Simon Willison
https://simonwillison.net/ · Editorial weight 9/10
Quoting Andreas Påhlsson-Notini
Andreas Påhlsson-Notini argues current AI agents inherit human flaws—indecision, impatience, constraint-negotiation—rather than embodying truly alien intelligence. The critique challenges whether today's systems are genuinely autonomous or merely mimicking human problem-solving patterns.
Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons
Simon Willison upgraded his Claude Token Counter tool to compare tokenization across different Claude models. Claude Opus 4.7 introduced the first tokenizer change in the Claude family, making cross-model comparison newly relevant for developers optimizing API costs.
Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 on April 16, 2026, with updated system prompts compared to the February 4.6 version. The company continues its practice of publicly archiving system prompt changes, enabling transparency into how model instructions evolve across releases.
Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool
Simon Willison demonstrates a practical agentic engineering pattern using a short LLM prompt to automate adding new content types to his blog-to-newsletter tool, showcasing how minimal prompting can accomplish substantial work in a single API call.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
Simon Willison compared Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Claude Opus 4.7 using his informal "pelican riding a bicycle" benchmark, finding Alibaba's model produced superior image generation on a MacBook Pro M5 despite being smaller and quantized.
Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now
The UK AI Safety Institute independently evaluated Claude Mythos's cybersecurity capabilities, confirming Anthropic's claims about its vulnerability-detection prowess. Analysis suggests performance scales with computational investment, framing security testing as a resource-intensive verification process.
