LLMs are like your weird, over-confident intern | Simon Willison (Datasette)

Software Misadventures

Known for co-creating Django and Datasette, as well as his thoughtful writing on LLMs, Simon Willison joins the show to chat about blogging as an accountability mechanism, how to build intuition with LLMs, building a startup with his partner on their honeymoon, and more.

Segments:

(00:00:00) The weird intern

(00:01:50) The early days of LLMs

(00:04:59) Blogging as an accountability mechanism

(00:09:24) The low-pressure approach to blogging

(00:11:47) GitHub issues as a system of records

(00:16:15) Temporal documentation and design docs

(00:18:19) GitHub issues for team collaboration

(00:21:53) Copy-paste as an API

(00:26:54) Observable notebooks

(00:28:50) pip install LLM

(00:32:26) The evolution of using LLMs daily

(00:34:47) Building intuition with LLMs

(00:43:24) Democratizing access to automation

(00:47:45) Alternative interfaces for language models

(00:53:39) Is prompt engineering really engineering?

(00:58:39) The frustrations of working with LLMs

(01:01:59) Structured data extraction with LLMs

(01:06:08) How Simon would go about building a LLM app

(01:09:49) LLMs making developers more ambitious

(01:13:32) Typical workflow with LLMs

(01:19:58) Vibes-based evaluation

(01:23:25) Staying up-to-date with LLMs

(01:27:49) The impact of LLMs on new programmers

(01:29:37) The rise of 'Goop' and the future of software development

(01:40:20) Being an independent developer

(01:42:26) Staying focused and accountable

(01:47:30) Building a startup with your partner on the honeymoon

(01:51:30) The responsibility of AI practitioners

(01:53:07) The hidden dangers of prompt injection

(01:53:44) “Artificial intelligence” is really “imitation intelligence”

Show Notes:

Simon’s blog: https://simonwillison.net/

Natalie’s post on them building a startup together: https://blog.natbat.net/post/61658401806/lanyrd-from-idea-to-exit

Simon’s talk from DjangoCon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkRK2rJGB0

Simon on twitter: https://x.com/simonw

Datasette: https://github.com/simonw/datasette

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Music: Vlad Gluschenko — Forest License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en