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
67 articles name Simon Willison, excluding author credits.
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- Top 10 Decision Models in October 2026: Jev, Perplexity, OpenAI and Open Source →
In three weeks the decision-model category went from one hosted product to a crowded field of hosted APIs and open weights. This is a ranked list of ten you can use today, starting with Jev, with prices, latency, licenses and the caveat that matters most for each.
- OpenAI Decisions API Developer Verdict: Day-One Tests vs Jev →
OpenAI's Decisions API hit public beta on October 6, 2026, and Hacker News had hands-on numbers within hours. One tester measured about 3.1x Jev's cost and lower confidence on ambiguous tags. Another timed 160 to 175 ms end to end. Here is the first-day verdict, the disagreements, and who should adopt it anyway.
- DwarfStar 4: Can You Run ds4 on Your Mac This Week? →
Salvatore Sanfilippo's ds4 is back on the Hacker News front page. The useful question is whether your Mac, Spark, or Strix Halo can hold a project quant this week, and whether Claude Code or Codex can talk to it.
- Are We All Meat Proxies Now? →
"Meat proxy" started as a Slack insult for people who paste Claude into a channel unread. Two months later the dictionary card is trending because the insult stopped being a joke. This is the companion to our point-of-no- return essay: not extinction, not vibe coding — whether human judgment is still in the loop, or we are just the network cable.
- OpenAI Agent Security on X: “It’s Not Just the Sandbox” — Joe’s Inside View →
Joe (@joedaroo), who works on Agent Security at OpenAI, published a long personal essay on X September 28, 2026 (~868K views) arguing sandbox-only fixes miss how frontier RL evals actually run — petabytes, thousands of parallel environments, and capability jumps that outpace controls. explainx.ai summarizes the three containment pillars, culture argument, and what enterprises should copy.