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
Experiments with AI coding agents scaling to build a web browser from scratch, generating over a million lines of code.
A pure C, dependency-free implementation of the FLUX.2-klein-4B AI model, created with AI assistance.
Discusses using CLI tools over REST APIs for AI agents to improve accuracy, success rates, and cost-efficiency with simpler models.
OpenAI announces ads for free ChatGPT tiers and a new 'Go' subscription, while detailing privacy safeguards and ad formats.
Introduces Open Responses, a vendor-neutral JSON API standard for hosted LLMs, based on OpenAI's Responses API and backed by major industry partners.
A deep dive into the technical design of Fly.io's Sprites, focusing on their architecture as disposable computers, warm pools, and custom persistence layer.
OpenAI researchers propose 'confessions' as a method to improve AI honesty by training models to self-report misbehavior in reinforcement learning.
Security researchers found a vulnerability in Claude Cowork allowing data exfiltration via the Anthropic API, bypassing default HTTP restrictions.
Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation to support Python ecosystem security and core development.
A prompt injection attack on Superhuman AI exposed sensitive emails, highlighting a security vulnerability in third-party integrations.
A hands-on review of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's new general AI agent for non-coding tasks, exploring its interface and capabilities.
Argues against anti-AI sentiment in software development, stating AI is a transformative and useful tool for programmers' careers.
Author explores the legal and ethical implications of using LLMs to port open source code between programming languages, based on personal experiments.
A blog post quoting Linus Torvalds on using AI-powered 'vibe-coding' to create a Python audio visualizer tool.
Explores a software library with no code, using AI agents to generate implementations from specifications and conformance tests.
Fly.io launches Sprites.dev, a stateful sandbox environment for secure coding agents and untrusted code execution.
A tech expert shares predictions for 2026 on a podcast, focusing on the future of LLMs, coding agents, and AI-assisted software development.
A look at Google's resurgence in AI, including the origin of 'Nano Banana', Sergey Brin's return, and Gemini's user growth compared to OpenAI.
Tailwind Labs CEO discusses the severe business impact of AI, including major layoffs and revenue decline, despite the framework's growing popularity.
A reflection on the arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), arguing that its 'general' nature distinguishes it from all previous purpose-built AI models.
