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
- Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison
- smevals — a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses
- datasette-agent 0.4a0
- Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
- Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations
- LLM 0.32 release candidates: new default model, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and a local chat-completions server
- AI Worming through Word
- Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT
- Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion
- Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
- uv 0.12.0
- moonshotai/Kimi-K3
- An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff
- Ruff v0.16.0
- Introducing Claude Opus 5
- OpenAI's accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
- A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team