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.
260 articles from this blog
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.
A theater software CEO shares his journey from AI skepticism to using Claude Code to build a niche lighting app, discussing AI's impact on programming.
Datasette 1.0a24 release adds file upload support, a new dev environment using uv, and plugin hook enhancements.
A developer explains how to add dynamic features like admin edit links and random tag navigation to a statically cached Django blog using localStorage and JavaScript.
A five-level model for AI-assisted programming, from basic autocomplete to fully autonomous 'dark factory' software development.
A developer uses a single AI coding agent to build a basic web browser from scratch in Rust over three days, challenging assumptions about AI-assisted development.
Kimi K2.5 is a new multimodal AI model with visual understanding and a self-directed agent swarm for complex task execution.
Tips for using AI coding agents to generate high-quality Python tests, focusing on leveraging existing test suites and patterns.
