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Simon Willison
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@simonw

Simon Willison

@simonw
Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon Bsky: simonwillison.net
San Francisco, CA
simonwillison.net
Joined November 2006
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  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    2h
    Got access to GPT-6 Astra. Want to see some pelicans? Yeah you want to see some pelicans... here's a grid comparing Astra to GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gp…
    Grid comparing 12 illustrations of pelicans riding bicycles. Columns: gpt-6-astra, gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, gpt-5.6-luna. Rows: MAX, XHIGH, HIGH reasoning effort.

All are recognizable, cheerful cartoons with orange bills and sunny pastel backgrounds. Astra is consistently polished, with elegant bird shapes, fine wheel spokes and coherent bicycles. Sol is appealing but varies more in proportions, with a particularly elongated neck at MAX. Terra has expressive birds but more awkward anatomy: its XHIGH pelican faces left on a left-facing bicycle, and HIGH has bulky, arm-like wings. Luna is simpler, with stiff poses and some awkward wing and foot placement. Higher effort does not produce an obvious, consistent improvement across all four models.

Costs in cents, in column order:
MAX: 63.21, 48.55, 32.09, 7.83.
XHIGH: 33.85, 24.11, 14.67, 4.24.
HIGH: 18.37, 10.38, 3.74, 2.46.

(Alt text by GPT-6 Astra)
    94
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    6h
    It happened again... this time OpenAI's rogue agents cyber-attacked (well, spammed) a dormant German wiki and used it to share the answers to a benchmark they were training against
    simonwillison.net
    OpenAI’s rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
    Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by …
    61
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 2
    I wrote some notes on what's new in the (published) Fable 5.1 system prompt in comparison to Fable 5 - it's mostly about not reproducing song lyrics and avoiding drawing copyrighted characters
    Image
    simonwillison.net
    Claude’s new system prompt really doesn’t want to reproduce song lyrics
    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). I love that they do this, and …
    58
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 2
    In another case of it being quicker to build a tool than hunt around to find something that does what you need, here's a little vibe-coded thing for turning one or more GeoJSON shapes into a rendered PNG
    Image
    simonwillison.net
    Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer
    View and visualize GeoJSON data on an interactive OpenStreetMap with customizable styling options. Paste GeoJSON objects (Feature, FeatureCollection, or Geometry) into the editor, adjust fill color...
    33
  • @simonw
    Simon Willison
    @simonw
    Sep 2
    A few notes on Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 - with Max thinking level I got the best SVG pelican I've had from any Anthropic model (at a hefty cost of $3.30!), which I then had it animate simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/cla…
    Image
    00:00
    125
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