Simon Willison’s Weblog

files-to-prompt 0.3. New version of my files-to-prompt CLI tool for turning a bunch of files into a prompt suitable for piping to an LLM, described here previously.

It now has a -c/--cxml flag for outputting the files in Claude XML-ish notation (XML-ish because it's not actually valid XML) using the format Anthropic describe as recommended for long context:

files-to-prompt llm-*/README.md --cxml | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet \
  --system 'return an HTML page about these plugins with usage examples' \
  > /tmp/fancy.html

Here's what that gave me.

The format itself looks something like this:

<documents>
<document index="1">
<source>llm-anyscale-endpoints/README.md</source>
<document_content>
# llm-anyscale-endpoints
...
</document_content>
</document>
</documents>

# 5:57 am / projects, tools, ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude

Why GitHub Actually Won (via) GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon shares some thoughts on how GitHub won the open source code hosting market. Shortened to two words: timing, and taste.

There are some interesting numbers in here. I hadn't realized that when GitHub launched in 2008 the term "open source" had only been coined ten years earlier, in 1998. This paper by Dirk Riehle estimates there were 18,000 open source projects in 2008 - Scott points out that today there are over 280 million public repositories on GitHub alone.

Scott's conclusion:

We were there when a new paradigm was being born and we approached the problem of helping people embrace that new paradigm with a developer experience centric approach that nobody else had the capacity for or interest in.

# 5:16 pm / git, github, open-source