Intel / article

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging

Source: simonwillison.net
Date: Published Aug 4, 2026

Terms in this piece · Glossary

LLM — A large language model — the neural network behind tools like Claude and ChatGPT, trained on huge amounts of text to predict what comes next.
MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.

Why it matters

Server-side tools and become one-flag operations from the terminal, and reasoning traces are separated from piped output so existing shell pipelines keep working.

Key quotes

“I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project.”
Simon Willison

“Running LLM against reasoning models now displays their reasoning traces to standard error, so you can see what they are "thinking" without that information being included in the standard output that you might pipe to another tool.”
Simon Willison

“When I started work on LLM, the term "agent" had such a vague definition that I refused to use it.”
Simon Willison

“Maybe the next version of LLM will bake the concept of an "agent" into the core library. I'm still trying to figure out what that would look like.”
Simon Willison

Read the source simonwillison.net