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
- GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
- OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog
- Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
- Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team
- Claude Sonnet 5.5
- Quoting @joedaroo
- Quoting Muse AI Agent
- 2026 in LLMs (so far)
- Bluesky reply bot checker
- S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
- Kākāpō Party
- Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, California Brown Pelican
- Quoting John Gruber
- Note on 24th September 2026
- commit-rewriter 0.2
- datasette 1.0a41
- SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering
- Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war
- Quoting @therealcornpop
- llm 0.36
- llm-anthropic 0.29
- llm-typesafe 0.1a0
- Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available
- Jev introduces a new shape of LLM - System One, aka Decision Models
- MCP was always a bad idea?
- Quoting voxium
- datasette-explain 0.2.2
- llm-keys-ui 0.1
- California Sea Lion, Brandt's Cormorant
- datasette-auth-github 1.0
- Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI
- Note on 18th September 2026
- Quoting Thariq Shihipar
- The Creative Spirit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit
- Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans
- How To Write With An LLM
- Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries
- Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
- Quoting Mustafa Suleyman
- Gemini Live audio
- Quoting Laurie Voss
- The contagion of fear
- What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?
- commit-rewriter 0.1
- shot-scraper 1.12
- California Brown Pelican
- Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work
- OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May
- Quoting Paul Ford
- Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases