About
Simon Willison is an independent open-source developer, writer, and researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
He is widely known as a co-creator of the Django web framework and the creator of Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring and publishing data. Formerly an Engineering Director at Eventbrite and co-founder of Lanyrd, he was also a JSK Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
On his longstanding weblog simonwillison.net, he actively documents practical developments in generative AI, prompt injection vulnerabilities, SQLite, Python, and modern web development.
You can also find Simon Willison on:
- Website: https://simonwillison.net
- Twitter: @simonw
- GitHub: simonw
- Bluesky: @simonwillison.net
- Mastodon: fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon
Articles
- Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
- Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
- Understanding ChatGPT Work
- Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
- Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
- Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face
- One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5
- New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging
- Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)
- OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
- A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team
- Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark
- The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol
- sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations
- sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25)
- Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video
- Porting the Moebius 0.2B image inpainting model to run in the browser with Claude Code