Simon Willison’s Weblog

llm-tools-exa. When I shipped LLM 0.26 yesterday one of the things I was most excited about was seeing what new tool plugins people would build for it.

Dan Turkel's llm-tools-exa is one of the first. It adds web search to LLM using Exa (previously), a relatively new search engine offering that rare thing, an API for search. They have a free preview, you can grab an API key here.

I'm getting pretty great results! I tried it out like this:

llm install llm-tools-exa
llm keys set exa
# Pasted API key here

llm -T web_search "What's in LLM 0.26?"

Here's the full answer - it started like this:

LLM 0.26 was released on May 27, 2025, and the biggest new feature in this version is official support for tools. Here's a summary of what's new and notable in LLM 0.26:

• LLM can now run tools. You can grant LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local models access to any tool you represent as a Python function.
• Tool plugins are introduced, allowing installation of plugins that add new capabilities to any model you use.
• Tools can be installed from plugins and loaded by name with the --tool/-T option. [...]

Exa provided 21,000 tokens of search results, including what looks to be a full copy of my blog entry and the release notes for LLM.