Simon Willison

Simon Willison

@simonwillison.net

Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/

51.4K followers1.4K following5K posts

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

It's been less than 24 hours and there's already a French fork of Battle Drones that reimagines it as Belle Époque steampunk! simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/21/...

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

I built a Command & Conquer style RTS called Battle Drones, mainly using Claude Opus 5.5, which runs in the browser and includes device-to-device multiplayer over an audio link simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/20/...

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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Warning if you're going to try this: the audio multiplayer plays a high pitched noise throughout the game - annoying at best, and at worst might give you an actual headache (Natalie: "why do my teeth hurt?")

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Haiku 5.5 is SO MUCH better at drawing pelicans riding bicycles than Claude Haiku 4.5, released almost a year ago and costing 10x more. Here's Haiku 4.5's attempt:

Simon Willison reposted

Jake Gold
@jacob.gold

I've called this the 'The Kobayashi Maru' interview question for programmers. There's no "right" answer only painful trade-offs which makes it very revealing.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net

I need to decide if 1KB means 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes in all of my software I was leaning 1,024 but it looks like macOS and Windows both define KB as 1,000 these days I want whatever people are most likely to understand (I do not think most people know what KiB or MiB means)

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I need to decide if 1KB means 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes in all of my software I was leaning 1,024 but it looks like macOS and Windows both define KB as 1,000 these days I want whatever people are most likely to understand (I do not think most people know what KiB or MiB means)

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

If you have not yet been to see the scale model of NYC built by Joe Macken out of cardboard and balsa wood over a period of 21 years you only have until the 12th of October to see it! It's at the Museum of the City of New York, by the north east end of Central Park

Simon Willison reposted

Brian G. aka urbanbohemian 🪩🥂💖
@urbanbohemian.com

We're on Bluesky, put the link in your post. Put the link in your post. Put. The. Link. In. Your. Post. Links in posts aren't buried or de-prioritized here. This is one of the last platforms you don't have to make interested users do detective work to find the link. Just put it in the post.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I really like how @reckless.bsky.social described this: "The people do not yearn for automation" www.theverge.com/podcast/9170...

theverge.comBEWARE SOFTWARE BRAINSoftware brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social

Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

My hunch is that the challenge of regular non-nerds having trouble finding things to do with their agents will mostly be solved by word-of-mouth When your dumbass friend Mike figures out how to use Muse... Like how in the early days of MySpace people learned CSS to customize their page!

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/...

simonwillison.net2026 in LLMs (so far)On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …
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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/...

simonwillison.net2026 in LLMs (so far)On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …
Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

How late to the party am I on WebP? I only recently started using it as my preferred format for non-photo images and it's SO MUCH smaller than PNG, and looks much better than JPG used to shrink down screenshots too Has everyone else been having a WebP party without me for years?

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I just exported 69 slides from Keynote - as (reduced quality) JPG: 10.4MB, as PNG: 100MB, as WebP: 4.1MB Quality looks great, this 1920×1080 image here is 58KB

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

I included a few references to this year's record-breaking Kākāpō breeding season in a talk I gave yesterday, and since Claude Opus 5.5 is surprisingly capable at pixel art animation I had it create this celebratory video for my closing slide

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Big model release today - I wrote about Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna - plus comparison grids of pelicans by the different model families at different reasoning levels simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/22/...

simonwillison.netClaude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price warYesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It’s …