← All people

Simon Willison

Voice

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; prolific writer on LLMs and practical AI tooling.

Blog ↗X ↗

Recent posts

Quoting Terk Terkowitz

If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing. Document why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can...

Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge

Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer. I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into...

GPT-6.1 Terra

GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing...

Quoting Jason Koebler

Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And,...

webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox

Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden...

Seam Cutter

Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a...

battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map

Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle -...

Quick Study

Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my...

Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro

Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version...

DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)

DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat: The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or...

Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation

Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI...

Quoting Armin Ronacher

As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, ai-security-research,...

Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile

Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk...

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and...

My obituary for programming

My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you...

llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1

Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those...

llm-echo 0.5

Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the...

Inline rendering with document​.currentScript

Inline rendering with document​.currentScript Lean Rada describes a neat trick that takes advantage of the document.currentScript property. You can use that to drop in a tiny inline <script> element that replaces...