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Public story · 2026-02-17 · source-backed
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 complete open-source agent tooling stack for AI agents to self-document.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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 decorativ...
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...
Anthropic shipped Fable 5 on June 9. Willison spent ~5.5 hours stress-testing it: slow and expensive, but it handled everything he threw at it, including agentic coding. (Simon Willison) The tell that it's a real working model and not a benchmark queen: because it post-dated A...
Three independent sources — Simon Willison at the Pragmatic Summit, blog.tedivm.com's coding agent guide, and Anthropic's 2026 Trends Report — converged in March 2026 on the same conclusion: the highest-leverage skill in AI-assisted development is no longer prompt engineering...
Simon Willison spent a while taking ChatGPT Work apart and published the map on August 30. Work splits into Work Cloud and Work Local, the latter being the renamed Codex desktop app, at $20/month and up since July 9. He enumerates six capabilities Work has that Chat doesn't, a...
Anthropic released Sonnet 5 on June 30 as the successor to Sonnet 4.6, and the marketing word is "drop-in." Simon Willison read the platform docs so you don't have to, and the reality is that a straight swap will break things in production. Three changes matter. First, the tok...
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