llm-gemini 0.33 lands, sqlite-utils 4.2 fixes drops, Codex writes alchemy-utils

Sources

llm-gemini 0.33 simonwillison.net

Release: llm-gemini 0.33 It’s been a while since the last llm-gemini release. This version of the plugin adds support for today’s Gemini 3.7 Flash release, plus gemini-3.6-flash , gemini-3.5-flash-lite and two embedding models gemini-embedding-2 and gemini-embedding-001 . The plugin is also upgraded for compatibility with LLM 0.32, which means you can now see reasoning traces and you can also enable server-side tools using this pattern: llm -m gemini-3.7-flash -T CodeExecution \ ‘use python to…

sqlite-utils 4.2 simonwillison.net

Release: sqlite-utils 4.2 Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature , which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one. transform() now preserves a much larger array of edge-case schema definitions, including check constraints, unique constraints and even comments describing the columns. There are also new introspection properties for check constraints, and a whol…

sqlite-utils 4.2.1 simonwillison.net

Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2 . I’d introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one of the other dependencies in the dev dependency group , but when you uvx sqlite-utils directly you don’t get those dependencies. As part of fixing this I figured out how to run a smoke test to ensure the CLI tool still works even wit…

alchemy-utils 0.1a1 simonwillison.net

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a1 Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, see here .

References

VentureBeat venturebeat.com

Gemini 3.7 Flash targets coding and agents with a 50% introductory price cut… $0.75/$3.75 per 1M tokens, guaranteed only through 2026.

Reddit r/GeminiAI benchmark thread reddit.com

dramatic score increases in short windows (e.g., AutomationBench jumping from 17% to 30.4%) may reflect ‘benchmaxxing’ rather than generalized improvement; hallucination rates still trail Google’s own 3.1 Pro.

AI Weekly on LLM 0.32 aiweekly.co

Reasoning traces are displayed by default to stderr so the model’s internal logic is visible without contaminating stdout — preserving the ability to pipe the final answer into other Unix tools.

Medium — Migrating to Gemini 3: Thought Signatures medium.com

Omitting these signatures in Gemini 3 typically results in a 400 INVALID_ARGUMENT error during function calling; middleware like OpenRouter often strips the signature field, breaking multi-turn tool loops.

The Hacker News thehackernews.com

Researchers replayed encrypted reasoning traces from Gemini 3 Pro into weaker ‘fuzzy decoder’ models and forced them to output the hidden reasoning in plaintext, exposing API keys and tokens present in the scratchpad but hidden from the final response.

Google AI Developer docs (latest-model) ai.google.dev

Thinking mode exposes three effort tiers — Low (latency-critical), Medium (default, balanced for coding/agentic), High (multi-step planning); the ‘minimal’ tier from 3.6 Flash has been removed.

InfoQ — Shadow Table Strategy for Data Migration infoq.com

A ‘shadow table’ refers to a parallel table used for zero-downtime migrations. Developers create a shadow version of a production table, use triggers to sync live writes to both, and backfill historical data in batches before performing a final cutover.

simonwillison.net — sqlite-utils features series simonwillison.net

Version 4.2 introduces three new introspection properties to the Python API: table.checks, table.column_checks, and table.table_checks — solving a long-standing challenge because SQLite provides no built-in method to list check constraints.

Simon Willison — elsewhere / project log simonwillison.net

To prevent regressions the project now runs uv run --isolated --no-default-groups sqlite-utils --help as a smoke test, forcing the CLI to stand up using only its declared dependencies.

Simon Willison — homepage (AI-assisted development context) simonwillison.net

Willison has been openly documenting heavy LLM assistance across the 4.x cycle, defending ‘lines of code’ as a productivity signal while HN commenters push back that simplicity should remain paramount regardless of how code is generated.

Simon Willison — alchemy-utils 0.1a0 post simonwillison.net

A DuckDB export that originally took nearly an hour was reduced to approximately 35 seconds after Codex applied a bulk-load optimization using DuckDB’s native read_csv path.

InjazAI coverage injazai.com

Willison initiated the project as a ‘research spike,’ tasking LLMs like OpenAI Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with reimplementing the core sqlite-utils API — insert, upsert, and table introspection — backed by SQLAlchemy, using red/green TDD with pytest.

dnorth.net roundup news.dnorth.net

sqlite-utils includes a sophisticated transform() method for complex schema changes and native support for FTS and SpatiaLite… these are not yet integrated into the alchemy-utils API with the same ‘one-liner’ simplicity.

tutorials.technology — SQLAlchemy bulk insert benchmarks tutorials.technology

PostgreSQL’s native COPY command offers up to a 240x speedup over session.add() loops; Core-level insert().values() gives ~40x, and ORM 2.0 session.execute(insert()) reaches ~20x.

muzh.io — M1 Daily muzh.io

ingestr v1 (Go rewrite) claimed speeds up to 12 times faster than dlt and other Python-based competitors when loading 1M-row tables… alchemy-utils offers a sqlite-utils-style API backed by SQLAlchemy for simple insert/upsert across PostgreSQL and DuckDB.