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Stories from Simon Willison's Weblog. Show all stories · All sources

• SSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-15✓ Read

  Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO

  Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO The phrase "told investors" appears four times in this FT article, which reports on Anthropic's day of hosting investors on Wednesday. Lots of details in here from "people with knowledge of the matter". Key things I learned from the article: Q1 revenue (Jan/Feb/Mar) was "about $4.8bn" Q2 (Apr/May/Jun) was $11.5bn Q3 (Jul/Aug/Sep) was $16.8bn In Q3: $1.70 in revenue for every $1 spent on "computing power"

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• SSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-14✓ Read

  Tree Appreciator

  Tool: Tree Appreciator Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode) where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with: Build a three js game called "Tree appreciator" - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechanics is about appreciating the differences between them. Think hard about how to make sure it is both fun and beautiful. Somewhat embarrassingly given my recent talk, I've found that telling Opus 5.5 "make sure it is fun" works uncomfortably well.

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• SSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-14✓ Read

  AI is mass decompiling games. That’s both awesome and scary

  AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary. Indie game developer Popcar talks about the recent wave of AI-powered decompilation of existing games, enabling weird mashups between existing games, and producing a boom in game preservation projects to get old games working on new hardware (often in a browser using WebAssembly). I like how this piece captures both the positives and the negatives of this new development: Most people already realized the scary part by now.

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• SSimon WillisonSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-13✓ Read

  Redesigning source control at Anthropic

  Redesigning source control at Anthropic Interesting piece from Anthropic describing why and how they built their own custom alternative to Git, based on the dramatic increase in rate of changes to their code after the past six months. In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day. They included a chart showing those changes. I had Claude modify their chart (code here) to add markers for the public releases of each of their models in 2026:

  
• SSimon WillisonSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-13✓ Read

  Llm-gemini 0.35

  Release: llm-gemini 0.35 I added support to llm-gemini for the new Gemini 4 Argon model, made available today via the Gemini API and for customers of their $100/month subscription plan. Here are the low, medium and high pelicans. As expected, they are all excellent: Gemini has a track record of producing great SVGs, and are the only lab where I know their staff have invested in SVG specifically (and who have boasted about their pelicans before.) Here's the "high" illustration, which cost me 17.166 cents: The pricing is interesting.

  
• SSimon Willison's Weblog2026-10-13✓ Read

  Quoting Geoffrey Huntley

  If the agent isn't using my diagnostics library, I could introspect and update AGENTS.md, but there's still a delta, and it'll drift. Instead, I write a pre-commit hook that checks the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass my diagnostics module. Boom: fail the commit, inject a prompt telling the agent to use the diagnostics library. All of a sudden it's ten out of ten.

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