Latest / October 8, 2026
7 posts from engineering leaders published October 8, 2026, by Simon Willison, Charity Majors, Gergely Orosz and 2 more.
Release: ttok 0.4 ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library. It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI, and added a --list-models command to list available models. It works with uvx…
Computer programming is, fundamentally, about two things: Problem-solving using computers Learning to control complexity while solving these problems I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of…
Brilliant jerks, ZIRP-era managers, and how psychological safety lost the plot. Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Cat Hicks.
The Firebase iOS SDK crashed after a backend change, crashing all apps which used Firebase analytics for 2-6 hours. Google didn’t update the status page, but did offer a postmortem 4 days later.
As an improvement to my version with Python or with Ruby , with tools like jq now being widely used, how do we minify a JSON string? Given: { "key" : [ 123 , 456 ], "key2" : "value" } We can override the -c : % jq -c . {"key":[123,456],"key2":"value"} (Thanks to jtheo's…
I was speaking to someone the other day - while I've been at Open Source Summit (Europe) - about the great Custom Properties that GitHub added in ~2023. However, they weren't aware that they're available to anyone with read access to the repo - which means for a public repo,…
Software engineering has changed in the last 2 years. Here's how that looks without the fluff. Real company, big stakes, finite token budget