Posted by lumpa 6 days ago
I have no idea how this could work but as a long time Commodore 64 fan I'm interested. The link won't load for me, sadly. Can somebody give me a quick rundown on how I can host HTML apps inside my Commodore Datasette tape drive?
Any query you save is a regular query. It operates under the permissions of the viewer, and checks that the viewer has the necessary permissions - read access to the database, or more finely grained write access which checks the individual tables they will be writing to.
The problem with that is that it means you can't build an app which other, signed out or unprivileged users, can use.
So there's a second category: "trusted" queries. These are current only configurable by the site administrator who controls the Datasette deployment, as they go straight in the configuration file: https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/sql_queries.html#trusted...
I'm planning to add a way for trusted users to create these through the UI via another permission, with a very strong UI warning to only use this feature if you understand the implications.
Here's a demo of an app that runs against trusted stored queries: https://agent.datasette.io/-/apps/01ktw6fpag19dnnga85t2ced3p
Source code here, showing how those queries are called: https://gist.github.com/simonw/6e6a3760fa0528ceda1f65d789069...
It uses these queries: https://agent.datasette.io/content/timeline-filtered and https://agent.datasette.io/content/timeline-count
1. Love the addition. Everything becoming its own self-serve artifact factory is great. Malleable software's been a dream a long time, it's supposed to be soft and this concept helps get it there.
2. Since Claude goes on and on about surface, now everyone is using it. Or was everyone using it already?
FTA: “I quickly realised that the sandboxed pattern is interesting for way more than just adding custom apps to the interface surface and promoted it to its own top-level concept within the Datasette ecosystem.”
For decades that sentence would have parsed without the word surface in it. What does it mean that's suddenly so – um – load-bearing?
It's quite possible I've been subconsciously influenced into thinking in terms of "surfaces" though!
I just edited that to this, which is a bit cleaner:
> I quickly realised that the sandboxed pattern is interesting for way more than just adding custom apps in a chat interface and promoted it to its own top-level concept within the Datasette ecosystem.
It has 119 repositories.
Is this how AI slop looks like in code? Made for the agents, by the agents? Is this separation of concerns or context management with agents as a first class residents and humans merely acting as custodians?
Most of them predate coding agents. I started the Datasette project in 2017.
In fact we can answer this with Datasette! Here's a query showing the 111 packages with at least one release prior to ChatGPT on Nov 30 2022: https://datasette.simonwillison.net/simonwillisonblog?sql=wi...
And this is that same query for Claude Code (Feb 24 2025) - which returns 172:
https://datasette.simonwillison.net/simonwillisonblog?sql=wi...
I'm at 205 today (some of the repos on GitHub aren't plugins, and some in the datasette org were written and released by Alex Garcia which excludes them from my own releases database).
Most of the plugins I wrote this year have been heavily AI-assisted, but that wasn't the case for the older ones. Here's my post from October 2025 when I first realized Claude Sonnet 4.5 could one-shot a plugin for me: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/claude-datasette-plugin...
The reason there are so many repos is that Datasette uses a plugin architecture, which makes it much easier to try out different features without risk of corrupting the core project with things that turn out to be bad ideas.
I gave a talk about plugin architecture at DjangoCon a couple of years ago: https://2024.djangocon.us/talks/how-to-design-and-implement-...
Simon needs to resist the pelicans(and the django mindset) and Garry needs a new loop which can loop on itself without any human trigger so that the agents can "dream" better. Who knew that it was not just the models which could hallucinate.
I named my database management software Datasette as an homage to the C64. I also figured it would be a unique name that would be easy to search for...
... jokes on me, it turns out the retro computing C64 community is way more active than I expected and there are still plenty of people taking about Datasette tape drives online, 30+ years after they stopped being manufactured and sold.
Either way feels ridiculous, but the human in me wants to know which it is ^_^
10 PRINT "HAVE YOU TRIED READING IT AGAIN?"
20 GOTO "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48594798"Just read for the first time.
Thank you for the disambiguation for me - and the other readers.
Please hold the snark, lol
Here the goal is to be a self-assembling harness (akin to pi) but focusing on duplex human-agent interactivity over rendered HTML "apps". To start, it's focused more on the "please review this PR and then generate a one-page report" with the ability to write comments in the actual report that automatically get sent back to the agent. The end goal is closer to offering a substrate for less technical people to be able to build personal applications like
- an interactive wiki maintainer: chat with the agent about an article, pull out sections, append/create concepts in the wiki with the new info - agent code harness: agent tabs to the left, chat in middle, code diffs on the right (like the superset/commander class of apps)
Anyway, I'm really into the "self assembling" class of software where everything is basically just an SDK + Agent. I think we might actually be ushering in a new era of "personal computing" in that it's less friction than ever to personalize your setup to your whims. Anyway, thats the goal I'm reaching for.
It seems many others are coalescing on this idea at the same time, so it must just be in the aether.
Ive witnessed it many times now, im positive this phenomenon exists.