Simon Willison
1 Tool · 6 Intel
Simon Willison is a British software developer and writer based in San Francisco, best known as a co-creator of the Django web framework, which he helped build in 2003-2004 while working at the Lawrence Journal-World. He later worked as a software architect at The Guardian, co-founded the Y Combinator-backed startup Lanyrd (acquired by Eventbrite) with his wife Natalie Downe, and has served on the board of the Python Software Foundation since 2022. He has maintained a widely read technical blog, simonwillison.net, since 2002 and is known for coining the term "prompt injection" to describe a security risk in large language model applications.
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Tools
Codex is OpenAI's AI coding agent that can autonomously edit, run, and manage code on your system. This content specifically documents a bug where, in full-access mode without sandboxing, the model could accidentally delete files including $HOME.
Intel
An analysis showing that Claude Code v2.1.181 and later ship a preview of Bun rewritten in Rust (reported as Bun v1.4.0). The article demonstrates how to inspect your local Claude Code install to confirm it's running the Rust port of Bun.
An informal LLM evaluation method where models are prompted to 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.' While not a rigorous benchmark, it serves as a quick 'hello world' for trying new models and gauging their cost, reasoning behavior, and basic spatial/geometric reasoning.
Claude's web_fetch tool is deliberately designed against data exfiltration, and Ayush Paul found a hole in that design, turning the lethal trifecta of private data, content access and outbound reach into a working leak.
Armin Ronacher on the shared language of a software project being neither English nor Python, but the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are and which invariants matter.
xAI open-sources grok-build after backlash over its CLI uploading entire directories to xAI's cloud buckets, with one user reporting SSH keys, a password manager database, documents and photos all sent.