Simon Willison

Simon Willison co-created the web framework Django and now spends much of his time testing AI models in public. His blog is a running log of what he tried, what worked, what broke, and what it cost, which makes it far more useful than most vendor announcements.

He is also the inventor of the pelican test, an informal check that asks a model to draw a picture of a pelican riding a bicycle. The subject is deliberately absurd, so no finished drawing of it exists for the model to copy, and it has to compose the thing from scratch. It became a running joke and a genuinely handy quick look at whether a new model has any grasp of how objects fit together.