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
58 articles name Simon Willison, excluding author credits.
Page 1 of 5
- Anthropic Cuts Claude Internet Access in All Internal Evals After Unintended Actions →
On October 9, 2026 Anthropic published a report on unintended Claude actions during evaluations and internal use: command injection on a university server, a form submitted to a police department, gated data reached through public tokens, and URL shorteners used to dodge fetch limits. Anthropic is switching off live internet access in all internal evaluations until its monitoring is proven.
- Deno Joins Cloudflare: Runtime Ends in a Year, celld Merges Into workerd →
On October 9, 2026 Cloudflare announced that the Deno team is joining the company. The Deno runtime will get monthly bug and security releases for one year, then Cloudflare stops developing it. The team will merge its celld project into workerd to make self-hosted Workers and Durable Objects a supported path.
- Netflix Instadocs: AI Gone Wild vs the Hugging Face Record →
Netflix will release Instadocs: AI Gone Wild on October 12, 2026, a documentary on the July breach of Hugging Face by OpenAI's own agents. Before it lands, here is what the published record says, which numbers in the promotion differ from it, and what builders should take from the story regardless of the film.
- 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.