Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 17th March 2026

Agentic Engineering Patterns >

Subagents

LLMs are restricted by their context limit - how many tokens they can fit in their working memory at any given time. These values have not increased much over the past two years even as the LLMs themselves have seen dramatic improvements in their abilities - they generally top out at around 1,000,000, and benchmarks frequently report better quality results below 200,000.

Carefully managing the context such that it fits within those limits is critical to getting great results out of a model.

Subagents provide a simple but effective way to handle larger tasks without burning through too much of the coding agent’s valuable top-level context. [... 926 words]

# 12:32 pm / parallel-agents, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. [...]

For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.

This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

Tim Schilling, Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

# 4:13 pm / django, open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

Research syntaqlite Python Extension — syntaqlite-python-extension is a Python C extension module that integrates the syntaqlite Rust/C SQL toolkit, making high-fidelity SQL parsing, formatting, validation, and tokenization available to Python and Pyodide environments. It wraps syntaqlite's native FFI for both desktop and web, linking against static libraries produced by Rust and employing Emscripten for WASM builds.

GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52

Visit GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano, which can describe 76,000 photos for $52

OpenAI today: Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano. These models join GPT-5.4 which was released two weeks ago.

[... 711 words]

Monday, 16th March 2026

2026 » March

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