SimonWillison.net is the long-running blog of Simon Willison, a software engineer, open-source creator, and co-author of the original Django framework. He writes about Python, Django, Datasette, AI tooling, prompt engineering, search, databases, APIs, data journalism, and practical software architecture. The blog includes detailed notes from experiments, conference talks, and real projects. Readers will find clear explanations of topics such as LLM workflows, SQL patterns, data publishing, scraping, deployment, caching, and modern developer tooling. Simon also publishes frequent micro-posts and TIL entries that document small discoveries and tricks from day-to-day engineering work. The tone is practical and research oriented, making the site a valuable resource for anyone interested in serious engineering and open data.
207 articles from this blog
A research paper analyzes LLM performance on SQL generation tasks using different structured data formats and large schemas, comparing frontier and open-source models.
A study finds AI tools increase cognitive load and work intensity, leading to potential burnout, despite feeling more productive.
Anthropic's Claude AI reportedly discovered 500 zero-day vulnerabilities, sparking debate on AI's role in security research.
Mitchell Hashimoto introduces Vouch, a system to combat low-quality AI-generated PRs in open source by requiring user vouching.
Anthropic introduces a faster 'fast mode' for Claude Opus 4.6 at a significantly higher cost, with a temporary discount.
David Crawshaw reflects on the joy and exploration AI agents bring to programming, while acknowledging broader societal fears about AI.
StrongDM's AI team describes a 'Software Factory' where AI agents write and test code autonomously, eliminating human coding and review.
Tom Dale discusses the mental health impact on software engineers due to rapid AI-driven change and cognitive overload in the tech industry.
Explains how to run Pydantic's Monty, a sandboxed Python subset written in Rust, in WebAssembly for secure, untrusted code execution in browsers.
Heroku announces a shift to a 'sustaining engineering model,' focusing on stability over new features, prompting user migration concerns.
An OpenAI researcher describes using Codex AI to automate due diligence, code exploration, and hyperparameter tuning for experiments.
Mitchell Hashimoto shares unconventional tips for integrating AI coding agents into a developer's workflow to boost productivity.
Anthropic releases Opus 4.6 and OpenAI releases GPT-5.3-Codex, with analysis on their incremental improvements and capabilities.
Mistral releases Voxtral Transcribe 2, a new family of audio-to-text models, including an open-weights real-time transcription model.
Explains how to distribute Go CLI tools like sqlite-scanner via PyPI using go-to-wheel, making them easily installable with pip/uv.
Deno Sandbox is a new hosted sandbox service from Deno Deploy, allowing secure code execution with features like secret management and resource limits.
OpenAI releases Codex, a new macOS app for its AI coding agent, featuring Skills, Automations, and insights into its growing developer usage.
A blog post discussing a social network exclusively for AI bots, exploring their interactions and the implications of their sci-fi influenced conversations.
Steve Yegge discusses evolving the Beads CLI for AI agents by implementing their 'hallucinations' to create a natural interface.
Moltbook is a social network for AI agents, built on the OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot) open-source digital assistant platform.
