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
47 articles name Simon Willison, excluding author credits.
Page 2 of 4
- What Is Indirect Prompt Injection? How Web Content Hijacks AI Agents →
When an AI agent browses the web, reads a document, or checks an inbox, it cannot tell the difference between your instructions and text an attacker planted for it to find. That gap is indirect prompt injection — and it is already being exploited against production agents.
- Codex as a Platform: OpenAI Opens Up Its Agent Harness to Builders →
OpenAI Developers published "Codex as a platform" on August 19, 2026, arguing the same open-source harness behind the Codex app, CLI, and IDE extension can power purpose-built products — engineering dashboards, ops consoles, support tools. explainx.ai maps the three integration layers and how the pitch lines up against Claude Agent SDK and MCP.
- Qwen3.8-27B Is Live — The Local Model Hacker News Put at #1 →
The Qwen3.8-27B companion Alibaba promised — and that our August 13 coverage flagged as missing — finally shipped, and Hacker News sent it straight to #1 with 893 points. It's a dense 27B vision-language model that Alibaba's own model card puts within striking distance of Claude Opus-class scores on agentic coding benchmarks, and unlike the 2.4T Qwen3.8-Max flagship, this one runs on a single RTX 4090 or a Mac Studio.
- Gemini 3.7 Flash Is Official: $0.75/1M Input, 1M Context, Confirmed Pricing →
Google's official blog.google post confirmed Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 14, 2026 — $0.75/$3.75 per million input/output tokens through the end of 2026, a 1M-token context window, and availability across Antigravity, AI Studio, Android Studio, Gemini Enterprise, and Spark. The pricing leak turned out to be fully accurate; the Gemini 3.5 Pro and Sergey Brin RSI claims did not.