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
- Quoting Drew Breunig
- More than just code review
- Quoting Linus Torvalds
- llm 0.33
- A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView
- CORS Chat
- ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale
- Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
- DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)
- Don't classify. Hallucinate!
- Markdown SVG upgrades
- Mojo🔥 is now open source
- Northern Gannet
- Quoting Dario Amodei
- Quoting Florian Herrengt
- Quoting Jeremy Morrell
- Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
- Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
- Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
- There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
- We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
- alchemy-utils 0.1a0
- alchemy-utils 0.1a1
- datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0
- llm-gemini 0.33
- smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript
- sqlite-utils 4.2
- sqlite-utils 4.2.1
- An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing
- GitHub Models is now retired
- Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
- Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
- Quoting John Gruber
- Quoting OpenClaw
- SQLite compressed text-history prototypes
- Simon Willison on Technical Blogging
- The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
- Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models
- datasette 0.65.3
- datasette 1.0a38
- datasette-auth-tokens 0.4a13
- Quoting Steve Yegge
- Don't be a meat proxy
- Quoting David Crawshaw's prompt
- condense-json 1.0
- Open letters about AI development
- datasette-apps 0.2a0
- Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
- DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
- Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest