with Claude Code. github.com/menufactory43/pan…
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I built a Command & Conquer style RTS called Battle Drones, mainly using Claude Opus 5.5, which runs in the browser and includes device-to-device multiplayer over an audio link simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/2…
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Warning if you're going to try this: the audio multiplayer plays a high pitched noise throughout the game - annoying at best, and at worst might give you an actual headache (Natalie: "why do my teeth hurt?")
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OK, that headache bug was really bad! It inspired me to add proper online multiplayer to Battle Drones (via a tiny @flydotio hosted WebSockets relay server) - now you can start an online game and send a link to a friend so they can join you simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/2…
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