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Release TIL Research Tool Museum Sighting
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- New
TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette)utility method for creating"_r"dictionaries. #2695- Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701
- Fixed bug with display of column actions dialog on Mobile Safari. #2708
- Fixed bug where tests could crash with a segfault due to a race condition between
Datasette.close()andDatasette.close(). #2709
That segfault bug was gnarly. I added a mechanism to Datasette recently that would automatically close connections at the end of each test, but it turned out that introduced a race condition where an in-flight query could sometimes be executing in a thread against a connection while it was being closed. I ended up solving that by having Codex CLI (with GPT-5.5 xhigh) create a minimal Dockerfile that recreated the bug.
A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one:
Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the
/v1/responsesendpoint instead of/v1/chat/completions. This enables interleaved reasoning across tool calls for GPT-5 class models. #1435
This means you can now see the summarized reasoning tokens when you run prompts against an OpenAI model, displayed in a different color to standard error. Use the -R or --hide-reasoning flags if you don't want to see that.
Kim_Bruning on Hacker News:
But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...]
This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simplest, which takes advantage of LLM fragments:
#!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f
Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
But you can also incorporate tool calls using the -T name_of_tool option:
#!/usr/bin/env -S llm -T llm_time -f
Write a haiku that mentions the exact current time
Or even execute YAML templates directly that define extra tools as Python functions:
#!/usr/bin/env -S llm -t model: gpt-5.4-mini system: | Use tools to run calculations functions: | def add(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a + b def multiply(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a * b
Then:
./calc.sh 'what is 2344 * 5252 + 134' --td
Which outputs (thanks to that --td tools debug option):
Tool call: multiply({'a': 2344, 'b': 5252})
12310688
Tool call: add({'a': 12310688, 'b': 134})
12310822
2344 × 5252 + 134 = **12,310,822**
Read the full TIL for a more complex example that uses the Datasette SQL API to answer questions about content on my blog.
gemini-3.1-flash-liteis no longer a preview.
Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then.
I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide.
Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/big-words?text=simonwillison.net&gradient=1&size=9.5
Double click or double tap the page to access a form for modifying the different options.
One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt:
Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats
Example output for simonw/datasette and simonw/llm.
The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs.
The first is that the CAPTCHA I added to that site a few weeks ago was triggering for the .json fetch requests used by the map plugin, and since those weren't HTML the user was not being asked to solve them. Here's the fix.
The second was that OpenStreetMap quite reasonably block tile requests from sites that use a Referrer-Policy: no-referrer header.
Datasette does this by default, and I didn't want to change that default on people without warning - so I had Codex + GPT-5.5 build me a new plugin to help set that header to another value.
- Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models.
Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a specific model with temperature set to 0.5.
- New
-o thinking 1option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher.
This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this:
uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with llm-echo==0.5a0 llm -m echo hi -o thinking 1
This will fake a reasoning block to standard error before returning JSON echoing the prompt.
If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail.
I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack of support for backtracking.
Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis.
The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSERT, ARLASTITEMS, ARLEN, ARMGET, ARMSET, ARNEXT, AROP, ARRING, ARSCAN, ARSEEK, ARSET.
The implementation is currently available in a branch, so I had Claude Code for web build this interactive playground for trying out the new commands in a WASM-compiled build of a subset of Redis running in the browser.
The most interesting new command is ARGREP which can run a server-side grep against a range of values in the array using the newly vendored TRE regex library.
Salvatore wrote more about the AI-assisted development process for the array type in Redis array type: short story of a long development.
I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone using Claude Code for web.
I started by building an inaturalist-clumper Python CLI for fetching and "clumping" observations - by default clumps use observations within 2 hours and 5km of each other.
Then I setup simonw/inaturalist-clumps as a Git scraping repository to run that tool and record the result to clumps.json.
That JSON file is hosted on GitHub, which means it can be fetched by JavaScript using CORS.
Finally I ran this prompt against my simonw/tools repo:
Build inat-sightings.html - an app that does a fetch() against https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/inaturalist-clumps/refs/heads/main/clumps.json and then displays all of the observations on one page using the https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/538073008/small.jpg small.jpg URLs for the thumbnails - with loading=lazy - but when a thumbnail is clicked showing the large.jpg in an HTML modal. Both small and large should include the common species names if available
- Fixed a bug in 0.32a0 where tool-calling conversations were not correctly reinflated from SQLite. #1426
- New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model:
llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418- New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models:
-o verbosity low. Values arelow,medium,high.- New option for setting the image detail level used for image attachments to OpenAI models:
-o image_detail low- values arelow,highandauto, and GPT-5.4 and 5.5 also acceptoriginal.- Models listed in
extra-openai-models.yamlare now also registered as asynchronous. #1395
LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes.
Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5.
llm openrouter refreshcommand for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire.
I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter as soon as it became available there.
Here's its pelican - this time as an HTML page because Kimi chose to include an HTML and JavaScript UI to control the animation. Transcript here.
I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata().)
Here's an example sheet demonstrating all three methods.
Anthropic publish the system prompts for Claude chat and make that page available as Markdown. I had Claude Code turn that page into separate files for each model and model family with fake git commit dates to enable browsing the changes via the GitHub commit view.
I used this to write my own detailed notes on the changes between Opus 4.6 and 4.7.
I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly:
- Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where
execute_write_fn()callbacks with a parameter name other thanconnwere seeing errors. (#2691)- The database.close() method now also shuts down the write connection for that database.
- New datasette.close() method for closing down all databases and resources associated with a Datasette instance. This is called automatically when the server shuts down. (#2693)
- Datasette now includes a pytest plugin which automatically calls
datasette.close()on temporary instances created in function-scoped fixtures and during tests. See Automatic cleanup of Datasette instances for details. This helps avoid running out of file descriptors in plugin test suites that were written before theDatabase(is_temp_disk=True)feature introduced in Datasette 1.0a27. (#2692)
Most of the changes in this release were implemented using Claude Code and the newly released Claude Opus 4.7.
- New model:
claude-opus-4.7, which supportsthinking_effort:xhigh. #66- New
thinking_displayandthinking_adaptiveboolean options.thinking_displaysummarized output is currently only available in JSON output or JSON logs.- Increased default
max_tokensto the maximum allowed for each model.- No longer uses obsolete
structured-outputs-2025-11-13beta header for older models.