Hackers' Pub

Syntax	Description	Examples
`"` keyword `"`	Finds the string within quotes, including spaces. Case-insensitive. (Escape quotes inside with `\"`)	`"Hackers' Pub"`
`from:` handle	Finds content written by the specified user.	`from:hongminhee` `from:hongminhee@hollo.social`
`lang:` ISO 639-1	Finds content written in the specified language.	`lang:en`
`#` tag	Finds content with the specified tag. Case-insensitive.	`#HackersPub`
condition condition	Finds content that satisfies both conditions on either side of the space (logical AND).	`"Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
condition `OR` condition	Finds content that satisfies at least one of the conditions on either side of the OR operator (logical OR).	`#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" lang:en`
`(` condition `)`	Combines the operators within the parentheses first.	`(#HackersPub OR "Hackers' Pub" OR "Hackers Pub") lang:en`

Simon Willison @simon@fedi.simonwillison.net

11/4/2025, 9:36:31 PM

Public

Datasette 1.0a20 is out, featuring an entirely new SQL-powered permissions system. This is by far the most ambitious project I've attempted with the help of coding agents (Claude Code and Codex CLI in this case) - here are detailed notes on how it works and what I learned along the way
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/4/datasette-10a20/

A new SQL-powered permissions system in Datasette 1.0a20

Datasette 1.0a20 is out with the biggest breaking API change on the road to 1.0, improving how Datasette’s permissions system works by migrating permission logic to SQL running in SQLite. …

simonwillison.net · Simon Willison’s Weblog

Simon Willison @simon@fedi.simonwillison.net

11/4/2025, 9:45:50 PM

Public

And in case you don't make it as far as the "miscellaneous tips" section, here's a bunch of lessons I learned about working with coding agents that I picked up along the way https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/4/datasette-10a20/#miscellaneous-tips-i-picked-up-along-the-way

When working on anything relating to plugins it’s vital to have at least a few real plugins that you upgrade in lock-step with the core changes. The tadd and radd shortcuts were invaluable for productively working on those plugins while I made changes to core.
Coding agents make experiments much cheaper. I threw away so much code on the way to the final implementation, which was psychologically easier because the cost to create that code in the first place was so low.
Tests, tests, tests. This project would have been impossible without that existing test suite. The additional tests we built along the way give me confidence that the new system is as robust as I need it to be.
Claude writes good commit messages now! I finally gave in and let it write these—previously I’ve been determined to write them myself. It’s a big time saver to be able to say “write a tasteful commit message for these changes”.
Claude is also great at breaking up changes into smaller commits. It can also productively rewrite history to make it easier to follow, especially useful if you’re still working in a branch.

A really great way to review Claude’s changes is with the GitHub PR interface. You can attach comments to individual lines of code and then later prompt Claude like this: Use gh CLI to fetch comments on URL-to-PR and make the requested changes. This is a very quick way to apply little nitpick changes—rename this function, refactor this repeated code, add types here etc.
The code I write with LLMs is higher quality code. I usually find myself making constant trade-offs while coding: this function would be neater if I extracted this helper, it would be nice to have inline documentation here, this changing this would be good but would break a dozen tests... for each of those I have to determine if the additional time is worth the benefit. Claude can apply changes so much faster than me that these calculations have changed—almost any improvement is worth applying, no matter how trivial, because the time cost is so low.

Internal tools are cheap now. The new debugging interfaces were mostly written by Claude and are significantly nicer to use and look at than the hacky versions I would have knocked out myself, if I had even taken the extra time to build them.
That trick with a Markdown file full of upgrade instructions works astonishingly well—it’s the same basic idea as Claude Skills. I maintain over 100 Datasette plugins now and I expect I’ll be automating all sorts of minor upgrades in the future using this technique.

If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://fedi.simonwillison.net/users/simon/statuses/115493617706816462 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)