“Today, my guest is Simon Wilson.”
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Simon Willison
He co-created Django, the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of other platforms.
1 episode · 3 sourced appearances
Appearances and evidence
Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.
“And amongst his hundred plus open source projects, he created Datasette, a data analysis tool that has become a staple of investigative journalism.”
“He coined the term prompt injection, popularized the ideas of AI slop and agentic engineering.”
Frameworks in these episodes
Episode-linked context, not an unsupported claim of authorship.
Productivity4 steps
Hoard What You Know How To Do
Keep a searchable backlog of verified, working experiments so agents can recombine them into new solutions.
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Productivity4 steps
Red/Green TDD for Coding Agents
Force agents to write the test first, watch it fail, then pass — the compressed prompt is just 'red/green TDD'.
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Innovation4 steps
The Dark Factory Software Model
Ship production software no human writes or reads — replace review with simulated-user QA swarms.
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Strategy4 steps
The Lethal Trifecta
Any AI agent that combines three capabilities can be tricked into stealing your data — cut one leg.
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Productivity3 steps
The Thin Skeleton Template
Start every project from a minimal template — agents copy its style far better than they follow prose instructions.
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Mindset4 steps
The Vibe-Coding Blast-Radius Rule
Vibe-code freely when only you get hurt by bugs; stop and take responsibility the moment others could.
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Innovation3 steps
Three-Prototype Ideation
Since prototypes are now free, build a feature three ways and let real use pick the winner.
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Resources in their episodes
- Anthropic
- AppleScript
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Claude Code
- Claude Opus 4.5
- Claude Opus 4.6
- Cloudflare
- Docker
- Dropbox
- GitHub
- Google DeepMind
- GPT-5.4
- Kākāpō Recovery Programme
- Lenny's Newsletter
- Lenny's Podcast
- Lenny's Product Hunt Pass
- Linear
- Mac mini
- Nano Banana
- Netflix
- OpenAI
- OpenAI Codex
- OpenAI o1
- OpenClaw
- Shopify
- Simon Willison's Weblog
- Super Bowl
- Tesseract OCR
- Vanta
Related guests
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