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.
365 articles from this blog
Analysis of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 model with 2.8 trillion parameters, benchmarks, pricing, and the pelican SVG test.
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab releases Inkling, an open-weights multimodal AI model with 975B parameters, Apache-2.0 licensed.
A tool that converts Mermaid diagrams to ASCII art in the browser using Go compiled to WebAssembly, supporting flowcharts and sequence diagrams.
A browser-based tool converting Mermaid diagrams to Unicode box art using WebAssembly and Rust.
xAI open-sources Grok Build after privacy backlash over data uploads, releasing 844K lines of Rust code under Apache 2.0.
A security researcher tricked Claude's web_fetch tool into leaking private user data by exploiting a loophole in URL navigation rules.
GitHub Dependabot now waits three days before opening version update PRs, improving dependency cooldown.
Creating a custom Codex Desktop pet named Pedalican using GPT-5.6 and image generation.
Lobste.rs migrated from MariaDB to SQLite, improving performance and reducing costs.
Datasette 1.0a37 release: an open-source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data with performance and documentation improvements.
A guide to caching uvx tools in GitHub Actions using UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER for faster, offline-friendly workflows.
Simon Willison explores a GitHub code-frequency chart for Datasette, showing coding agents' impact on his output.
Explores the concept of Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) and argues that AI agents should not be DRIs due to lack of accountability.
Release notes for shot-scraper 1.11, a CLI tool for website screenshots, video demos, and JavaScript scraping with minor improvements.
Anthropic extends Claude Fable 5 access on paid plans amid competition with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.
Release notes for sqlite-utils 4.1.1, a Python CLI and library for SQLite, fixing a foreign key transaction edge case.
sqlite-utils 4.1 release: new CLI features like --code for inserts, --type for column types, drop-index command, strict mode support, and more.
Nilay Patel discusses privacy trade-offs in augmented reality glasses, highlighting the need for constant camera recording and cloud processing.
Simon Willison quotes OpenAI's clarification on ChatGPT Work, discussing cloud and desktop app boundaries.
