Simon Willison
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 1, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for Simon Willison’s Weblog
- Top 500K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 5, 2026
Latest articles
Codex bundles LibreOffice (opens the original)
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I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice open source office suite (which forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010): The ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/plugins/openai-prima
Understanding ChatGPT Work (opens the original)
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OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here’s what I’ve figured out about it so far. The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let’s call it Work Cloud. If you install the ChatGPT desktop app—the app that used to be called Codex—you gain access to a thing called ChatGPT
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things (opens the original)
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Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen’s self-reported benchmarks for this model are eye-opening. They show a boost from both Qwen 3.6 27B and the closed-weight Qwen 3.7-Plus, which was one of Qwen’s strongest models of any size as recently a
Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face (opens the original)
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OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about “the Hugging Face Incident” (previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It’s short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how things played out inside OpenAI. I’ve used the video to construct the timeline below. Here’s the timeline. My favourite detail is at the end: OpenAI found out that they were responsible for the at
Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp) (opens the original)
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Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol. For background: MCP is the Model Context Protocol, which describes a standard way to expose new tools to LLM-powered agent frameworks. It was introduced by Anthropic back in November 2024, had a h
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Top 500K sites
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