Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 28th May 2026

Sighting 11:17 AM — Brewer's Blackbird, in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, CA, US, CA
Brewer's Blackbird
Brewer's Blackbird

A slightly customized Markdown rendering tool with special treatment for fenced code SVG blocks - it both renders the image and provides a tab for switching to the code view.

You can paste in Markdown or give it a URL to a CORS-enabled Markdown file or Gist. Here's an example where it loads a Markdown file full of LLM pelican logs for Opus 4.8.

  • New model: Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4.8).
  • New -o fast 1 option for fast mode, for organizations with that feature enabled on their account.
  • Default max_tokens for each model now defaults to that model's maximum output rather than 8,192. #72

See also my notes on Opus 4.8 - I used this new release of llm-anthropic to generate the pelicans.

Claude Opus 4.8: “a modest but tangible improvement”

Visit Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement"

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement:

[... 983 words]

Wednesday, 27th May 2026
Friday, 29th May 2026