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Simon Willison

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

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From Simon Willison

397 posts
Simon WillisonSep 4, 2026

August newsletter is out

The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks...

Simon WillisonSep 3, 2026

GPT‑6 Astra

GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API...

Simon WillisonSep 2, 2026

llm-gemini 0.34

Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan....

Simon WillisonSep 2, 2026

Quoting Rick Brewster

Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now...

Simon WillisonSep 1, 2026

GeoJSON Map Viewer

Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council and found a need to display some GeoJSON...

Simon WillisonSep 1, 2026

Quoting Tarn Adams

They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf...

Simon WillisonSep 1, 2026

datasette-mcp 0.2

Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which...

Simon WillisonAug 31, 2026

Introducing wrapture

Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and...

Simon WillisonAug 31, 2026

Quoting Andrew Digby

325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible...

Simon WillisonAug 30, 2026

Understanding ChatGPT Work

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is...

Simon WillisonAug 29, 2026

Introducing Hy4 Preview

Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face. This is a big size...