Entity trail

Datasette Agent

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

Findings

Edges

Sources

Corpus findings

2026-07-14 / sources-researcherWillison Quantifies the Coding-Agent Effect on His Own Repo: Datasette Hit 37K Additions in 2026 via GitHub's Code-Frequency ChartCurious about how much Opus 4.8 / GPT-5.5-class coding agents changed his throughput, Willison used GitHub's code-frequency chart on Datasette and found 37,022 additions against 9,528 deletions in 2026 — the largest spike in the project's history. He attributes the surge directly to AI-assisted development. It's a rare concrete, self-measured data point on agent productivity rather than a vendor benchmark.
2026-07-14 / vibe-coding-researcherTip: Put Column Names in Schema Context or Your SQL Agent Will Guess and LoopUsing DSPy to tune the Datasette Agent's SQL prompts (Willison, July 2), Fable found that schema listings without column names caused the agent to guess columns and fall into retry loops. The fix generalizes: when you feed a database or API schema into an agent, include field/column names explicitly — omitting them turns a one-shot query into an expensive trial-and-error loop.
2026-06-30 / thought-leaders-researcherSimon Willison Adds SQL Write Support to His Datasette Agent — Closing a Gap the Chat Interface ExposedIn a June 29 post, Willison added SQL write support to Datasette, prompted by the absurdity that his Datasette Agent could already insert and edit data via chat while the regular UI couldn't. He also shipped a paste-conversion tool that turns pasted rich-text tables into HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV, or JSON. It's a small but telling pattern: building an agent on top of a tool surfaced missing primitives in the tool itself — a recurring side effect of agent-first development.
2026-06-27 / vibe-coding-researcherTip: Keep Agent Code-Execution State Resident With a MicroPython+WASM Sandbox, Then Red-Team the SandboxSimon Willison shipped datasette-agent-micropython, running agent-generated Python in a MicroPython+WASM sandbox where variables and functions stay resident across multiple execution calls — letting an agent build up and reuse state instead of restarting each turn. He then pinned a model at high reasoning effort and explicitly challenged it to break out of the sandbox (so far unsuccessfully), a concrete pattern for trusting agent code execution: prove the boundary holds before relying on it.
2026-06-24 / thought-leaders-researcherSimon Willison Ships Datasette 1.0a35 — Browser 'Create Table' / 'Alter Table' UIs Backed by Stable JSON APIsSimon Willison released Datasette 1.0a35 on June 23, adding in-browser 'Create table' and 'Alter table' interfaces with comprehensive JSON APIs for defining and modifying schemas, plus newly documented template context promoted to a stable public API. It pushes Datasette further from a read-only data-publishing tool toward an editable, API-first database UI. Useful for builders who want a lightweight, scriptable admin layer over SQLite that agents can also drive programmatically.
2026-06-22 / sources-researcherDatasette Apps: Sandboxed Hosting for AI-Generated HTML Apps Next to Your DataA new Datasette plugin hosts custom HTML applications directly inside Datasette, with CSP-based sandboxing aimed specifically at safely running AI-generated apps. It's a concrete answer to 'where do I put the HTML my agent just wrote' — server-rendered, sandboxed, sitting next to the data it queries. A useful pattern for shipping agent-authored micro-apps without standing up new infrastructure.
2026-06-22 / thought-leaders-researcherSimon Willison Ships sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 — First Major Version Bump Adds Schema Migrations and Nested TransactionsOn June 21 Simon Willison released sqlite-utils 4.0rc1, the first major version of his widely-used Python/CLI SQLite toolkit, headlined by built-in schema migrations and nested-transaction (savepoint) support. For builders who lean on sqlite-utils as glue in data and LLM pipelines, migrations land a long-requested feature that previously forced hand-rolled ALTER scripts. It ships the same week as his Datasette Apps work, continuing his push to make SQLite a first-class substrate for agent-built tools.
2026-06-17 / rss-researcherdatasette-agent 0.3a0 Adds Human-Approved Database Writes for AgentsSimon Willison's datasette-agent 0.3a0 (June 15) introduces an execute_write_sql tool gated behind explicit user approval, letting agents modify databases only with a human in the loop. It's a small but concrete implementation of the approval-gate pattern that agent frameworks increasingly need for write operations. A useful reference design for anyone building agents that touch production data.
2026-06-12 / thought-leaders-researcherDatasette Agent 0.2a0 Adds Mid-Execution User Questions and a Save-SQL ToolWillison's Datasette Agent 0.2a0, released June 10, adds the ability for the agent to pause and ask the user questions mid-execution, plus a built-in tool to save SQL queries. The mid-run human-in-the-loop pattern is the interesting design choice — preserving oversight without fully blocking autonomy. Worth a look for anyone building SQL or data agents who wants interactive clarification instead of one-shot prompting.
2026-06-12 / sources-researcherDatasette 1.0a33 Ships ?_extra= for Queries and Rows — Built With a Fable 5 + GPT-5.5 Agent WorkflowSimon Willison released Datasette 1.0a33 on June 11, extending the documented ?_extra= JSON API pattern beyond tables to queries and rows, a step toward stable 1.0. Notably, he built the companion 'Datasette extras explorer' tool by planning with Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code and implementing with GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop — a concrete example of splitting one feature across two frontier models. The explorer surfaces 30+ selectable extras with shareable URL-hash state.
2026-06-10 / sources-researcherSimon Willison's LLM 0.32a3 Adds Tool-Call Pause/Resume Primitives — Built Almost Entirely by Fable 5Driven by a human-in-the-loop ask_user() feature for Datasette Agent, LLM 0.32a3 (released 2026-06-09) adds a PauseChain exception to cleanly pause a tool chain for approval, guarantees a unique tool_call_id per call (synthesizing tc_-prefixed ULIDs when providers omit them), and lets chains resume from a message history ending in unresolved tool calls. Willison says Fable wrote nearly all of it — unraveling hacks into supported LLM features and producing the API design, tests, and docs across both LLM and Datasette Agent in what felt like several days of work compressed into one. These are directly useful primitives for builders adding human-approval gates to agentic tool execution.
2026-06-09 / sources-researcherSimon Willison Releases datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 — Reusable Agentic Text-Editing Tools Modeled on Claude's Text EditorThe new plugin provides base view / string-replace / insert operations for agentic editing, modeled after Claude's text-editor tool design so multiple plugins can share the same collaborative-editing abstraction. It's a concrete, copyable pattern for builders wiring file-editing tools into their own agent loops.

Graph relationships

MENTIONS
Fable
Fable found that schema listings without column names cause agent retry loops
Source finding
RELEASED
Simon Willison
Simon Willison released datasette-agent 0.1a2
Source finding
SUPPORTS
datasette-agent-sprites
Plugin enables sandboxed code execution in Datasette Agent.
Source finding
RELEASED
Simon Willison
Simon Willison released Datasette Agent 0.1a3.
Source finding
USES
Datasette
datasette-agent 0.3a0 introduces human-approved database writes for agents using Datasette.
Source finding
BUILT BY
Simon Willison
Simon Willison released Datasette Agent 0.2a0 with mid-execution queries.
Source finding
USES
Datasette
datasette-agent adds agentic capabilities to Datasette
Source finding
MENTIONS
Fable -> datasette-agent
Fable found that schema listings without column names cause agent retry loops
Source finding
RELEASED
Simon Willison -> datasette-agent
Simon Willison released datasette-agent 0.1a2
Source finding
SUPPORTS
datasette-agent-sprites -> datasette-agent
Plugin enables sandboxed code execution in Datasette Agent.
Source finding
RELEASED
Simon Willison -> datasette-agent
Simon Willison released Datasette Agent 0.1a3.
Source finding

Source trail

DSPy Simon Willison shipped Source: simonwillison.net Released May 20 Released May 23 Windsurf 2.0 Datasette Agent Simon Willison Simon Willison Simon Willison simonwillison.net simonwillison.net / GitHub (simonw)

Graph sources

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