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/
Yeah, I'd be pretty furious if I got spam email from some "AI agent" thanking me for my contributions too
I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...
I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...
December 26, 2025 at 6:27 PM
Yeah, I'd be pretty furious if I got spam email from some "AI agent" thanking me for my contributions too
I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...
I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...
And with spectacular timing... the power went out six minutes before we served up our Christmas dinner!
December 26, 2025 at 12:17 AM
And with spectacular timing... the power went out six minutes before we served up our Christmas dinner!
I built a new Python CLI tool called claude-code-transcripts that can create nice readable HTML versions of your Claude Code sessions, both local and pulled from Claude Code for web, and makes it easy to publish them online too simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/25/...
A new way to extract detailed transcripts from Claude Code
I’ve released claude-code-transcripts, a new Python CLI tool for converting Claude Code transcripts to detailed HTML pages that provide a better interface for understanding what Claude Code has done t...
simonwillison.net
December 25, 2025 at 11:53 PM
I built a new Python CLI tool called claude-code-transcripts that can create nice readable HTML versions of your Claude Code sessions, both local and pulled from Claude Code for web, and makes it easy to publish them online too simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/25/...
I wrote about how I've been having a ton of fun cooking with LLMs recently - including having Claude take a photo of two recipe cards and vibe-code me up a custom timer application to help me prepare two meals at once simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/23/...
Cooking with Claude
I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun recently using LLMs for cooking. I started out using them for basic recipes, but as I’ve grown more confident in their culinary …
simonwillison.net
December 23, 2025 at 5:03 AM
I wrote about how I've been having a ton of fun cooking with LLMs recently - including having Claude take a photo of two recipe cards and vibe-code me up a custom timer application to help me prepare two meals at once simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/23/...
Had my first successful experience using a browser agent to solve a real problem - in this case I had the Claude in Chrome extension help me find some configuration I had lost deep within the Cloudflare control panel simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/22/...
Using Claude in Chrome to navigate out the Cloudflare dashboard
I just had my first success using a browser agent - in this case the Claude in Chrome extension - to solve an actual problem. A while ago I set …
simonwillison.net
December 22, 2025 at 5:21 PM
Had my first successful experience using a browser agent to solve a real problem - in this case I had the Claude in Chrome extension help me find some configuration I had lost deep within the Cloudflare control panel simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/22/...
We all know The Muppet Christmas Carol is the perfect Christmas movie (and the definitive movie version of that novel) already... but did you know the Muppets' costumes are all era-appropriate - and their styles for the 1780s, 1790s, 1840s are all different! www.tiktok.com/@littlebloss...
i was so shocked to see just how perfect these costumes are ! have you seen the muppets christmas carol before? because i hadn’t ! i’d heard other historical costumers talk about these delightful cost...
TikTok video by Blossom Darling
www.tiktok.com
December 21, 2025 at 8:42 PM
We all know The Muppet Christmas Carol is the perfect Christmas movie (and the definitive movie version of that novel) already... but did you know the Muppets' costumes are all era-appropriate - and their styles for the 1780s, 1790s, 1840s are all different! www.tiktok.com/@littlebloss...
GPT-5.2 Codex is the first model to decide that pelicans should ride their bicycles in the desert simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/19/...
Introducing GPT-5.2-Codex
The latest in OpenAI's Codex family of models (not the same thing as their Codex CLI or Codex Cloud coding agent tools). GPT‑5.2-Codex is a version of GPT‑5.2 further optimized …
simonwillison.net
December 19, 2025 at 5:23 AM
GPT-5.2 Codex is the first model to decide that pelicans should ride their bicycles in the desert simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/19/...
I see a lot of complaints about untested AI slop in pull requests. Submitting those is a dereliction of duty as a software engineer: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/...
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
simonwillison.net
December 18, 2025 at 2:57 PM
I see a lot of complaints about untested AI slop in pull requests. Submitting those is a dereliction of duty as a software engineer: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/...
Here's my article on Gemini 3 Flash, with four pelicans (one for each of its thinking effort levels) plus an image gallery Web Component that I had Gemini 3 Flash build specially for this post simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/17/...
Gemini 3 Flash
It continues to be a busy December, if not quite as busy as last year. Today’s big news is Gemini 3 Flash, the latest in Google’s “Flash” line of faster …
simonwillison.net
December 17, 2025 at 10:48 PM
Here's my article on Gemini 3 Flash, with four pelicans (one for each of its thinking effort levels) plus an image gallery Web Component that I had Gemini 3 Flash build specially for this post simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/17/...
Blogged some notes on the new ChatGPT Images model that launched today simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/16/...
The new ChatGPT Images is here
OpenAI shipped an update to their ChatGPT Images feature - the feature that gained them 100 million new users in a week when they first launched it back in March, …
simonwillison.net
December 17, 2025 at 12:07 AM
Blogged some notes on the new ChatGPT Images model that launched today simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/16/...
Given their reputation for inaccuracy it feels a little absurd to ask an LLM to fact check something, but I've been getting similar high quality results from the best search-tool-using models recently for the prompt "fact check this"
I have found GPT-5.2 Thinking to be a surprisingly deep second-opinion/fact checker. I gave it a dense paragraph with a few correct claims, a couple errors that required research to find, and some things that needed interpretation
It found and gently corrected all the problems based on research.
It found and gently corrected all the problems based on research.
December 16, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Given their reputation for inaccuracy it feels a little absurd to ask an LLM to fact check something, but I've been getting similar high quality results from the best search-tool-using models recently for the prompt "fact check this"
I ported a Python library implementing a full HTML5 parser to JavaScript using GPT-5.2 and Codex CLI in 4.5 hours, and decorated for Christmas and watched Knives Out while I was doing it simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/...
I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in 4.5 hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testi...
simonwillison.net
December 16, 2025 at 12:37 AM
I ported a Python library implementing a full HTML5 parser to JavaScript using GPT-5.2 and Codex CLI in 4.5 hours, and decorated for Christmas and watched Knives Out while I was doing it simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/15/...
JustHTML by @emilstenstrom.bsky.social is a new Python library (no dependencies) that parses HTML according to the HTML5 specification and passes the 9,200 test html5lib-tests suite
It's 3,000 lines of code mostly written by coding agents over a couple of months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/...
It's 3,000 lines of code mostly written by coding agents over a couple of months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/...
JustHTML is a fascinating example of vibe engineering in action
I recently came across JustHTML, a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It’s a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as …
simonwillison.net
December 14, 2025 at 5:13 PM
JustHTML by @emilstenstrom.bsky.social is a new Python library (no dependencies) that parses HTML according to the HTML5 specification and passes the 9,200 test html5lib-tests suite
It's 3,000 lines of code mostly written by coding agents over a couple of months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/...
It's 3,000 lines of code mostly written by coding agents over a couple of months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/...
Reposted by Simon Willison
Congratulations to the new #Python #SteeringCouncil!
🗳️ @pumpichank.bsky.social
🗳️ @corona10.bsky.social
🗳️ @pablogsal.com
🗳️ @savannah.dev
🗳️ @yhg1s.bsky.social
discuss.python.org/t/steering-c...
Welcome Savannah & thank you to @gpshead.bsky.social for your service!
hugovk.github.io/python-steer...
🗳️ @pumpichank.bsky.social
🗳️ @corona10.bsky.social
🗳️ @pablogsal.com
🗳️ @savannah.dev
🗳️ @yhg1s.bsky.social
discuss.python.org/t/steering-c...
Welcome Savannah & thank you to @gpshead.bsky.social for your service!
hugovk.github.io/python-steer...
December 13, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Congratulations to the new #Python #SteeringCouncil!
🗳️ @pumpichank.bsky.social
🗳️ @corona10.bsky.social
🗳️ @pablogsal.com
🗳️ @savannah.dev
🗳️ @yhg1s.bsky.social
discuss.python.org/t/steering-c...
Welcome Savannah & thank you to @gpshead.bsky.social for your service!
hugovk.github.io/python-steer...
🗳️ @pumpichank.bsky.social
🗳️ @corona10.bsky.social
🗳️ @pablogsal.com
🗳️ @savannah.dev
🗳️ @yhg1s.bsky.social
discuss.python.org/t/steering-c...
Welcome Savannah & thank you to @gpshead.bsky.social for your service!
hugovk.github.io/python-steer...
OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way
Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...
Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...
OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …
simonwillison.net
December 12, 2025 at 11:32 PM
OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way
Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...
Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...
Just pushed a new release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models, adding support for GPT 5.1 and GPT 5.2 plus a few smaller bug fixes llm.datasette.io/en/stable/ch...
December 12, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Just pushed a new release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models, adding support for GPT 5.1 and GPT 5.2 plus a few smaller bug fixes llm.datasette.io/en/stable/ch...
Initial notes on GPT-5.2 - I'm excited to see the knowledge cut-off bump up to August 2025, interesting that it's priced at 1.4x over GPT-5.1 simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/11/...
GPT-5.2
OpenAI reportedly declared a “code red” on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google’s Gemini 3. It’s less than two weeks later …
simonwillison.net
December 12, 2025 at 12:06 AM
Initial notes on GPT-5.2 - I'm excited to see the knowledge cut-off bump up to August 2025, interesting that it's priced at 1.4x over GPT-5.1 simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/11/...
I put together a detailed collection of useful patterns I've collected after vibe-coding 150 different single-file HTML tools over the past couple of years simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
simonwillison.net
December 10, 2025 at 9:08 PM
I put together a detailed collection of useful patterns I've collected after vibe-coding 150 different single-file HTML tools over the past couple of years simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...
I've never been particularly invested in light mode v.s. dark mode but I got enough complaints from people that my blog was "blinding" that I had Claude Code knock out a dark mode theme for it, and it seems to work pretty well simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...
Dark mode
I've never been particularly invested dark v.s. light mode but I get enough people complaining that this site is "blinding" that I decided to see if Claude Code for web …
simonwillison.net
December 10, 2025 at 4:16 PM
I've never been particularly invested in light mode v.s. dark mode but I got enough complaints from people that my blog was "blinding" that I had Claude Code knock out a dark mode theme for it, and it seems to work pretty well simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...
Outstanding news for Kākāpō breeding season: it's a bumper year for the Rimu trees!! www.tiktok.com/@nzherald/vi...
Kākāpō Recovery Group Chair and University of Auckland Professor, Jacqueline Beggs, tells Herald NOW they're expecting chicks from all 84 females this season.
TikTok video by nzherald
www.tiktok.com
December 10, 2025 at 6:09 AM
Outstanding news for Kākāpō breeding season: it's a bumper year for the Rimu trees!! www.tiktok.com/@nzherald/vi...
Put together some notes on Mistral Vibe, Mistral's new CLI coding agent (think Claude Code / OpenAI Codex) which is Apache 2 licensed, written in Python+Pydantic+Textual and has a neat set of system and tool definition prompts that are fun to read simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/m...
mistralai/mistral-vibe
Here's the Apache 2.0 licensed source code for Mistral's new "Vibe" CLI coding agent, released today alongside Devstral 2. It's a neat implementation of the now standard terminal coding agent …
simonwillison.net
December 9, 2025 at 8:22 PM
Put together some notes on Mistral Vibe, Mistral's new CLI coding agent (think Claude Code / OpenAI Codex) which is Apache 2 licensed, written in Python+Pydantic+Textual and has a neat set of system and tool definition prompts that are fun to read simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/m...
I finally made it to The Museum of Jurassic Technology today! It's been top of my list of want-to-go museums for years www.niche-museums.com/116
The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Opened by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in Culver City, Los Angeles in 1988, the Museum of Jurassic Technology somewhat defies explanation.
It *looks* like a museum at the surface le...
www.niche-museums.com
December 8, 2025 at 2:51 AM
I finally made it to The Museum of Jurassic Technology today! It's been top of my list of want-to-go museums for years www.niche-museums.com/116
I thoroughly recommend reading all of Cory Doctorow's recent speech on AI skepticism, it's crammed with new arguments and interesting new ways of thinking about these problems pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...
Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net
December 7, 2025 at 10:21 PM
I thoroughly recommend reading all of Cory Doctorow's recent speech on AI skepticism, it's crammed with new arguments and interesting new ways of thinking about these problems pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...
Let's build hyper-personalized AI-powered software that avoids the attention hijacking anti-patterns that defined so much of the last decade of software design - here's our manifesto with principles on how we can do that - more thoughts on my blog: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/r...
December 5, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Let's build hyper-personalized AI-powered software that avoids the attention hijacking anti-patterns that defined so much of the last decade of software design - here's our manifesto with principles on how we can do that - more thoughts on my blog: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/5/r...
Some notes on the two features in the newly released Django 6 that most caught my eye: background workers and template partials simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/4/d...
Django 6.0 released
Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials. Background workers started out as DEP (Django Enhancement …
simonwillison.net
December 5, 2025 at 12:03 AM
Some notes on the two features in the newly released Django 6 that most caught my eye: background workers and template partials simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/4/d...