Gemini 2.5 Pro is really good at transcribing large and complex PDFs (it transcribes tables beautifully etc), but it only does the first 10 or so pages. Then it says "Due to the extensive length and dense data in the remaining 400+ pages, a complete verbatim transcription is not feasible here." Is there a better way?

Now that we're all figuring out how to use Claude Code, Conductor built a UI that makes it easy to run multiple Claude Code's in parallel. I can totally see multiple UI's being built on Claude Code - it's basically the best agent experience out there right now, but pretty geeky. (link)

I do believe Simon coined "vibe scraping" (and he's coined quite a few AI-y words) - vibe coding something that scrapes a website for data. (link)

More than the year of agents, this feels like the year of evals.

SQLite feels like the perfect working-memory container for agents. Small, self-contained in one file, powerful, well understood by LLMs. LLMs can save stuff in there in between sessions, it's structured, it's powerful, you can take it with you.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, a free online book by Nathan Lambert is a treasure trove of information. As an example, how are chatbots trained on personaility?

Simon: "My personal theory is that getting a significant productivity boost from LLM assistance and AI tools has a much steeper learning curve than most people expect." Right now, in coding, that is very true. Then again, engineers are used to investing in their own productivity. They call it DX, developer experience. And they will spend as much time as available customizing their work setup, so customizing Claude Code, as an example, is a natural fit. (link)

I wonder what other professional groups are similar in that way - used to investing lots of time in optimizing their own productivity.

Living in Spain, I get a lot of official emails in Spanish, and I'm really enjoying the Gmail Gemini summaries at the top. My Spanish is good but those email threads are often a lot. Same for long emails from the kids' schools. The summaries help me be confident that I didn't miss anything. (link)

Simon Willison has been saying (and showing) that this might be a great time to start blogging again, so after 10 years or so, I've revived my blog. I expect I'll write mostly about AI and climate, but we'll see. I had (of course) to build my own blogging software, which took a day or so with a little help from Claude. It's really custom to what I like. (link)

As an example of how I'm using Claude, it's roughly in the "talk to a junior engineer" style that works really well right now. It's fairly specific, but I don't have to write the boring bits myself. As an example, I just wrote this:

Create a migration that inserts the first category in the db called "Other", and adjust the livewire component for creating new posts to select the first (id=1) category as default.