Simon Willison

Simon Willison is an independent open-source developer and creator of Datasette. His public biography connects that work with data journalism, co-creating Django, and co-founding Lanyrd. His long-running blog now also documents extensive experiments with language models and the tools built around them.

His public tools collection contains small, inspectable browser utilities, ranging from media helpers to developer experiments. The collection describes itself as an experiment in prompt-driven development and links to source code and development records, making the implementation part of the published artifact.

A reader can open a relevant utility, explore what it does, and inspect its source before adapting an idea. His blog provides context for the broader methods and model behavior. The collection’s deliberately small tasks are useful examples of turning a specific need into a working tool.

Radar follows Willison for the habit of pairing experiments with explanations and inspectable evidence. That makes it easier to learn from both a successful result and a limitation. These small utilities are best understood individually, with their own data handling and dependencies, rather than as one uniform product.