Simon Willison

Deno is joining Cloudflare

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Deno is being acquired by Cloudflare, with the plan to build on the open‑source celld implementation of Durable Objects to make workerd a first‑class, self‑hosting platform for Workers. Cloudflare will maintain the Deno runtime for one more year, after which it will cease development but keep it open source. The acquisition reflects a shift away from Deno’s focus on Node compatibility toward new abstractions like celld and a robust permissions system.

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Simon Willison
Sep 21

Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available

Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available After a two year preview, Cloudflare's support for running Python code in their server-side Workers platform is now stable: "Python is now a first-class, fully supported language on the Cloudflare Developer Platform". A neat thing about this is how it works.

Simon Willison
Aug 25

EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!

EVE Online is beginning its transition to Python 3, a move that will involve using the futurize script on 2.4 million lines of code and a manual review of about 20,000 differences between Python 2 and Python 3. The company has historically run on Stackless Python since 2003, with the last major upgrade in 2010 to Stackless Python 2.7. While the announcement does not detail how Stackless will be replaced, the team previously showcased a shift away from Stackless in their Carbon engine for EVE Frontier, leveraging the open‑source carbonengine/scheduler library.

Simon Willison
Sep 11

Feeling sad about AI

Simon Willison reflects on the emotional impact of AI tools that can produce code quickly, noting that many developers experience an initial sense of disheartenment. He argues that recognizing the shift from coding to higher‑level problem solving allows experienced engineers to leverage new tools and add greater value. Willison emphasizes that software engineering has always faced rapid change, so adapting to AI is part of the profession’s ongoing evolution.

Simon Willison
Sep 10

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify

Shopify has decided to move away from React Native and return to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for its native mobile apps. The company originally adopted React Native in 2020 to avoid duplicating work, enable cross‑stack development, and reduce feature parity overhead, but has since found that modern coding agents can handle much of the implementation, translation, testing, and review work, making native development less of a bottleneck. Shopify also maintains several React Native libraries—react‑native‑skia, flash‑list, and restyle—though the latter will be archived by the end of 2026.

Simon Willison
Aug 9

GitHub Models is now retired

GitHub Models is now retired I missed this news until today, when the GitHub Actions run for my simonw/research repository failed with this error message: GitHub Models is temporarily unavailable as part of a scheduled retirement brownout. That message is already stale, because the retirement has been completed.