Simon Willison
person on 7 shows · 15 statements across 3 episodes · said 27 times in 17 episodes since 2023
Latent Space 19 
the Knowledge Project 3 
Big Technology 2 
the MAD Podcast 1 
TBPN 1 
20VC 1 
Lenny's Podcast
On the record as a speaker too: Simon Willison across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
Latent Space 19the Knowledge Project 3Big Technology 220VC 1the MAD Podcast 1TBPN 1
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 13 mentions in 9 episodes 1 per episode
- ⚡️Launching AI Diplomacy: the hardest LLM Game Benchmark yet - Alex Duffy
- Context Engineering for Agents - Lance Martin, LangChain
- Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders
- How To Build A Cult | Lulu Cheng Meservey
- OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap: GPT-5's Capabilities, Why It Matters, and Where AI Goes Next
- The RLVR Revolution — with Nathan Lambert (AI2, Interconnects.ai)
- AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
- Why Every Agent needs Open Source Cloud Sandboxes
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- The Ultimate Guide to Prompting - with Sander Schulhoff from LearnPrompting.org
- The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Computer Use, and Building SOTA Agents — with Erik Schluntz, Anthropic
- Answer.ai & AI Magic with Jeremy Howard
- Ethan Mollick: Why OpenAl Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken | E1184 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 3 mentions in 1 episode
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
15 statements about Simon Willison, every show
Willison: AI generates roughly 95% of the code I produce
“And today, probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself.”
Willison: Product designers not vibe coding prototypes miss AI's biggest boost
“I think anyone who's doing product design isn't vibe coding little prototypes is missing out on the latest, but like the most powerful sort of boost that we get in that step.”
Willison: Simulated AI user testing cannot match real human usability feedback
“I don't think that's credible. I don't think you're going to get as good results from ChatGPT pretending to click around on your prototype than you would from an actual human being.”
Willison: AI can never have true agency without human motivations
“I think agents have no agency at all. Like I would argue that the one thing AI can never have is agency because it doesn't have human motivations. Sure. You can tell it make more money or whatever, but it's never going to be able to decide on its, like what ma…”
Willison: AI-written code will become common for engineers by end of 2026
“I expect by the end of this year, it will not be uncommon to have an engineer say that almost all of that code is written by AI.”
Willison: Agentic coding removes developers' need for multi-hour focus blocks
“People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders, right? Your coders needs to have Like solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and tune out the code. It's some, that that's changed completel…”
Willison: AI makes rapid prototyping almost free, democratizing the skill
“Prototyping is almost free, I think. And that really impacts me because throughout my entire career, my superpower has been prototyping. Like I am very, I've been very quick at knocking out working prototypes of things. I'm the person who can show up at a meet…”
Willison: Coding agents become truly productive only in permissionless 'unsafe' mode
“I think a lot of people who haven't got on board with coding agents yet, haven't tried them in the unsafe mode. They're using coding agent where it's like, oh, can I run this piece of code? Can I edit this file? And that means you have to pay complete attentio…”
Willison: LLM search integration is now better at searching than humans
“Now that all of the major models have really good search integration, they're just better at searching than I am. I can ask them a question and watch them fire off five searches in parallel for like aspects of answering that question, pull the data back.”
Willison: AI coding agents make verbose, extensive test suites economical
“If you look at a repo and there's huge amounts of tests that aren't really doing anything interesting, that's really expensive because now when you change the code, you've got to update a thousand lines of tests and all of that.
It turns out I don't care anymo…”
Willison: Minimal code skeletons guide AI agents better than long Claude.md instructions
“So sometimes, some people will tell you should have a Claude.md with like paragraphs of text describing how you like to work. I don't tend to do that because instead I start with a very thin skeleton that just gives it enough hints on how I like to work that i…”
Willison: AI prompt injection benchmarks under 100% provide false security
“And again, until it's a hundred percent, I don't think it's a meaning. I think it just gives people a false sense of security that this problem won't bite them.”
Willison: OpenClaw is only run within isolated Docker containers
“I don't run it myself outside of a Docker container where I set it up to safely poke it and see what it can do.”
Fanelli: Simon Willison reported Anthropic added Brave Search as a sub-processor
“Our friend Simon Willison wrote a post that Anthropic added Brave Search as one of the sub processor in their product.”