Simon Willison — 2026-05-01#

Highlight#

Simon demonstrates the power of mobile AI-assisted development by building a complete, multi-component tracking application entirely on his phone while camping using Claude Code for web. It’s a perfect example of chaining small, sharp tools—Python CLIs, Git scraping, and AI-generated static frontends—into a highly practical personal utility.

Posts#

[iNaturalist Sightings] · Source Simon wanted to consolidate and view his iNaturalist observations across multiple accounts, grouped by when and where they occurred. To solve this, he used Claude Code for web to write inaturalist-clumper, a Python CLI that groups sightings within a 2-hour and 5km radius. He then set up a Git scraping repository to regularly run the tool and generate a clumps.json file hosted via GitHub. Finally, he prompted an AI against his tools repository to build a static HTML frontend that fetches the CORS-friendly JSON and displays the sightings in a gallery with lazy-loaded thumbnails and full-size modal images.

Project Pulse#

This post is a classic showcase of Simon’s preferred rapid-prototyping architecture: leveraging Git scraping to act as a zero-maintenance, CORS-friendly JSON API, and using generative AI tools like Claude Code to rapidly build out the accompanying Python backend tools and static HTML frontends.