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Public story · 2026-02-17 · source-backed
Willison published 8 posts on February 17 — his most prolific single day in recent memory. Key outputs: (1) Claude Sonnet 4.6 review, noting "similar performance to November's Opus 4.5" at Sonnet pricing, with SVG benchmark tests noting Sonnet 4.6 "consistently added decorative top hats" to his pelican test. (2) Released Rodney v0.4.0 with rodney assert for JavaScript testing and Windows support. (3) Released Chartroom (matplotlib CLI wrapper) and datasette-showboat (remote streaming). (4) Shared Dimitris Papailiopoulos' insight on Claude Code enabling researchers to quickly assess "if a question has any meat to it." His Showboat ecosystem (Rodney + Chartroom + datasette-showboat) is now the most complete open-source agent tooling stack for AI agents to document and demonstrate their own work.
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Willison's same-day review provides independent verification of Anthropic's claims. His SVG generation benchmark and pelican test offer reproducible evaluation methodology. Also notable: his Showboat ecosystem (Rodney + Chartroom + datasette-showboat) represents the most compl...
No new posts today. Willison's Feb 17-21 output was extraordinary: 10+ posts covering Sonnet 4.6, GGML/HuggingFace merger, SWE-bench analysis (Opus 4.5 leads at 76.8%, Chinese models dominate top 10), and the Karpathy "Claws" amplification. His Showboat ecosystem — Rodney, Cha...
Willison documented on July 4 that Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 can perform worse than older versions when driving bespoke file-edit tools, because they're increasingly trained and optimized for Claude Code's native editor format (Simon Willison). This is a real trap if you're buildi...
If you've used Claude Code for any serious session, you know the drill. Approve. Approve. Approve. Approve. You stop reading the prompts after the fifteenth one. That's the worst possible security outcome, way worse than a well-designed automated check. Anthropic launched auto...
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on September 1. Claude Code v2.1.257 made it the default Fable model at 17:53 UTC that day, with a 1M-token context window, $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output, and $0.25 per million on cache reads (claude-code CHANGELOG). B...
On June 9, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 across Claude.ai, Claude Code (CLI and web), and Cowork. The spec sheet: 1M-token context, 128K max output, a January 2026 knowledge cutoff, and pricing at $10 input / $50 output per million tokens. That's double Opus 4...
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