Simon Willison
Creator, Datasette. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
engineerscientistfounderauthor@simonw ↗simonwillison.net ↗Wikipedia ↗YouTube ↗
Simon Willison is a co-creator of the Django web framework and the creator of Datasette. He previously co-founded Lanyrd and is renowned for coining the term prompt injection.
2shows
2appearances
44statements
6resolved
4supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
21said about them ↓ Everything Simon Willison said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Willison: AI 'lethal trifecta' risk is solvable only by eliminating one core capability
“You have a lethal trifecta. Anytime your agent has three things, it's got Access to private information. There's information that you've exposed to it, like your private inbox that, that is, is private in some way. It's exposed to malicious instructions. So th…”
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: Building a secure OpenClaw is AI's biggest current opportunity
“So I think the biggest opportunity in AI right now, if you can build safe OpenClaw, if you can deploy a version of OpenClaw that does all the things people love about it and won't randomly leak people's data and delete their files, that's a huge opportunity.”
Willison: Anthropic and OpenAI focused 2025 training efforts on coding
“Both Anthropic and OpenAI spent the whole of 2025 focusing all of their training efforts on coding.”
Willison: All software development will eventually be mediated through AI
“We're all moving in the direction where
Our code is mediated through AI at some point.”
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: Anthropic found and responsibly disclosed 100 vulnerabilities to Mozilla
“I think Firefox just a few days ago, maybe last week said that they'd, they'd done a release, which was assisted by Anthropic. Anthropic had Discovered a hundred like potential vulnerabilities in Firefox and responsibly reported them to Mozilla who then fixed …”
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: Handcrafted software will be valued more in the future
“Artisanal to handcrafted software, I think is going to be valued more.”
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: 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: Practices helping AI agents code also improve human engineering
“Most of the things that make agents write better code work for humans too.”
Willison: Prompting AI agents with 'red/green TDD' yields better code
“If you get them to write the tests first.
You do get better results because they're much less likely to forget to test something or to add bits of code that aren't necessary.
And so you could tell them,
Write this using test, make sure that you write the test …”
Willison: Coding agents excel at adopting existing patterns from single example files
“And the reason for this is it turns out coding agents are phenomenally good at sticking to existing patterns in the code. Like if you give them a code base that already has just a single test in it, they will write more tests. They will notice that if you've g…”
Willison: Human-in-the-loop AI safety requires filtering requests to high-risk actions only
“Human in the loop helps a little bit, but if you ask the human to click, okay, five times a minute, they'll just click. Okay. All the time. If you can filter it down. So the human only gets asked on the high risk activities. That's how you build a sort of A pe…”
Willison: Building a 'claw' will be AI engineering's Hello World
“So like, I think the new hello world of AI engineering is going to be building your own claw.”
Willison: Journalists are better equipped for AI than most professions
“The art of journalism is you talk to a bunch of people and some of them lie to you and you figure out what's true. So as long as the journalist treats the AI as yet another unreliable source, they're actually better equipped to work with AI than most other pro…”
Willison: Cloudflare and Shopify planned 1,000 interns due to AI onboarding
“Cloudflare and Shopify, both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 20, 25. Because the intern onboarding costs, it used to be takes a month before you enter and can do anything useful. Now they're doing something useful within like a week…”
Willison: OpenClaw progressed from first commit to Super Bowl ad in months
“The first line of code for OpenClaw was written on November the 25th. And then in the super bowl, there was an ad for AI.com, which was effectively a vaporware white labeled open claw hosting provider. So we went from first line of code in November to super bo…”
The other half of the tape: Simon Willison's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 19 times in 10 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shawn Wang 5Sander Schulhoff 5Alex Duffy 3Lance Martin 2Zico Kolter 1Jeremy Howard 1Ben Firshman 1Alessio Fanelli 1
Statements about Simon Willison, by other people (2)
Duffy: AI benchmarks follow a lifecycle from initial idea to saturation
“Essentially there's, I think, a life cycle of a benchmark, right? It starts with an idea, then it gets adopted, and then it gets saturated.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Latent Space 19
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 8 mentions in 4 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
- 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
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Simon's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Creator, Datasette | 1 | 44 | 67% 4/6 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Creator, Datasette | 1 | 0 | — | full record on Latent Space → |