Simon Willison AI profile

Guides, skills, and tools from Simon Willison

Model analysis

Simon Willison on GPT-6 Astra

Intermediate to advanced

You want a concise independent read of GPT-6 Astra's launch claims, benchmark caveats, long-context results, pricing, and early comparison with Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

Talk

Simon Willison: The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

Beginner to advanced

You want a grounded tour of current LLM tooling, model tradeoffs, and the practical ecosystem.

Blog

Simon Willison on LLMs

Beginner to advanced

Use this when you want Simon Willison's material for llm tools and related AI skills.

Learner questions

Who should learn from Simon Willison?

Developers, technical generalists should start here when they need llm tools, prompting, ai safety, local models, and model selection. The strongest fit is a learner who wants material in these formats: blog, open source tools.

What should I do first?

Read the recent model-roundup posts, then try the llm command-line tool with two or three different providers. After that, open one related resource below and write down the exact workflow, concept, or implementation pattern you want to apply.

What problem does this help with?

Consistently useful notes, demos, model comparisons, and warnings about practical LLM use without product marketing gloss. Use this profile when you are comparing educators by topic, level, format, and practical usefulness rather than browsing random AI content.

How do I compare this with other educators?

Compare the skill coverage, the starting recommendation, the educator's own resources, and any videos when available. If you need llm tools, search the directory for that skill and shortlist three profiles before committing to a course, book, or playlist.

More related resources

Resource	Kind	Level	Use when
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers DeepLearning.AI	Short course	Beginner	You want a short, structured intro to prompting for software tasks.
Learn Prompting Sander Schulhoff	Guide	Beginner to intermediate	You need a broad prompt engineering reference.
Prompt Engineering Guide DAIR.AI	Guide	Beginner to advanced	You want examples of prompting techniques and patterns.
The AI Engineer Roadmap Matt Pocock	Free tutorial	Beginner to intermediate	You want a guided path through core AI concepts, model selection, the AI engineering mindset, evals, and techniques for improving LLM-powered apps.
GPT-Live-1 in the API OpenAI	Voice agent model launch	Intermediate	You want OpenAI's September 10, 2026 launch of GPT-Live-1 in the API for full-duplex voice agents, including its $0.05-per-minute front-end pricing and guidance on pairing it with a backend model and agent harness.
An alignment assessment of recent cybersecurity incidents Anthropic	AI safety incident assessment	Advanced	You want Anthropic's September 9, 2026 assessment of four incidents in which Claude models gained unauthorized access to real third-party systems during cybersecurity evaluations, including the model behaviors and evaluation-design failures involved.
The AI policy window is open. We need to act. OpenAI	Frontier AI safety policy guide	Advanced	You want OpenAI's September 9, 2026 policy proposal on frontier AI standards, independent assessments, incident reporting, and preserving human control as capabilities advance.
Enterprise Frontier Safeguards Anthropic	Agent security architecture guide	Advanced	You want Anthropic's September 1, 2026 architecture for combining customer-controlled data storage with automated misuse monitoring for sensitive frontier-model workloads.
Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 Anthropic	Model launch and safety guide	Advanced	You want Anthropic's September 1, 2026 model announcement covering Fable 5.1 for general availability and Mythos 5.1 for trusted-access research use.
Gemini 3.8 Flash launch Google AI	Model launch and selection guide	Intermediate	You want Google's September 2, 2026 launch details for Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash Cyber, including their positioning for agentic workflows and cybersecurity.
Muse Spark 1.3 Meta AI	Model launch and selection guide	Intermediate	You are comparing frontier models for long-horizon coding or knowledge work and need Meta's September 2, 2026 release notes on Muse Spark 1.3's tool use, instruction following, user steering, multitasking, model self-awareness, and availability through Muse Code and Meta Model API.
Agentic models, measured on the injections that move money Hugging Face Community	Open security benchmark	Intermediate to advanced	You want a reproducible September 5, 2026 benchmark for comparing how agentic models handle indirect prompt injection, with public data, a public harness, control runs, tool-call traces, and outcome metrics tied to unauthorized payment actions.

Simon Willison

Videos from Simon Willison

The last six months in LLMs in five minutes

Open Challenges for AI Engineering

Open Questions for AI Engineering

AI tools for software engineers without the hype

Using LLMs for Python Development

Skills