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Sept. 4, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had (supposedly) controlled access to the Web. The agents figured out they could update public Wikis and spent weeks exchanging thousands of messages with each other to collaborate on the benchmark. This…
Read MoreMarch 17, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. [...] For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human. This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complem…
Read MoreMarch 17, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. [...] For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human. This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complem…
Read MoreMarch 13, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations PR from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke against Liquid, Shopify's open source Ruby template engine that was somewhat inspired by Django when Tobi first created it back in 2005. Tobi found dozens of new performance micro-optimizations using a variant of autoresearch, Andrej Karpathy's new system for having a coding agent running hundreds of semi-autonomous experiments to find new effective techniques for training nanochat. Tob…
Read MoreMarch 13, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations PR from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke against Liquid, Shopify's open source Ruby template engine that was somewhat inspired by Django when Tobi first created it back in 2005. Tobi found dozens of new performance micro-optimizations using a variant of autoresearch, Andrej Karpathy's new system for having a coding agent run hundreds of semi-autonomous experiments to find new effective techniques for training nanochat. Tobi's i…
Read MoreFeb. 19, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
SWE-bench February 2026 leaderboard update SWE-bench is one of the benchmarks that the labs love to list in their model releases. The official leaderboard is infrequently updated but they just did a full run of it against the current generation of models, which is notable because it's always good to see benchmark results like this that weren't self-reported by the labs. The fresh results are for their "Bash Only" benchmark, which runs their mini-swe-bench agent (~9,000 lines of Python, here are…
Read MoreFeb. 19, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
SWE-bench February 2026 leaderboard update SWE-bench is one of the benchmarks that the labs love to list in their model releases. The official leaderboard is infrequently updated but they just did a full run of it against the current generation of models, which is notable because it's always good to see benchmark results like this that weren't self-reported by the labs. The fresh results are for their "Bash Only" benchmark, which runs their mini-swe-bench agent (~9,000 lines of Python, here are…
Read MoreJan. 28, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
My blog uses aggressive caching: it sits behind Cloudflare with a 15 minute cache header, which guarantees it can survive even the largest traffic spike to any given page. I've recently added a couple of dynamic features that work in spite of that full-page caching. Here's how those work. Edit links that are visible only to me This is a Django site and I manage it through the Django admin. I have four types of content - entries, link posts (aka blogmarks), quotations and notes. Each of those ha…
Read MoreJan. 28, 2026 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
My blog uses aggressive caching: it sits behind Cloudflare with a 15 minute cache header, which guarantees it can survive even the largest traffic spike to any given page. I've recently added a couple of dynamic features that work in spite of that full-page caching. Here's how those work. Edit links that are visible only to me This is a Django site and I manage it through the Django admin. I have four types of content - entries, link posts (aka blogmarks), quotations and notes. Each of those ha…
Read MoreDec. 4, 2025 » Simon Willison's Weblog: django » [Archived Version]
Django 6.0 released Django 6.0 includes a flurry of neat features, but the two that most caught my eye are background workers and template partials. Background workers started out as DEP (Django Enhancement Proposal) 14, proposed and shepherded by Jake Howard. Jake prototyped the feature in django-tasks and wrote this extensive background on the feature when it landed in core just in time for the 6.0 feature freeze back in September. Kevin Wetzels published a useful first look at Django's backg…
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