Simon Willison
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2 days ago
Peter Gostev built a Doom-like game engine using SQLite, where SQL queries handle all game mechanics including movement, collision detection, enemies, combat, and graphics rendering instead of storing data separately. The implementation runs as a Python terminal script that generates a recursive CTE ray tracer query and creates a playable game accessible through both the command line and a Datasette web interface. Players can now monitor game state through a live-updating HTML dashboard with minimap functionality, generated by Claude from a natural language prompt.
Simon Willison
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2 days ago
Simon Willison examined his Datasette open source project's GitHub code-frequency chart to measure the impact of AI coding assistants on his productivity. A notable spike in commit frequency appeared in the most recent period, coinciding with the release of models including Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Fable 5, and GPT-5.6 Sol. The increased activity suggests AI coding tools have accelerated his development pace on the project.
The Register
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3 days ago
Enterprise executives are experiencing unexpected cost increases from AI services that switched to usage-based token billing, with a KPMG survey finding 29 percent of senior executives struggling to understand scaling costs and nearly half reconsidering deployments. Gartner research projects that AI coding agent costs per developer will exceed average global developer salaries by 2028, and already exceed salaries in lower-cost regions like India. Companies are responding by deploying cheaper models, using open source alternatives, and adopting tools like a Netflix engineer's token-trimming utility that has saved users hundreds of thousands of dollars by removing redundant input before sending to language models.
TLDR
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3 days ago
Zhipu's co-founder announced a strategic pivot away from short-term revenue toward foundation-model research, committing the company to a two-year "Touch High" plan focused on advancing capabilities toward AGI. The company released GLM-5.2, ranked in the top 3 on the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, with a one-million-token context window and an open MIT license for unrestricted commercial use. Zhipu will concentrate investment on long-horizon tasks, autonomous agent systems, self-training mechanisms, and safety governance rather than pursuing near-term application monetization.
The Neuron
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3 days ago
GitHub released Spec Kit, an open-source toolkit that enables developers to write executable specifications that directly generate working code implementations through AI coding agents. The toolkit installs via `uv tool install specify-cli` and works with over 30 AI coding agents including GitHub Copilot and Claude. Users define project principles, create specifications describing what to build, establish technical plans and task lists, then execute implementation—shifting development from code-first to specification-first workflows.
