Independent open source developer and creator of Datasette
Simon Willison
Simon Willison is an independent developer, Datasette creator, and Django co-creator who builds open source tools and writes about language models.
About Simon Willison
Simon Willison is an independent open source developer and the creator of Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data. He builds software for data journalism and maintains LLM, a Python library and command-line tool for working with large language models.
He is a co-creator of the Django web framework and previously worked as an engineering director at Eventbrite after its acquisition of Lanyrd, which he co-founded. His long-running blog documents programming, AI tools, and experiments with language models.
Mentioned in our coverage
66 articles name Simon Willison, excluding author credits.
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- OpenAI Model Names Explained: Luna, Terra, Sol, Astra and What 6.1 Means →
In a Hacker News comment this week, OpenAI's Ted Sanders laid out the logic behind Luna, Terra, Sol and Astra and what a version number signals. We turn it into a practical model-picking guide and show where developers say the scheme still confuses.
- Spawn Says Ten People and an Agent Fleet Shipped 77,000 Changes in 30 Days: What the Founder Claims →
Simon Willison highlighted a founder essay describing Spawn, a ten-person company that says agents ship to production hourly, spend 30x payroll on tokens and killed pull requests. We summarize the claims, the practices behind them, and what to treat with caution.
- GitHub Octoverse 2026: 7.4 Billion Commits a Month, 40% of Pull Requests Start With an Agent →
GitHub's Octoverse 2026 shows commits up about 6x in a year and more than 40% of pull requests started by an agent. Here are the headline numbers, what they do and do not prove, and what they mean for teams reviewing machine-written code.
- Kimi K3.1 Pro: Moonshot's Open-Weight Flagship Scores 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, Weights Due by Nov 4 →
Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3.1 Pro and a 2-3x faster Highspeed variant on October 23, 2026. Here is what the company published about benchmarks, price, cyber controls and the November 4 open-weight promise, what comes from Moonshot alone, and what developers on Hacker News are saying.