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1. 1

   battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 24, 2026

   Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non-audio based multiplayer mode so up to four human players can join (any spare slots use AI) Claude Opus 5.5 added a new map called "Compass Rose" and modified the WebSockets multiplayer network code to support up to four players for that map, joining via share links or QR codes. The new teams use ro

   Original source ↗Software engineering
2. 2

   Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 23, 2026

   Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version that's 2-3x faster, at twice the price (except for input token cache hits, which are priced the same). The US dollar pricing is $2.00/million tokens for input and $10/million for output - the same as GPT-6.1 Sol and half the price of Claude Opus 5.5. Moonshot's own benchmarks show Kimi as approximately level with Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra - beating them on a few benchmarks, coming

   Original source ↗Software engineering
3. 3

   Quoting Armin Ronacher

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   Simon WillisonOctober 22, 2026

   As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security , generative-ai , armin-ronacher , ai , ai-security-research , llms

   Original source ↗Software engineering
4. 4

   Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 22, 2026

   Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI last year, and to which we donated the Model Context Protocol (MCP). I'm pleased to note I called this one last December , when Anthropic first declared skills to be an "open standard": I wouldn't be surprised to see this end up in the AAIF , recently the new home of the MCP specification. Fun s

   Original source ↗Software engineering
5. 5

   DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)

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   Simon WillisonOctober 22, 2026

   DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat : The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it . Via flir on Hacker News Tags: music , ai , generative-ai , pelican-riding-a-bicycle

   Original source ↗Software engineering
6. 6

   Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 21, 2026

   Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro! Panache est un jeu de stratégie en temps réel pour mobile et navigateur, dans la France de la Belle Époque (vers 1900) : dirigeables, Fardiers à vapeur, Creusot cuirassés, automates en képi, Gargantua la forteresse marchante — et beaucoup de panache. You can play Panache here - it's worth clicking that link just to experience the new int

   Original source ↗Software engineering
7. 7

   Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 21, 2026

   Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the coordinated disclosure process. This post from the PHP Foundation explain what went so wrong: On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began circulating on online forums and social media. They came with a wrong release time and a wrong CVSS score of 10.0 (the actual score is

   Original source ↗Software engineering
8. 8

   Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 20, 2026

   My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones ( play it here ). Unlike my previous experiments , this one is actually fun to play . I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also supports multiplayer between nearby devices using audio to synchronize game state! Here's what I've built so far, and some of the things I learned along the way. Battle Drones How I built this v1: the initial prototype v2: full sprites v3: varied terrain v4: the fun update v5: Battle Drones

   Original source ↗Frontier AISoftware engineering
9. 9

   eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

   article

   Simon WillisonOctober 20, 2026

   eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a list of trusted certificates needs to be updated. This site is tracking software updates via this GitHub repository - Linux distros need to update their ca-certificates packages. In Python world uv 0.13.4 and pip 26.2.2 and certifi 2026.10.19 have been released with upgraded certificate lists. Ther

   Original source ↗Software engineering
10. 10

    My obituary for programming

    article

    Simon WillisonOctober 19, 2026

    My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't do it! No, they needed us. They would give us a problem and we would solve it the way we wanted. We set the strategy, we made the timeline, we defined what was and was not

    Original source ↗Frontier AISoftware engineering
11. 11

    web-edit 0.1a2

    article

    Simon WillisonOctober 17, 2026

    Release: web-edit 0.1a2 web-edit ( previously ) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale. I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was running pelican prompts on a laptop from my phone (here's DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017 ) and I wanted an easy way to copy the resulting logs into a Gist. Tags: projects , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , deepseek

    Original source ↗Software engineering
12. 12

    llm-echo 0.5

    article

    Simon WillisonOctober 18, 2026

    Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now updates the simulated token usage counts to take tool calls, system prompts, and reasoning tokens into account. Example usage: uvx --with llm-echo llm -m echo 'hi there' -o thinking 1 --usage Outputs: First I consider the prompt, then I decide what to say. { "prompt": "hi there", "system": "", "attachments": [], "stream": tru

    Original source ↗Software engineering