Simon Willison’s Weblog

Symbex 1.4. New release of my Symbex tool for finding symbols (functions, methods and classes) in a Python codebase. Symbex can now output matching symbols in JSON, CSV or TSV in addition to plain text.

I designed this feature for compatibility with the new “llm embed-multi” command—so you can now use Symbex to find every Python function in a nested directory and then pipe them to LLM to calculate embeddings for every one of them.

I tried it on my projects directory and embedded over 13,000 functions in just a few minutes! Next step is to figure out what kind of interesting things I can do with all of those embeddings. # 5th September 2023, 5:29 pm

Datasette Cloud and the Datasette 1.0 alphas. I sent out the Datasette Newsletter for the first time in quite a while, with updates on Datasette Cloud, the Datasette 1.0 alphas, a note about the security vulnerability in those alphas and a summary of some of my research into combining LLMs with Datasette. # 22nd August 2023, 7:56 pm

Welcome to Datasette Cloud. We launched the Datasette Cloud blog today! The SaaS hosted version of Datasette is ready to start onboarding more users—this post describes what it can do so far and hints at what’s planned to come next. # 16th August 2023, 1:46 am

llm-mlc (via) My latest plugin for LLM adds support for models that use the MLC Python library—which is the first library I’ve managed to get to run Llama 2 with GPU acceleration on my M2 Mac laptop. # 12th August 2023, 5:33 am

Datasette 1.0a3. A new Datasette alpha release. This one previews the new default JSON API design that’s coming in 1.0—the single most significant change in the 1.0 milestone, since I plan to keep that API stable for many years to come. # 9th August 2023, 8:49 pm

asgi-replay. As part of submitting LLM to Homebrew core I needed an automated test that demonstrated that the tool was working—but I couldn’t test against the live OpenAI API because I didn’t want to have to reveal my API token as part of the test. I solved this by creating a dummy HTTP endpoint that simulates a hit to the OpenAI API, then configuring the Homebrew test to hit that instead. As part of THAT I ended up building this tiny tool which uses my asgi-proxy-lib package to intercept and log the details of hits made to a service, then provides a mechanism to replay that traffic. # 24th July 2023, 7:51 pm

LLM can now be installed directly from Homebrew (via) I spent a bunch of time on this at the weekend: my LLM tool for interacting with large language models from the terminal has now been accepted into Homebrew core, and can be installed directly using “brew install llm”. I was previously running my own separate tap, but having it in core means that it benefits from Homebrew’s impressive set of build systems—each release of LLM now has Bottles created for it automatically across a range of platforms, so “brew install llm” should quickly download binary assets rather than spending several minutes installing dependencies the slow way. # 24th July 2023, 5:16 pm

LLM 0.4. I released a major update to my LLM CLI tool today—version 0.4, which adds conversation mode and prompt templates so you can store and re-use interesting prompts, plus a whole bunch of other large and small improvements.

I also released 0.4.1 with some minor fixes and the ability to install the tool using Hombrew: brew install simonw/llm/llm # 17th June 2023, 10:58 pm

Trogon (via) The latest project from the Textualize/Rich crew, Trogon provides a Python decorator—@tui—which, when applied to a Click CLI application, adds a new interactive TUI mode which introspects the available subcommands and their options and creates a full Text User Interface—with keyboard and mouse support—for assembling invocations of those various commands.

I just shipped sqlite-utils 3.32 with support for this—it uses an optional dependency, so you’ll need to run “sqlite-utils install trogon” and then “sqlite-utils tui” to try it out. # 21st May 2023, 9:39 pm

GPT-3 token encoder and decoder. I built an Observable notebook with an interface to encode, decode and search through GPT-3 tokens, building on top of a notebook by EJ Fox and Ian Johnson. # 27th April 2023, 11:48 pm

image-to-jpeg (via) I built a little JavaScript app that accepts an image, then displays that image as a JPEG with a slider to control the quality setting, plus a copy and paste textarea to copy out that image with a data-uri. I didn’t actually write a single line of code for this: I got ChatGPT/GPT-4 to generate the entire thing with some prompts (transcript in the via link). # 5th April 2023, 10:10 pm

apple-notes-to-sqlite (via) With the help of ChatGPT I finally figured out just enough AppleScript to automate the export of my notes to a SQLite database. AppleScript is a notoriously read-only language, which is turns out makes it a killer app for LLM-assisted coding. # 9th March 2023, 6:04 am

Examples of sites built using Datasette (via) I gave the examples page on the Datasette website a significant upgrade today: it now includes screenshots (taken using shot-scraper) of six projects chosen to illustrate the variety of problems Datasette can be used to tackle. # 29th January 2023, 3:40 am

Datasette Lite: Loading JSON data (via) I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead. # 18th November 2022, 6:43 pm

Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival traffic on Saturday 15th October 2022 (via) It’s the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival this weekend... and its impact on the traffic between our little town of El Granada and Half Moon Bay—8 minutes drive away—is notorious. So I built a git scraper that archives estimated driving times from the Google Maps Navigation API, and used git-history to turn that scraped data into a SQLite database and visualize it on a chart. # 16th October 2022, 3:56 am

shot-scraper 1.0 (via) Only a minor release in terms of features, but I decided that I’m comfortable enough with the CLI design at this point that I’m ready to stamp a 1.0 on it and commit to not making backwards-incompatible changes (at least without shipping a 2.0 release, which I’d like to avoid if possible). # 15th October 2022, 9:28 pm

Open every CSV file in a GitHub repository in Datasette Lite (via) I built an Observable notebook that accepts a GitHub repository as input, scans it for CSV files and generates a link to open all of those CSV files in Datasette Lite. # 1st September 2022, 7:24 pm

viewport-preview (via) I built a tiny tool which lets you preview a URL in a bunch of different common browser viewport widths, using iframes. # 26th July 2022, 12 am

simonw/datasette-screenshots (via) I started a new GitHub repository to automate taking screenshots of Datasette for marketing purposes, using my shot-scraper browser automation tool. # 17th May 2022, 5:56 pm

s3-credentials 0.8. The latest release of my s3-credentials CLI tool for creating S3 buckets with credentials to access them (with read-write, read-only or write-only policies) adds a new --public option for creating buckets that allow public access, such that anyone who knows a filename can download a file. The s3-credentials put-object command also now sets the appropriate Content-Type heading on the uploaded object. # 7th December 2021, 7:04 am

Datasette Desktop 0.1.0 (via) This is the first installable version of the new Datasette Desktop macOS application I’ve been building. Please try it out and leave feedback on Twitter or on the GitHub Discussions thread linked from the release notes. # 8th September 2021, 5:14 am

Django SQL Dashboard 1.0 (via) As part of my ongoing attempt to be braver about 1.0 releases (crucial if you want to do semantic versioning properly) I’ve released version 1.0 of Django SQL Dashboard, my Datasette-inspired app for Django that adds an interface for running read-only, bookmarkable SQL queries against a PostgreSQL database. The new version adds a column cog menu providing shortcuts for changing the sort order, counting distinct values and performing a group-by/count against column values. # 1st July 2021, 5:44 pm

Datasette 0.57. Released today, Datasette 0.57 has new options for controlling which columns are visible on a table page, a way to show more than the default 30 facet results, a whole bunch of smaller improvements and a fix for a severe cross-site scripting security vulnerability. # 5th June 2021, 11:12 pm

datasette-css-properties (via) My new Datasette plugin defines a “.css” output format which returns the data from the query as a valid CSS stylesheet defining custom properties for each returned column. This means you can build a page using just HTML and CSS that consumes API data from Datasette, no JavaScript required! Whether this is a good idea or not is left as an exercise for the reader. # 7th January 2021, 7:42 pm

sqlite-utils 3.2 (via) As discussed in my weeknotes yesterday, this is the release of sqlite-utils that adds the new “cached table counts via triggers” mechanism. # 3rd January 2021, 9:25 pm

datasette.io (via) Datasette finally has an official project website, three years after the first release of the software. I built it using Datasette, with custom templates to define the various pages. The site includes news, latest releases, example sites and a new searchable plugin directory. # 11th December 2020, 4:11 am

Datasette 0.52. A relatively small release—it has a new plugin hook (database_actions(), for adding links to a new database actions menu), renames the --config option to --setting and adds a new “datasette publish cloudrun --apt-get-install” option. # 29th November 2020, 12:56 am

datasette-graphql 1.2 (via) A new release of the datasette-graphql plugin, fixing a minor security flaw: previous versions of the plugin could expose the schema (but not the actual data) of tables in databases that were otherwise protected by Datasette’s permission system. # 21st November 2020, 10:21 pm

Security vulnerability in datasette-indieauth: Implementation trusts the “me” field returned by the authorization server without verifying it. I spotted a critical security vulnerability in my new datasette-indieauth plugin: it accepted the “me” profile URL value returned from the authorization server in the final step of the IndieAuth flow without verifying it, which means a malicious server could imitate any user. I’ve shipped 1.1 with a fix and posted a security advisory to the GitHub repository. # 19th November 2020, 9:14 pm

xml-analyser. In building evernote-to-sqlite I dusted off an ancient (2009) project I built that scans through an XML file and provides a summary of what elements are present in the document and how they relate to each other. I’ve now packaged it up as a CLI app and published it on PyPI. # 12th October 2020, 12:41 am