Fetching from the wire…
Security2026-06-07 · source-backed
On June 6, Willison released micropython-wasm, an alpha package that runs untrusted Python inside a WebAssembly binary with enforced memory, CPU, and file/network limits. He wired it into a Datasette Agent plugin, put GPT-5.5 xhigh inside, and challenged it to break out. So far it hasn't. Source: simonwillison.net This is the practical answer to the RCE story above. If your agent executes model-generated code, you need a sandbox, and renting a cloud VM per execution is slow and expensive. A 362KB container-free primitive you self-host is a different proposition. Worth a real look for anyone running code-execution agents.
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Willison's June 13 post walks through publishing WebAssembly wheels to PyPI so Python packages run client-side under Pyodide, alongside Datasette 1.0a33 adding JSON "extras" to the API (Simon Willison). He built a throwaway extras-API explorer with Claude Fable 5 to understand...
Prompted by Julia Evans admitting on July 17 that she still can't read query plans, Willison had Fable build a tool that runs arbitrary SQL against a SQLite database and renders both EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN and the lower-level EXPLAIN bytecode with per-line plain-English annotation...
This is the case study I'll be pointing people to for months. Simon Willison shipped sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 on July 5, his first major version bump since 2020, with most of the code written by "Claude Fable" across 37 prompts and 34 commits, for about $149.25 total. The number th...
He handed Claude Fable 5, in Claude Code for web, the job of evaluating whether smolvm 1.8.3 could safely run untrusted Python and JavaScript under strict constraints. Verdict: it fits, with hardware-isolated VMs rather than shared-kernel containers, enforced CPU/RAM limits, g...
Simon Willison has been writing software for over 25 years. He's one of the most disciplined, transparent engineers in the Python ecosystem. And yesterday he published an essay admitting he no longer reviews every line of code that Claude Code generates for his production proj...
Willison updated his open WebRTC audio playground so you can paste a document before a session and discuss it live over voice. It runs on OpenAI's GPT-Realtime-2, the company's first realtime voice model with GPT-5-class reasoning (128K context, parallel tool calls, interrupti...
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