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Tools2026-06-25 · source-backed
On June 24, Willison converted the mdn/browser-compat-data repo into a SQLite database served over a GitHub CDN with open CORS headers, queryable directly in Datasette Lite (simonwillison.net). It's a small pattern with big reach: ship a static SQLite file with open CORS and you get a free, serverless query API. I've over-engineered backends for exactly this kind of read-only reference data. Sometimes the right database is a file on a CDN.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
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...
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...
Satya Nadella said companies routing everything through a single proprietary lab may not survive. His argument: you hand that lab your most sensitive business context, and the lab can turn it against you as a competitor. His prescription is an orchestration layer — keep the ha...
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 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...
Simon Willison doesn't hand out superlatives. So when he writes that Z.ai's GLM-5.2 is "probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM," that's worth stopping for. His June 17 evaluation walks through a 753B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 40B active params, a 1...
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