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
- Don't sleep on wrapture
- Feeling sad about AI
- Quoting Boris Cherny
- Quoting huggingface.co/security.txt
- So you want to use OpenRouter?
- Soft-deprecating re.match()
- datasette 0.65.4
- datasette 1.0a39
- datasette-publish-fly 1.4
- github-to-sqlite 2.9.1
- Quoting Calif Research
- .blend URL Viewer
- Quoting Terence Tao
- Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5
- On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
- Creepy crawlies
- Mercator ↔ Equal Earth
- Quoting Jakub Pachocki
- Video compressor
- llm 0.35
- Quoting Zach Kehs
- Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
- The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
- There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
- Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers
- Using Blender with coding agents on macOS
- August newsletter is out
- OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
- GPT‑6 Astra
- Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
- Quoting Rick Brewster
- llm-gemini 0.34
- Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
- Codex bundles LibreOffice
- GeoJSON Map Viewer
- Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!
- Quoting Tarn Adams
- datasette-mcp 0.2
- Introducing wrapture
- Quoting Andrew Digby
- Understanding ChatGPT Work
- Introducing Hy4 Preview
- Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
- Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
- Quoting Paul Dix
- Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
- EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
- Your executable is a SQLite database
- llm-anthropic 0.27
- Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive