Simon Willison’s Weblog

My post this morning about Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections is an example of a blogging format I'd love to see more of: informal but informed commentary on academic papers.

Academic papers are generally hard to read. Sadly that's almost a requirement of the format: the incentives for publishing papers that make it through peer review are often at odds with producing text that's easy for non-academics to digest.

(This new Design Patterns paper bucks that trend, the writing is clear, it’s enjoyable to read and the target audience clearly includes practitioners, not just other researchers.)

In addition to breaking a paper down into more digestible chunks, writing about papers offers an extremely valuable filter. There are hundreds of new papers published every day: seeing someone who's work you respect confirm that a paper is worth your time is a really strong signal.

I added a paper-review tag this morning, gathering six posts where I’ve attempted this kind of review. Notes on the SQLite DuckDB paper in September 2022 was my first.

I apply the same principle to these as my link blog: try to add something extra, so that anyone who reads both my post and the paper itself gets a little bit of extra value from my notes.