creators

Simon Willison — Datasette, LLM, prompt injection

Simon Willison co-created Django and now builds Datasette and the LLM command-line tool. He coined "prompt injection" in 2022 and "the lethal trifecta" in 2025.

Simon Willison is a British software developer who co-created the Django web framework in 2003-2004 with Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Wilson Miner while working at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Kansas. He co-founded the conference directory Lanyrd in 2010, went to Eventbrite with its 2013 acquisition as an engineering director, and in September 2019 began a John S. Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford, in the class of 2020. He now works as an independent open-source developer on tools for data journalism built around Datasette and SQLite, and on LLM, a command-line tool and Python library for working with language models. His blog at simonwillison.net is widely read among AI engineers; he coined the term "prompt injection" there on 12 September 2022 and "the lethal trifecta" on 16 June 2025. He sits on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation, does one day a week for Prime Radiant, Jesse Vincent's applied AI research lab, and lives in Half Moon Bay, California.

Specialization

open-source data tools, LLM tooling, AI security, prompt injection

Country

United States