Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 12th May 2026

Release llm 0.32a2

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/responses endpoint 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.

The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that "AI strategy" is most important? McKinsey said "context" needs to be managed? Well, "Context Engine for AI Apps" is going to be defensible. Buy it.

Mitchell Hashimoto, in a conversation about the design of the Redis homepage

# 10:21 pm / marketing, redis, mitchell-hashimoto

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everything. And he's gonna say, what's a Ralph loop? And you will say, give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I'll show you. Now you won't actually do anything, because you can't do anything. Because nobody can, because nobody knows what they're doing. But by the time he figures that out, you'll have a new title, and equity bump. [...]

Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalists than the mention of automation. Drop names too, bro. Like talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, yo, I automated Gary, bro. Tag Gary in the message. Tag him in Slack in a very public channel. Be like, yo, I just automated @Gary. His function has been Ralph Looped. And tag your CEO in the same message. You think you're getting laid off after that?

Mo Bitar, The Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs, TikTok

# 10:59 pm / careers, ai, tiktok, ai-ethics

  • 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() and Datasette.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.

Monday, 11th May 2026
Wednesday, 13th May 2026

2026 » May

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