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
Microsoft announces MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI-Code-1-Flash LLMs, with low active parameters and claims of performance, but training data issues remain.
Release of datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0, using MicroPython in a WASM sandbox for safe code execution in Datasette Agent.
Announcement of micropython-wasm 0.1a1, a Python library for running a MicroPython sandbox using WebAssembly.
A tool that creates a text editor with automatic file attachment for pasted content over 1,000 characters, inspired by Claude's large paste feature.
Simon Willison announces micropython-wasm 0.1a0, a Python library to run MicroPython in a WebAssembly sandbox via wasmtime.
Hackers exploited Meta's AI chatbot to hijack high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking it to change account recovery details.
Datasette 1.0a32 bugfix release fixes INSERT...RETURNING queries and base_url issues for exploring and publishing data.
Explores the paradox of AI tools boosting productivity while causing attention fragmentation and project overload.
Simon Willison shares an Anthropic revenue definition quote from Karen Kwok's Reuters Breakingviews article.
An overview of how Anthropic contains Claude across products using sandbox techniques like gVisor, Seatbelt, Bubblewrap, and VMs.
A tech professional announces retirement from tech and open source to live offline, citing AI as the last straw.
Running Python ASGI apps in the browser using Pyodide and service workers, enabling serverless web apps.
Datasette 1.0a31 alpha release adds SQL write queries and saved stored queries for database exploration.
Anthropic's run-rate revenue hits $47 billion, highlighting rapid growth and enterprise adoption in the AI industry.
Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8 with modest improvements, focusing on honesty and reduced hallucinations.
A markdown rendering tool with live preview, supporting tables, code blocks, and interactive SVG previews.
SQLite adds AGENTS.md file clarifying no acceptance of AI-generated code, while splitting AI bug reports into a new forum.
Analysis of Anthropic and OpenAI achieving product-market fit with rising enterprise API costs and profitable quarters.
Simon Willison quotes Romain Huet on OpenAI's GPT-5.5 unifying Codex and main model for agentic coding.
Guide to prompting GPT-5.5 with tips from OpenAI, including migration advice and a trick for multi-step tasks.
