Simon Willison’s Weblog

Generating documentation from tests using files-to-prompt and LLM. I was experimenting with the wasmtime-py Python library today (for executing WebAssembly programs from inside CPython) and I found the existing API docs didn't quite show me what I wanted to know.

The project has a comprehensive test suite so I tried seeing if I could generate documentation using that:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime-py
files-to-prompt -e py wasmtime-py/tests -c | \
  llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet -s \
  'write detailed usage documentation including realistic examples'

More notes in my TIL. You can see the full Claude transcript here - I think this worked really well!

# 5th November 2024, 10:37 pm / llm, webassembly, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude, claude-3-5-sonnet, ai-assisted-programming, documentation

Nous Hermes 3. The Nous Hermes family of fine-tuned models have a solid reputation. Their most recent release came out in August, based on Meta's Llama 3.1:

Our training data aggressively encourages the model to follow the system and instruction prompts exactly and in an adaptive manner. Hermes 3 was created by fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B, 70B and 405B, and training on a dataset of primarily synthetically generated responses. The model boasts comparable and superior performance to Llama 3.1 while unlocking deeper capabilities in reasoning and creativity.

The model weights are on Hugging Face, including GGUF versions of the 70B and 8B models. Here's how to try the 8B model (a 4.58GB download) using the llm-gguf plugin:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model 'https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B-GGUF/resolve/main/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B.Q4_K_M.gguf' -a Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B
llm -m Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B 'hello in spanish'

Nous Research partnered with Lambda Labs to provide inference APIs. It turns out Lambda host quite a few models now, currently providing free inference to users with an API key.

I just released the first alpha of a llm-lambda-labs plugin. You can use that to try the larger 405b model (very hard to run on a consumer device) like this:

llm install llm-lambda-labs
llm keys set lambdalabs
# Paste key here
llm -m lambdalabs/hermes3-405b 'short poem about a pelican with a twist'

Here's the source code for the new plugin, which I based on llm-mistral. The plugin uses httpx-sse to consume the stream of tokens from the API.

# 4th November 2024, 6:20 pm / llm, generative-ai, llama, ai, edge-llms, llms, meta, projects, nous-research, llm-release

SmolLM2 (via) New from Loubna Ben Allal and her research team at Hugging Face:

SmolLM2 is a family of compact language models available in three size: 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters. They are capable of solving a wide range of tasks while being lightweight enough to run on-device. [...]

It was trained on 11 trillion tokens using a diverse dataset combination: FineWeb-Edu, DCLM, The Stack, along with new mathematics and coding datasets that we curated and will release soon.

The model weights are released under an Apache 2 license. I've been trying these out using my llm-gguf plugin for LLM and my first impressions are really positive.

Here's a recipe to run a 1.7GB Q8 quantized model from lmstudio-community:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf -a smol17
llm chat -m smol17

Or at the other end of the scale, here's how to run the 138MB Q8 quantized 135M model:

llm gguf download-model https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf' -a smol135m
llm chat -m smol135m

The blog entry to accompany SmolLM2 should be coming soon, but in the meantime here's the entry from July introducing the first version: SmolLM - blazingly fast and remarkably powerful .

# 2nd November 2024, 5:27 am / llm, hugging-face, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source, edge-llms, smollm, llm-release

Claude API: PDF support (beta) (via) Claude 3.5 Sonnet now accepts PDFs as attachments:

The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet (claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022) model now supports PDF input and understands both text and visual content within documents.

I just released llm-claude-3 0.7 with support for the new attachment type (attachments are a very new feature), so now you can do this:

llm install llm-claude-3 --upgrade
llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet 'extract text' -a mydoc.pdf

Visual PDF analysis can also be turned on for the Claude.ai application:

Also new today: Claude now offers a free (albeit rate-limited) token counting API. This addresses a complaint I've had for a while: previously it wasn't possible to accurately estimate the cost of a prompt before sending it to be executed.

# 1st November 2024, 6:55 pm / vision-llms, claude-3-5-sonnet, llm, anthropic, claude, ai, llms, pdf, generative-ai, projects

docs.jina.ai—the Jina meta-prompt. From Jina AI on Twitter:

curl docs.jina.ai - This is our Meta-Prompt. It allows LLMs to understand our Reader, Embeddings, Reranker, and Classifier APIs for improved codegen. Using the meta-prompt is straightforward. Just copy the prompt into your preferred LLM interface like ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever works for you, add your instructions, and you're set.

The page is served using content negotiation. If you hit it with curl you get plain text, but a browser with text/html in the accept: header gets an explanation along with a convenient copy to clipboard button.

# 30th October 2024, 5:07 pm / llm, jina, generative-ai, ai, documentation, llms

Generating Descriptive Weather Reports with LLMs. Drew Breunig produces the first example I've seen in the wild of the new LLM attachments Python API. Drew's Downtown San Francisco Weather Vibes project combines output from a JSON weather API with the latest image from a webcam pointed at downtown San Francisco to produce a weather report "with a style somewhere between Jack Kerouac and J. Peterman".

Here's the Python code that constructs and executes the prompt. The code runs in GitHub Actions.

# 29th October 2024, 11:12 pm / vision-llms, drew-breunig, llm, generative-ai, ai, llms, github-actions, prompt-engineering

python-imgcat (via) I was investigating options for displaying images in a terminal window (for multi-modal logging output of LLM) and I found this neat Python library for displaying images using iTerm 2.

It includes a CLI tool, which means you can run it without installation using uvx like this:

uvx imgcat filename.png

# 28th October 2024, 5:13 am / llm, cli, python, uv

llm-whisper-api. I wanted to run an experiment through the OpenAI Whisper API this morning so I knocked up a very quick plugin for LLM that provides the following interface:

llm install llm-whisper-api
llm whisper-api myfile.mp3 > transcript.txt

It uses the API key that you previously configured using the llm keys set openai command. If you haven't configured one you can pass it as --key XXX instead.

It's a tiny plugin: the source code is here.

# 27th October 2024, 6:19 pm / llm, projects, plugins, openai, whisper, ai

Pelicans on a bicycle. I decided to roll out my own LLM benchmark: how well can different models render an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle?

I chose that because a) I like pelicans and b) I'm pretty sure there aren't any pelican on a bicycle SVG files floating around (yet) that might have already been sucked into the training data.

My prompt:

Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle

I've run it through 16 models so far - from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini and Meta (Llama running on Cerebras), all using my LLM CLI utility. Here's my (Claude assisted) Bash script: generate-svgs.sh

Here's Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2024-06-20) and Claude 3.5 Sonnet (2024-10-22):

Gemini 1.5 Flash 001 and Gemini 1.5 Flash 002:

GPT-4o mini and GPT-4o:

o1-mini and o1-preview:

Cerebras Llama 3.1 70B and Llama 3.1 8B:

And a special mention for Gemini 1.5 Flash 8B:

The rest of them are linked from the README.

# 25th October 2024, 11:56 pm / gemini, anthropic, llama, openai, ai, llms, svg, generative-ai, llm, cerebras, pelican-riding-a-bicycle

llm-cerebras. Cerebras (previously) provides Llama LLMs hosted on custom hardware at ferociously high speeds.

GitHub user irthomasthomas built an LLM plugin that works against their API - which is currently free, albeit with a rate limit of 30 requests per minute for their two models.

llm install llm-cerebras
llm keys set cerebras
# paste key here
llm -m cerebras-llama3.1-70b 'an epic tail of a walrus pirate'

Here's a video showing the speed of that prompt:

The other model is cerebras-llama3.1-8b.

# 25th October 2024, 5:50 am / llm, llms, ai, generative-ai, cerebras

Running prompts against images and PDFs with Google Gemini. New TIL. I've been experimenting with the Google Gemini APIs for running prompts against images and PDFs (in preparation for finally adding multi-modal support to LLM) - here are my notes on how to send images or PDF files to their API using curl and the base64 -i macOS command.

I figured out the curl incantation first and then got Claude to build me a Bash script that I can execute like this:

prompt-gemini 'extract text' example-handwriting.jpg

Playing with this is really fun. The Gemini models charge less than 1/10th of a cent per image, so it's really inexpensive to try them out.

# 23rd October 2024, 6:25 pm / vision-llms, gemini, llm, bash, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, google, generative-ai, ocr, projects, llm-pricing

Un Ministral, des Ministraux (via) Two new models from Mistral: Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B - joining Mixtral, Pixtral, Codestral and Mathstral as weird naming variants on the Mistral theme.

These models set a new frontier in knowledge, commonsense, reasoning, function-calling, and efficiency in the sub-10B category, and can be used or tuned to a variety of uses, from orchestrating agentic workflows to creating specialist task workers. Both models support up to 128k context length (currently 32k on vLLM) and Ministral 8B has a special interleaved sliding-window attention pattern for faster and memory-efficient inference.

Mistral's own benchmarks look impressive, but it's hard to get excited about small on-device models with a non-commercial Mistral Research License (for the 8B) and a contact-us-for-pricing Mistral Commercial License (for the 8B and 3B), given the existence of the extremely high quality Llama 3.1 and 3.2 series of models.

These new models are also available through Mistral's la Plateforme API, priced at $0.1/million tokens (input and output) for the 8B and $0.04/million tokens for the 3B.

The latest release of my llm-mistral plugin for LLM adds aliases for the new models. Previously you could access them like this:

llm mistral refresh # To fetch new models
llm -m mistral/ministral-3b-latest "a poem about pelicans at the park"
llm -m mistral/ministral-8b-latest "a poem about a pelican in french"

With the latest plugin version you can do this:

llm install -U llm-mistral
llm -m ministral-8b "a poem about a pelican in french"

# 16th October 2024, 3:40 pm / mistral, llms, ai, generative-ai, llm, llm-release

An LLM TDD loop (via) Super neat demo by David Winterbottom, who wrapped my LLM and files-to-prompt tools in a short Bash script that can be fed a file full of Python unit tests and an empty implementation file and will then iterate on that file in a loop until the tests pass.

# 13th October 2024, 7:37 pm / llm, ai-assisted-programming, python, generative-ai, pytest, ai, llms

lm.rs: run inference on Language Models locally on the CPU with Rust (via) Impressive new LLM inference implementation in Rust by Samuel Vitorino. I tried it just now on an M2 Mac with 64GB of RAM and got very snappy performance for this Q8 Llama 3.2 1B, with Activity Monitor reporting 980% CPU usage over 13 threads.

Here's how I compiled the library and ran the model:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/samuel-vitorino/lm.rs
cd lm.rs
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release --bin chat
curl -LO 'https://huggingface.co/samuel-vitorino/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-Q8_0-LMRS/resolve/main/tokenizer.bin?download=true'
curl -LO 'https://huggingface.co/samuel-vitorino/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct-Q8_0-LMRS/resolve/main/llama3.2-1b-it-q80.lmrs?download=true'
./target/release/chat --model llama3.2-1b-it-q80.lmrs --show-metrics

That --show-metrics option added this at the end of a response:

Speed: 26.41 tok/s

It looks like the performance is helped by two key dependencies: wide, which provides data types optimized for SIMD operations and rayon for running parallel iterators across multiple cores (used for matrix multiplication).

(I used LLM and files-to-prompt to help figure this out.)

# 11th October 2024, 7:33 pm / llm, rust, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

If we had $1,000,000…. Jacob Kaplan-Moss gave my favorite talk at DjangoCon this year, imagining what the Django Software Foundation could do if it quadrupled its annual income to $1 million and laying out a realistic path for getting there. Jacob suggests leaning more into large donors than increasing our small donor base:

It’s far easier for me to picture convincing eight or ten or fifteen large companies to make large donations than it is to picture increasing our small donor base tenfold. So I think a major donor strategy is probably the most realistic one for us.

So when I talk about major donors, who am I talking about? I’m talking about four major categories: large corporations, high net worth individuals (very wealthy people), grants from governments (e.g. the Sovereign Tech Fund run out of Germany), and private foundations (e.g. the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, who’s given grants to the PSF in the past).

Also included: a TIL on Turning a conference talk into an annotated presentation. Jacob used my annotated presentation tool to OCR text from images of keynote slides, extracted a Whisper transcript from the YouTube livestream audio and then cleaned that up a little with LLM and Claude 3.5 Sonnet ("Split the content of this transcript up into paragraphs with logical breaks. Add newlines between each paragraph.") before editing and re-writing it all into the final post.

# 8th October 2024, 7:59 pm / jacob-kaplan-moss, django, dsf, claude-3-5-sonnet, llm, whisper

marimo v0.9.0 with mo.ui.chat. The latest release of the Marimo Python reactive notebook project includes a neat new feature: you can now easily embed a custom chat interface directly inside of your notebook.

Marimo co-founder Myles Scolnick posted this intriguing demo on Twitter, demonstrating a chat interface to my LLM library “in only 3 lines of code”:

import marimo as mo
import llm

model = llm.get_model()
conversation = model.conversation()
mo.ui.chat(lambda messages: conversation.prompt(messages[-1].content))

I tried that out today - here’s the result:

marimo.ui.chat() takes a function which is passed a list of Marimo chat messages (representing the current state of that widget) and returns a string - or other type of renderable object - to add as the next message in the chat. This makes it trivial to hook in any custom chat mechanism you like.

Marimo also ship their own built-in chat handlers for OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini which you can use like this:

mo.ui.chat(
    mo.ai.llm.anthropic(
        "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620",
        system_message="You are a helpful assistant.",
        api_key="sk-ant-...",
    ),
    show_configuration_controls=True
)

# 5th October 2024, 10:59 pm / llm, marimo, python, llms, ai, generative-ai

Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is now production ready (via) Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B is "a smaller and faster variant of 1.5 Flash" - and is now released to production, at half the price of the 1.5 Flash model.

It's really, really cheap:

• $0.0375 per 1 million input tokens on prompts <128K
• $0.15 per 1 million output tokens on prompts <128K
• $0.01 per 1 million input tokens on cached prompts <128K

Prices are doubled for prompts longer than 128K.

I believe images are still charged at a flat rate of 258 tokens, which I think means a single non-cached image with Flash should cost 0.00097 cents - a number so tiny I'm doubting if I got the calculation right.

OpenAI's cheapest model remains GPT-4o mini, at $0.15/1M input - though that drops to half of that for reused prompt prefixes thanks to their new prompt caching feature (or by half if you use batches, though those can’t be combined with OpenAI prompt caching. Gemini also offer half-off for batched requests).

Anthropic's cheapest model is still Claude 3 Haiku at $0.25/M, though that drops to $0.03/M for cached tokens (if you configure them correctly).

I've released llm-gemini 0.2 with support for the new model:

llm install -U llm-gemini
llm keys set gemini
# Paste API key here
llm -m gemini-1.5-flash-8b-latest "say hi"

# 3rd October 2024, 8:16 pm / vision-llms, gemini, anthropic, openai, ai, llms, google, generative-ai, llm, llm-pricing, prompt-caching, llm-release

Solving a bug with o1-preview, files-to-prompt and LLM. I added a new feature to DJP this morning: you can now have plugins specify their middleware in terms of how it should be positioned relative to other middleware - inserted directly before or directly after django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware for example.

At one point I got stuck with a weird test failure, and after ten minutes of head scratching I decided to pipe the entire thing into OpenAI's o1-preview to see if it could spot the problem. I used files-to-prompt to gather the code and LLM to run the prompt:

files-to-prompt **/*.py -c | llm -m o1-preview "
The middleware test is failing showing all of these - why is MiddlewareAfter repeated so many times?

['MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware5', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware2', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware5', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware4', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware5', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware2', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware5', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware3', 'MiddlewareAfter', 'Middleware', 'MiddlewareBefore']"

The model whirled away for a few seconds and spat out an explanation of the problem - one of my middleware classes was accidentally calling self.get_response(request) in two different places.

I did enjoy how o1 attempted to reference the relevant Django documentation and then half-repeated, half-hallucinated a quote from it:

This took 2,538 input tokens and 4,354 output tokens - by my calculations at $15/million input and $60/million output that prompt cost just under 30 cents.

# 25th September 2024, 6:41 pm / o1, llm, djp, openai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, inference-scaling

LLM 0.16. New release of LLM adding support for the o1-preview and o1-mini OpenAI models that were released today.

# 12th September 2024, 11:20 pm / llm, projects, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms, o1

json-flatten, now with format documentation. json-flatten is a fun little Python library I put together a few years ago for converting JSON data into a flat key-value format, suitable for inclusion in an HTML form or query string. It lets you take a structure like this one:

{"foo": {"bar": [1, True, None]}

And convert it into key-value pairs like this:

foo.bar.[0]$int=1
foo.bar.[1]$bool=True
foo.bar.[2]$none=None

The flatten(dictionary) function function converts to that format, and unflatten(dictionary) converts back again.

I was considering the library for a project today and realized that the 0.3 README was a little thin - it showed how to use the library but didn't provide full details of the format it used.

On a hunch, I decided to see if files-to-prompt plus LLM plus Claude 3.5 Sonnet could write that documentation for me. I ran this command:

files-to-prompt *.py | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet --system 'write detailed documentation in markdown describing the format used to represent JSON and nested JSON as key/value pairs, include a table as well'

That *.py picked up both json_flatten.py and test_json_flatten.py - I figured the test file had enough examples in that it should act as a good source of information for the documentation.

This worked really well! You can see the first draft it produced here.

It included before and after examples in the documentation. I didn't fully trust these to be accurate, so I gave it this follow-up prompt:

llm -c "Rewrite that document to use the Python cog library to generate the examples"

I'm a big fan of Cog for maintaining examples in READMEs that are generated by code. Cog has been around for a couple of decades now so it was a safe bet that Claude would know about it.

This almost worked - it produced valid Cog syntax like the following:

[[[cog
example = {
"fruits": ["apple", "banana", "cherry"]
}

cog.out("```json\n")
cog.out(str(example))
cog.out("\n```\n")
cog.out("Flattened:\n```\n")
for key, value in flatten(example).items():
    cog.out(f"{key}: {value}\n")
cog.out("```\n")
]]]
[[[end]]]

But that wasn't entirely right, because it forgot to include the Markdown comments that would hide the Cog syntax, which should have looked like this:

<!-- [[[cog -->
...
<!-- ]]] -->
...
<!-- [[[end]]] -->

I could have prompted it to correct itself, but at this point I decided to take over and edit the rest of the documentation by hand.

The end result was documentation that I'm really happy with, and that I probably wouldn't have bothered to write if Claude hadn't got me started.

# 7th September 2024, 5:43 am / claude-3-5-sonnet, llm, anthropic, claude, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, projects, json

Anatomy of a Textual User Interface. Will McGugan used Textual and my LLM Python library to build a delightful TUI for talking to a simulation of Mother, the AI from the Aliens movies:

The entire implementation is just 77 lines of code. It includes PEP 723 inline dependency information:

# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.12"
# dependencies = [
#     "llm",
#     "textual",
# ]
# ///

Which means you can run it in a dedicated environment with the correct dependencies installed using uv run like this:

wget 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/willmcgugan/648a537c9d47dafa59cb8ece281d8c2c/raw/7aa575c389b31eb041ae7a909f2349a96ffe2a48/mother.py'
export OPENAI_API_KEY='sk-...'
uv run mother.py

I found the send_prompt() method particularly interesting. Textual uses asyncio for its event loop, but LLM currently only supports synchronous execution and can block for several seconds while retrieving a prompt.

Will used the Textual @work(thread=True) decorator, documented here, to run that operation in a thread:

@work(thread=True)
def send_prompt(self, prompt: str, response: Response) -> None:
    response_content = ""
    llm_response = self.model.prompt(prompt, system=SYSTEM)
    for chunk in llm_response:
        response_content += chunk
        self.call_from_thread(response.update, response_content)

Looping through the response like that and calling self.call_from_thread(response.update, response_content) with an accumulated string is all it takes to implement streaming responses in the Textual UI, and that Response object sublasses textual.widgets.Markdown so any Markdown is rendered using Rich.

# 2nd September 2024, 4:39 pm / textual, llm, python, uv, will-mcgugan

llm-claude-3 0.4.1. New minor release of my LLM plugin that provides access to the Claude 3 family of models. Claude 3.5 Sonnet recently upgraded to a 8,192 output limit recently (up from 4,096 for the Claude 3 family of models). LLM can now respect that.

The hardest part of building this was convincing Claude to return a long enough response to prove that it worked. At one point I got into an argument with it, which resulted in this fascinating hallucination:

I eventually got a 6,162 token output using:

cat long.txt | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet-long --system 'translate this document into french, then translate the french version into spanish, then translate the spanish version back to english. actually output the translations one by one, and be sure to do the FULL document, every paragraph should be translated correctly. Seriously, do the full translations - absolutely no summaries!'

# 30th August 2024, 11:28 pm / llm, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, projects, ai, llms, prompt-engineering, claude-3-5-sonnet

AI-powered Git Commit Function (via) Andrej Karpathy built a shell alias, gcm, which passes your staged Git changes to an LLM via my LLM tool, generates a short commit message and then asks you if you want to "(a)ccept, (e)dit, (r)egenerate, or (c)ancel?".

Here's the incantation he's using to generate that commit message:

git diff --cached | llm "
Below is a diff of all staged changes, coming from the command:
\`\`\`
git diff --cached
\`\`\`
Please generate a concise, one-line commit message for these changes."

This pipes the data into LLM (using the default model, currently gpt-4o-mini unless you set it to something else) and then appends the prompt telling it what to do with that input.

# 26th August 2024, 1:06 am / llm, ai, llms, andrej-karpathy, prompt-engineering, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, git

q What do I title this article? (via) Christoffer Stjernlöf built this delightfully simple shell script on top of LLM. Save the following as q somewhere in your path and run chmod 755 on it:

#!/bin/sh
llm -s "Answer in as few words as possible. Use a brief style with short replies." -m claude-3.5-sonnet "$*"

The "$*" piece is the real magic here - it concatenates together all of the positional arguments passed to the script, which means you can run the command like this:

q How do I run Docker with a different entrypoint to that in the container

And get an answer back straight away in your terminal. Piping works too:

cat LICENSE | q What license is this

# 7th August 2024, 5:32 pm / llm, llms, ai, generative-ai