Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django
About #
An independent software engineer and open-source maintainer who blogs near-daily about hands-on LLM/AI tooling, prompt injection risks, and practical model evaluation. Known for rigorous, first-hand testing of new models and tools rather than punditry, plus a running “TIL” log of technical discoveries. His long track record building Django and Datasette gives his commentary on AI-assisted coding and data tooling particular credibility in developer circles.
How this journal works #
Checked every 3 days: each new post or episode in Simon Willison’s own feeds (blog, til) becomes one entry, dated by publication and summarised in a few bullets.
Entries
- Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile
- Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security
- Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer
- eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
- My obituary for programming
- llm-echo 0.5
- llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1
- Inline rendering with document.currentScript
- web-edit 0.1a2
- Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang
- Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO
- Chirp Pong
- LaTeX renderer
- AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
- Quoting Geoffrey Huntley
- Redesigning source control at Anthropic
- llm-gemini 0.35
- web-edit 0.1a1
- Hello Python 3.15, goodbye 3.10, and now I can use 3.11
- Profiling web-edit with Python 3.15: flame graphs and source heatmaps
- datasette-ports 0.4
- llm-meta-ai 0.2
- web-edit 0.1a0
- Dwarf Fortress uses version control now
- Python 3.15.0 added to actions/python-versions
- Quoting The New York Times
- A new feature for my blog, built using my voice
- Deno is joining Cloudflare
- Quoting Matthew Green
- ttok 1.0
- Quoting Carson Gross
- ttok 0.4
- Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging
- Claude Haiku 5.5
- OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
- Quoting Ben Affleck
- Quoting Jake Boggan
- EmbeddingGemma 2
- Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk
- Quoting Victoria Kim
- Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces
- llm-mistral 0.16
- llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0
- Qwen3.8 27B addition in words
- September sponsors-only newsletter
- We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
- Rex's Dino Store
- Quoting Matthew Green
- pwasm 0.2a0
- He Built This City