Simon Willison's Weblog: datasette-agent

Datasette Agent

2026-05-21T19:52:19+00:00

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent, a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really excited about it!

Datasette Agent provides a conversational interface for asking questions of the data you have stored in Datasette. Add the datasette-agent-charts plugin and it can generate charts of your data as well.

The demo

The announcement post (on the new Datasette project blog) includes this demo video:

I recorded the video against the new agent.datasette.io live demo instance, which runs Datasette Agent against example databases including the classic global-power-plants by WRI, and a copy of the Datasette backup of my blog.

The live demo runs on Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite - it's cheap, fast and has no trouble writing SQLite queries.

A question I asked in the demo was:

when did Simon most recently see a pelican?

Which ran this SQL query:

SELECT
  title, commentary, created
FROM
  blog_beat
WHERE
  beat_type = 'sighting'
  AND (title LIKE '%pelican%' OR commentary LIKE '%pelican%')
ORDER BY
  created DESC
LIMIT
  5

And replied:

The most recent sighting of a pelican by Simon was recorded on May 20, 2026.

The observation included a California Brown Pelican, along with a Common Loon, Canada Goose, Striped Shore Crab, and a California Sea Lion.

Here's that sighting on my blog, and the Markdown export of the full conversation transcript.

The plugins

My favorite feature of Datasette Agent is that, like the rest of Datasette, it's extensible using plugins.

We've shipped three plugins so far:

datasette-agent-charts, shown in the video, adds charts to Datasette Agent, powered by Observable Plot.
datasette-agent-openai-imagegen adds an image generation tool to Datasette Agent using ChatGPT Images 2.0.
datasette-agent-sprites provides tools for executing code in a Fly Sprites persistent sandbox.

Building plugins is really fun. I have a bunch more prototypes that aren't quite alpha-quality yet.

Claude Code and OpenAI Codex are both proving excellent at writing plugins - just point them at a checkout of the datasette-agent repo for reference and tell them what you want to build!

Running it against local models

I've also been having fun running the new plugin against local models. Here's a uv one-liner to run the plugin against gemma-4-26b-a4b in LM Studio on a Mac:

uvx --prerelease=allow \
  --with datasette-agent --with llm-lmstudio \
  datasette --internal internal.db --root \
  -s plugins.datasette-llm.default_model lmstudio/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b \
  data.db

Datasette Agent needs reliable tool calls and the ability for a model to produce SQL queries that run against SQLite. The open weight models released in the past six months are increasingly able to handle that.

What's next

Datasette Agent opens up so many opportunities for the LLM and Datasette ecosystem in general.

It's already informed the major LLM 0.32a0 refactor which I'm nearly ready to roll into a stable release, maybe with some additional "LLM agent" abstractions extracte from Datasette Agent itself.

I've been exploring my own take on the Claude Artifacts, which is shaping up nicely as a plugin.

I'm excited to use Datasette Agent to build my own Claw - a personal AI assistant built around data imported from different parts of my digital life, which is a neat excuse to revisit my older Dogsheep family of tools.

We'll also be rolling out Datasette Agent for users of Datasette Cloud.

Join our #datasette-agent Discord channel if you'd like to talk about the project.

Tags: projects, sqlite, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, llm, uv, datasette-agent

datasette-agent-sprites 0.1a0

2026-05-21T18:21:07+00:00

Release: datasette-agent-sprites 0.1a0

A Datasette Agent plugin for running commands in a Fly Sprites sandbox.

Tags: sandboxing, datasette, fly, datasette-agent

datasette-agent-charts 0.1a2

2026-05-21T15:15:58+00:00

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a2

"View SQL query" buttons below rendered charts.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

datasette-agent 0.1a3

2026-05-21T15:04:09+00:00

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a3

"View SQL query" buttons for both visible tables and collapsed SQL result tool calls.

Don't display empty reasoning chunks

Improved handling of truncated responses - table still displays to the user even if the SQL results were truncated when showing the agent.

See Datasette Agent, an extensible AI assistant for Datasette.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1

2026-05-20T14:52:16+00:00

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1

More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observable10 categorical scheme. #2

Now checks execute-sql permission before running the query to find the column names.

Charts now display interactive tooltips.

Fixed a bug where waffleY charts were not described to the agent.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

datasette-agent 0.1a2

2026-05-15T00:03:00+00:00

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a2

Tool availability can now be attached to a required_permission. The default background agent tools now require the new datasette-agent-background permission. #10

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

datasette-agent 0.1a1

2026-05-14T22:01:42+00:00

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a1

Now uses the execute-sql permission when deciding which tables to list to the user. #8

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

datasette-agent-openai-imagegen 0.1a1

2026-05-12T22:03:22+00:00

Release: datasette-agent-openai-imagegen 0.1a1

Tags: datasette, openai, text-to-image, datasette-agent

datasette-agent-charts 0.1a0

2026-05-12T21:41:08+00:00

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a0

Tags: datasette, observable-plot, datasette-agent

datasette-agent 0.1a0

2026-05-12T21:29:33+00:00

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a0

Initial (silent) alpha release.

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent