Simon Willison's Weblog

Simon Willison has run simonwillison.net since 2002 — co-creator of the Django web framework, creator of Datasette, and one of the more prolific everyday LLM commentators on the open web. The blog has the rare property of being both a primary source (Simon ships LLM tooling, runs experiments, publishes results) and a high-signal aggregator (link posts with one to three paragraphs of original commentary).

Topical beats:

• LLM developments. New model releases, prompt engineering, tool-use patterns, hallucination case studies, security issues (he coined the term "prompt injection"). Posts are usually within hours of major releases.
• Datasette and SQLite ecosystem. Long-running personal product line — publish-data-as-API, plugin architecture, query inspection.
• Python and web tooling. Working notes from his own builds.
• Open-source governance. Licensing arguments, attribution norms, AI policy posts (the Zig anti-LLM coverage is in this beat).

The format that makes the blog useful is the link-with-commentary post: Simon links to a primary source, summarizes the load-bearing point in one or two paragraphs, and adds his own framing. For triaging what to read in a given week of LLM news, his archive is one of the better signals available.

URL: https://simonwillison.net/

Coverage in the wiki

• simonw-zig-anti-ai — coverage of Zig's anti-LLM policy and the Bun fork situation, with Loris Cro's contributor-poker framing
• simonw-vibe-coding-agentic — Willison's 2026-05-06 admission that the vibe-coding/agentic-engineering boundary collapsed in his own practice ("I'm not reviewing that code")
• cheap-reverse-engineering — Willison's 2026-07-20 note on how cheap agent-written code flips the ROI of reverse-engineering home devices; introduces the disposable-code framing