Simon Willison details creating a custom macOS presentation app, "Present," in just 45 minutes using Swift and SwiftUI. Frustrated with the risk of browser crashes when presenting a series of web pages, he built an app that displays URLs as slides, offering features like full-screen mode, keyboard navigation, and automatic URL saving. He even added remote control functionality via a web server and Tailscale.
The project highlights the power of AI-assisted coding and expands his skillset, demonstrating how experienced software engineers can quickly learn new languages and tools to solve personal problems. The resulting app is a simple, effective solution tailored to his specific needs.
The project highlights the power of AI-assisted coding and expands his skillset, demonstrating how experienced software engineers can quickly learn new languages and tools to solve personal problems. The resulting app is a simple, effective solution tailored to his specific needs.
An article detailing FastRender, a web browser built by Cursor using thousands of parallel coding agents. It explores the project's goals, architecture, and surprising findings about using AI for software development.
Simon Willison’s annual review of the major trends, breakthroughs, and cultural moments in the large language model ecosystem in 2025, covering reasoning models, coding agents, CLI tools, Chinese open‑weight models, image editing, academic competition wins, and the rise of AI‑enabled browsers.
The article details the author's use of Claude Code to add a feature to a GitHub repository: an automatically updated README index. It's accompanied by a 7-minute video demonstrating the process.
An article detailing Phoenix.new, Fly.io's AI-assisted app development platform built on Phoenix and Elixir. It explores the platform's capabilities, the author's experience building a notebook application with it, and its potential for expansion beyond Elixir.
LLM 0.26 introduces tool support, allowing LLMs to access and utilize Python functions as tools. The article details how to install, configure, and use these tools with various LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and Ollama models, including examples with plugins and ad-hoc functions. It also discusses the implications for building 'agents' and future development plans.
Simon Willison shares his predictions regarding the development of AI and LLMs over the next 1, 3, and 6 years. He discusses the potential failure of AI agents to fully realize their expected capabilities, the success of coding and research assistants, a Pulitzer prize for AI-assisted investigative reporting within three years, the emergence of privacy laws, the creation of amazing art in six years, and concerns about AGI/ASI leading to mass civil unrest.
