Simon Willison
Also known as simonw
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; blogs about LLMs at simonwillison.net.
At a glance
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- Simon Willison is a British programmer who co-created the Django web framework, co-founded the conference directory Lanyrd and created Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.
- After Eventbrite bought Lanyrd in 2013 he was an engineering director there, then became an independent open source developer.
- He has blogged at simonwillison.net from 2002, now largely about large language models, and coined the term "lethal trifecta" for risky AI agents in 2025.
Key facts
- Born
- January 19811
- Django
- Co-created it in 2003–2004 with Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner1
- The Guardian
- Hired as a software architect in 20081
- Lanyrd
- Co-founded it with Natalie Downe in 2010; Y Combinator, 2011; acquired by Eventbrite in 20131
- Eventbrite
- Engineering director, after the Lanyrd acquisition2
- Datasette
- Creator; builds open source tools for data journalism around Datasette and SQLite2
- Python Software Foundation
- Joined the board of directors in 20221
- Prime Radiant
- Works one day a week for Jesse Vincent's applied AI research lab2
- Lethal trifecta
- Coined the term in June 2025: agents with private data, untrusted content and a way to send data out1
Links
Sources
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