Simon Willison · 2026-06-16 · 2 min read
"Defenders need to be able to ask AI to fix the bugs in a file, explain why the fix matters, and write tests that confirm the patch works. That is not a guardrail bypass. It is the most valuable thing an AI model can do for defensive security: executing the find, fix, and test loop defenders run every day."
"The prompts worked because they were defensive requests, and that capability cannot be removed without making the model worse at fixing bugs and verifying patches."
Simon Willison · 2026-06-16 · 2 min read
"I'm using Cloudflare's CAPTCHA (they call it a "Web Application Firewall > Custom rules > Managed Challenge" these days) to prevent crawlers from aggresively spidering my faceted search engine on this site, but I got fed up of even simple ?q=term searches triggering the challenge."
"After some mucking around with Claude Code it turns out you can register the following rule instead, so the CAPTCHA only kicks in for search URLs containing at least one ampersand: (http.request.uri.path wildcard r"/search/*" and http.request.uri.query contains "&")"
Simon Willison · 2026-06-15 · 2 min read
"New tool, execute_write_sql, which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account."
"The datasette agent chat content.db -m gpt-5.5 --unsafe command can now be used to chat directly with a specific database and directly modify it through prompts like 'create a notes table', 'add a note about X' etc."