Fetching from the wire…
Tools2026-06-24 · source-backed
Simon Willison shipped 1.0a35 on June 23 with in-browser "Create table" and "Alter table" interfaces backed by stable JSON schema APIs, plus template context promoted to a stable public API. It pushes Datasette from read-only publishing toward an editable, scriptable database UI that agents can drive programmatically. A lightweight admin layer over SQLite that a human and an agent can both operate is genuinely handy.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
His conclusion is DuckDB matches or beats SQLite's safety for untrusted queries, but only with enable_external_access=false, lock_configuration=true, and a watchdog thread, since DuckDB lacks SQLite's opcode-based query timeouts. He ships a safe_duckdb.py helper and a Datasett...
Willison launched datasette-apps (0.1a2) on June 18, hosting self-contained HTML+JS apps in a sandboxed iframe that run SQL against your data, read-only by default. He frames it as "Claude Artifacts reimagined for Datasette," artifacts backed by a JSON API to a relational data...
The first major version bump of his widely-used Python/CLI SQLite toolkit lands built-in schema migrations and savepoint-based nested transactions on June 21. If you lean on sqlite-utils as glue in data or LLM pipelines, migrations kill the hand-rolled ALTER scripts you've bee...
Willison shipped datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 on June 7, letting agents perform structured data edits inside Datasette, alongside micropython-wasm sandbox work for running untrusted agent code. Separately his evolving Agentic Engineering Patterns guide reframes the work around t...
Simon Willison's release scans a JSON structure for duplicate strings and substrings from a supplied replacements object, swapping matches for compact references, marking condensed regions with {"$r": [...]} and pointing at replacements via {"$": "ID"}. Fully reversible via un...
Simon Willison released 1.0a33 on June 11, extending the ?_extra= JSON API to queries and rows. The build method is the interesting part: he planned with Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code and implemented with GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop. One feature, two models, planning split...
MindPattern daily
One email a day at 7 AM. Sources and a take on every story. Unsubscribe anytime.