Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 26th August 2026

The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.

Paul Dix, The end of programming

# 8:07 am / ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, bun

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (via) Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4".

It's pretty big: 125B parameters but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost.

I've been trying it out on a DGX Spark using these Unsloth quantized models. I'm still exploring the model - so far I've tried the 72.5GB UD-IQ1_S one (producing these pelicans) and the 78.9GB UD-Q2_K_XL (producing these).

My favorite so far was this xhigh reasoning effort one from UD-Q2_K_XL:

Flat vector illustration: a white pelican with an orange beak and orange legs rides a red bicycle along a sandy path, a wicker basket on the handlebars holding a blue fish, with green rolling hills, a small tree and bushes, white clouds and a bright yellow sun in a blue sky behind it

# 11:52 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, ai-in-china, nvidia-spark

Tuesday, 25th August 2026
Thursday, 27th August 2026