Simon Willison’s Weblog is the densest real-time record of what software engineers can actually do with LLMs, published daily by someone who uses them in his own practice. Facts below verified as of 2026-09-13.
No other voice tracks the tool-and-model churn of agentic development day-by-day with the same density and the same willingness to name what is hype; if you follow one feed for this domain, this is the one.
What it is #
A long-running personal blog, plus a companion TIL site and a monthly sponsor-funded digest, written by Simon Willison, the Django co-creator and author of Datasette and the LLM CLI.
He writes first-person, every day, about models, coding agents, MCP, sandboxing, and Python tooling, usually from direct hands-on use rather than press releases.
He coined the widely quoted framing of LLMs as a “weird, over-confident intern” and maintains an Agentic Engineering Patterns stream that distills working practice.
Status #
Active and as influential as ever. As of 2026-09-13 the homepage shows posts daily, sometimes several a day, through 12 September 2026, with dedicated tag streams for agentic-engineering, coding-agents, and ai-assisted-programming. He ships code on the blog too: the sqlite-utils 4.0 release notes record that much of it was written by a coding agent, so the blog is documentation of his own agent loops, not just commentary on them.
Strengths #
- Daily cadence means he catches and explains changes while they are still news, not after they settle into a retrospective.
- He uses the tools he writes about: agent-written releases, sandboxed agent experiments, and prompt-injection testing all appear as first-hand notes.
- The tag archives (agentic-engineering, code-review, sandboxing) act as a searchable playbook, not just a feed.
- Repeatedly surfaces skeptical and security-critical coverage, from prompt-injection results to supply-chain attacks.
Cautions #
- Volume is high; without a filter the firehose buries the signal, which is why the sponsor digest exists.
- Coverage is Python-and-open-source weighted, so the IDE-centric and enterprise story gets less depth.
- He is a tool builder (LLM, Datasette) which biases the notes toward command-line, open, and local workflows.
Pricing #
Free to read. The blog is sponsor-funded (GitHub sponsors at $10/month buy a monthly curated digest), with no paywall on the core feed.
Compared to #
- Latent Space: the podcast-and-conference synthesis of the same landscape; read Willison for the day-to-day working notes, listen to Latent Space for the interviews and the industry view.
- Steve Yegge: the provocative thesis-setter versus the reliable daily chronicler; Yegge declares, Willison documents.
- The Pragmatic Engineer: engineering-org and industry analysis versus hands-on tool notes; Orosz for the org, Willison for the terminal.
Bottom line #
Recommended for any engineer who works with LLMs daily and wants a low-DSP, high-signal feed plus a searchable archive of working patterns. Not for people who prefer periodic synthesis over daily volume, or who want a vendor-neutral enterprise take.
Changes #
- 2026-08-29 - Created in the People and publications category seed.
See also #
- Agentic Coding Tools Landscape - the map his daily notes keep current
- Context Management Patterns - a pattern stream he has written into explicitly
- Model Selection for Coding Tasks - the model churn he reports on daily, distilled to a process
- The Codebase Gardener - the human role his hands-on notes presuppose
References #
https://simonwillison.net/ - the blog: daily entries, tag streams, and the current-model testing notes
https://til.simonwillison.net/ - the Today I Learned companion archive
https://llm.datasette.io/ - the LLM CLI he builds and documents on the blog
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/is-vibe-coding-with-ai-gnarly-or-reckless-maybe-some-of-both/ - a critical press take on vibe coding that quotes his views