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.
127 articles from this blog
Explains dependency cooldowns, a strategy to reduce supply chain attack risk by delaying automatic dependency updates.
Analysis of Google's new Nano Banana Pro image generation model, covering its advanced features, API pricing, and real-world testing results.
Explores how LLMs could enable malware to find personal secrets for blackmail, moving beyond simple ransomware attacks.
OpenAI releases GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a new AI model focused on agentic coding tasks, featuring advanced context compaction for long-running work.
A developer explains his automated workflow using SQL, Datasette, and Observable to generate a Substack newsletter from his blog content.
Analysis of a major Cloudflare outage caused by a database permissions change and software panic, quoting CEO Matthew Prince.
New release of the llm-gemini plugin adds support for nested Pydantic schemas, YouTube URL attachments, and the latest Gemini 3 Pro model.
MacWhisper's new Automatic Speaker Recognition feature, powered by NVIDIA Parakeet, accurately identifies speakers in audio transcripts.
Google Antigravity is a new AI-powered IDE that integrates with Gemini models for agentic coding, featuring browser testing and automated documentation.
Ethan Mollick reflects on AI's rapid evolution from chatbots to digital coworkers, highlighting the changing role of human oversight.
A hands-on review of Google's new Gemini 3 Pro AI model, covering its features, benchmarks, pricing, and testing its multimodal capabilities.
Discusses the future of small open source libraries in the age of LLMs, questioning their relevance when AI can generate specific code.
Explores Andrej Karpathy's concept of Software 2.0, where AI writes programs through objectives and gradient descent, focusing on task verifiability.
Release of llm-anthropic plugin 0.22 with support for Claude's structured outputs and web search tool integration.
A guide to parakeet-mlx, a project porting NVIDIA's Parakeet ASR model to Apple's MLX framework for fast, local audio transcription.
Analysis of GPT-5.1's new adaptive thinking features, model routing system, and safety benchmarks from the system card addendum.
OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 API with new reasoning modes, adaptive reasoning, extended prompt caching, and new built-in tools for developers.
Datasette 1.0a22 release notes covering new security features, a client detection method, and developer tools for plugin authors.
A deep dive into Google's Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash) AI image model, exploring its autoregressive architecture and superior prompt engineering capabilities.
OpenAI objects to court order demanding 20M ChatGPT user conversations, citing dangerous precedent for AI discovery.
