Simon WillisonModify

2026-04-17 12:01:56

Release: datasette 1.0a28

I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly:

• Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_write_fn() callbacks with a parameter name other than conn were seeing errors. (#2691)
• The database.close() method now also shuts down the write connection for that database.
• New datasette.close() method for closing down all databases and resources associated with a Datasette instance. This is called automatically when the server shuts down. (#2693)
• Datasette now includes a pytest plugin which automatically calls datasette.close() on temporary instances created in function-scoped fixtures and during tests. See Automatic cleanup of Datasette instances for details. This helps avoid running out of file descriptors in plugin test suites that were written before the Database(is_temp_disk=True) feature introduced in Datasette 1.0a27. (#2692)

Most of the changes in this release were implemented using Claude Code and the newly released Claude Opus 4.7.

Tags: datasette

2026-04-17 04:37:12

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25

• New model: claude-opus-4.7, which supports thinking_effort: xhigh. #66
• New thinking_display and thinking_adaptive boolean options. thinking_display summarized output is currently only available in JSON output or JSON logs.
• Increased default max_tokens to the maximum allowed for each model.
• No longer uses obsolete structured-outputs-2025-11-13 beta header for older models.

Tags: llm, anthropic, claude

2026-04-17 01:16:52

For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-A3B from Alibaba and Claude Opus 4.7 from Anthropic.

Here's the Qwen 3.6 pelican, generated using this 20.9GB Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S.gguf quantized model by Unsloth, running on my MacBook Pro M5 via LM Studio (and the llm-lmstudio plugin) - transcript here:

And here's one I got from Anthropic's brand new Claude Opus 4.7 (transcript):

I'm giving this one to Qwen 3.6. Opus managed to mess up the bicycle frame!

I tried Opus a second time passing thinking_level: max. It didn't do much better (transcript):

I don't think Qwen are cheating

A lot of people are convinced that the labs train for my stupid benchmark. I don't think they do, but honestly this result did give me a little glint of suspicion. So I'm burning one of my secret backup tests - here's what I got from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Opus 4.7 for "Generate an SVG of a flamingo riding a unicycle":

I'm giving this one to Qwen too, partly for the excellent <!-- Sunglasses on flamingo! --> SVG comment.

What can we learn from this?

The pelican benchmark has always been meant as a joke - it's mainly a statement on how obtuse and absurd the task of comparing these models is.

The weird thing about that joke is that, for the most part, there has been a direct correlation between the quality of the pelicans produced and the general usefulness of the models. Those first pelicans from October 2024 were junk. The more recent entries have generally been much, much better - to the point that Gemini 3.1 Pro produces illustrations you could actually use somewhere, provided you had a pressing need to illustrate a pelican riding a bicycle.

Today, even that loose connection to utility has been broken. I have enormous respect for Qwen, but I very much doubt that a 21GB quantized version of their latest model is more powerful or useful than Anthropic's latest proprietary release.

If the thing you need is an SVG illustration of a pelican riding a bicycle though, right now Qwen3.6-35B-A3B running on a laptop is a better bet than Opus 4.7!

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, anthropic, claude, qwen, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, lm-studio

2026-04-16 08:18:03

Tool: datasette.io news preview

The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this:

- date: 2026-04-15
  body: |-
    [Datasette 1.0a27](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/changelog.html#a27-2026-04-15) changes how CSRF protection works in a way that simplifies form and API integration, and introduces a new `RenameTableEvent` for when a table is renamed by a SQL query.
- date: 2026-03-18
  body: |-
    ...

This format is a little hard to edit, so I finally had Claude build a custom preview UI to make checking for errors have slightly less friction.

I built it using standard claude.ai and Claude Artifacts, taking advantage of Claude's ability to clone GitHub repos and look at their content as part of a regular chat:

Clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io and look at the news.yaml file and how it is rendered on the homepage. Build an artifact I can paste that YAML into which previews what it will look like, and highlights any markdown errors or YAML errors

Tags: vibe-coding, claude, tools, datasette

2026-04-16 07:52:35

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a1

This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie.

Tags: datasette

2026-04-16 07:16:34

Release: datasette 1.0a27

Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern browser headers as described by Filippo Valsorda.

The second big change is that Datasette now fires a new RenameTableEvent any time a table is renamed during a SQLite transaction. This is useful because some plugins (like datasette-comments) attach additional data to table records by name, so a renamed table requires them to react in appropriate ways.

Here are the rest of the changes in the alpha:

• New actor= parameter for datasette.client methods, allowing internal requests to be made as a specific actor. This is particularly useful for writing automated tests. (#2688)
• New Database(is_temp_disk=True) option, used internally for the internal database. This helps resolve intermittent database locked errors caused by the internal database being in-memory as opposed to on-disk. (#2683) (#2684)
• The /<database>/<table>/-/upsert API (docs) now rejects rows with null primary key values. (#1936)
• Improved example in the API explorer for the /-/upsert endpoint (docs). (#1936)
• The /<database>.json endpoint now includes an "ok": true key, for consistency with other JSON API responses.
• call_with_supported_arguments() is now documented as a supported public API. (#2678)

Tags: annotated-release-notes, datasette, python