Simon Willison’s Weblog

Turning Your Root URL Into a DuckDB Remote Database. Fun idea from Drew Breunig: DuckDB supports attaching existing databases that are accessible over HTTP using their URL. Drew suggests creating vanity URLs using your root domain, detecting the DuckDB user-agent and serving the database file directly - allowing tricks like this one:

ATTACH 'https://steplist.app/' AS steplist;
SELECT * FROM steplist.lists;

# 10:02 pm / duckdb, drew-breunig

LLM 0.19. I just released version 0.19 of LLM, my Python library and CLI utility for working with Large Language Models.

I released 0.18 a couple of weeks ago adding support for calling models from Python asyncio code. 0.19 improves on that, and also adds a new mechanism for models to report their token usage.

LLM can log those usage numbers to a SQLite database, or make then available to custom Python code.

My eventual goal with these features is to implement token accounting as a Datasette plugin so I can offer AI features in my SaaS platform without worrying about customers spending unlimited LLM tokens.

Those 0.19 release notes in full:

• Tokens used by a response are now logged to new input_tokens and output_tokens integer columns and a token_details JSON string column, for the default OpenAI models and models from other plugins that implement this feature. #610
• llm prompt now takes a -u/--usage flag to display token usage at the end of the response.
• llm logs -u/--usage shows token usage information for logged responses.
• llm prompt ... --async responses are now logged to the database. #641
• llm.get_models() and llm.get_async_models() functions, documented here. #640
• response.usage() and async response await response.usage() methods, returning a Usage(input=2, output=1, details=None) dataclass. #644
• response.on_done(callback) and await response.on_done(callback) methods for specifying a callback to be executed when a response has completed, documented here. #653
• Fix for bug running llm chat on Windows 11. Thanks, Sukhbinder Singh. #495

I also released three new plugin versions that add support for the new usage tracking feature: llm-gemini 0.5, llm-claude-3 0.10 and llm-mistral 0.9.

# 11:59 pm / projects, releasenotes, releases, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm