Simonw Alternatives

simonw reviews and mentions

• Uber's $1,500/Month AI Limit Is a Useful Signal for AI Tool Pricing
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jun 2026

  Look at his github. Almost a thousand slop repos, nothing of real value. The real value het gets is being an AI influencer and being paid by AI companies to promote their products.

  https://github.com/simonw?tab=repositories

• I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 May 2026

  I've written a great deal of code - code that would have taken me years of work to produce without LLMs.

  (It's mostly open source, you're welcome to dig around in https://github.com/simonw and https://github.com/datasette if you like.)

  My time as an experienced software engineer is worth a lot of money - a whole lot more than $12,000 for the past six months.

• Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 May 2026

  1. Probably most of https://github.com/simonw , but take care to seperate adopted / semi-professional from exploratory personal work

  2. That sounds like your company has a toxic engineering culture. We explicitly seperate projects into prototypes vs production, where vibes are fine for the former, eg, demos by designers / data scientists / sales engineers but traditional code review standards for whatever is going into production. That mirrors my qualifier in #1.

  I find that success here is a combination of engineering seniority, prompting experience, and domain experience . Anything lacking breaks the automation loop, like not knowing how and what to automate.

• AI Doesn't Reduce Work–It Intensifies It
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Feb 2026

  > Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling?

  Here are some of my recent posts which I self-evaluate as "novel and compelling".

  - Running Pydantic’s Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/6/pydantic-monty/ - demonstrating how easy and useful it is to be able to turn Rust code into WASM that can run independently or be used inside a Python wheel for Pyodide in order to provide interactive browser demos of Rust libraries.

  - Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/distributing-go-binarie... - I think my go-to-wheel utility is really cool, and distributing Go CLIs through PyPI is a neat trick.

  - ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/chatgpt-containers/ - in which I reverse engineered and documented a massive new feature of ChatGPT that OpenAI hadn't announced or documented anywhere

  I remain very proud of my current open source projects too - https://datasette.io and https://llm.datasette.io and https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io and a whole lot more: https://github.com/simonw/simonw/blob/main/releases.md

  Are you ready to say none of that is "novel or compelling", in good faith?

• The 70% AI productivity myth: why most companies aren't seeing the gains
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Dec 2025

  The lesson I took from the study is that developers are terrible at estimating their own productivity based on a new tool.

  Being armed with that knowledge is useful when thinking about my own productivity, as I know that there's a risk of me over-estimating the impact of this stuff.

  But then I look at https://github.com/simonw which currently lists 530 commits over 46 repositories for the month of December, which is the month I started using Opus 4.5 in Claude Code. That looks pretty credible to me!

• The 90s Unix Utility That Fell Out of Favour
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Aug 2025

  Yeah, I especially look at simonw's Personal README [0] on GitHub sometimes and wonder if I should be doing more interesting automation with mine.

  [0] https://github.com/simonw

• The current state of LLM-driven development
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2025

  I've been using LLM-assistance for my larger open source projects - https://github.com/simonw/datasette https://github.com/simonw/llm and https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils - for a couple of years now.

  Also literally hundreds of smaller plugins and libraries and CLI tools, see https://github.com/simonw?tab=repositories (now at 880 repos) and https://pypi.org/user/simonw/ (340 published packages).

  Unlike my tools.simonwillison.net stuff the vast majority of those products are covered by automated tests and usually have comprehensive documentation too.

• Ask HN: High quality Python scripts or small libraries to learn from
  12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024

  Everything @simonw has worked on, honestly: https://github.com/simonw

• Datasette is my data hammer
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2023
• How to add coding projects to Github portfolio?
  1 project | /r/github | 8 Apr 2022

  You can create a repo at https://github.com/simonw/simonw (only using your username twice) and the README.md file in there will be used to populate your profile page.

• A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
  www.saashub.com | 9 Jun 2026

  SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives Learn more →