Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments by Simon Willison
Every talk should start with an AIM: Audience, Intent, Message. Who are the audience for the talk? What do you intend to achieve by giving the presentation? With those two things in mind, you can construct the message—the actual content of the talk.
Try to include at least one STAR moment—Something They’ll Always Remember. This can be a gimmick, a repeated theme, a well-selected video or audio clip. Something to help the talk stand out.
Presentations are most interesting if they are structured with contrasts. These can be emotional high and low points, or content that illustrates what is compared to what could be. Sparklines are a tool that can be used to think about this structure.
The human brain is incredibly attuned to stories. If you can find an excuse to tell a story, no matter how thin that excuse is, take it.
Always interested in figuring out ways to make presentations more engaging. My list of points are here - Best practices for presenting things. Maybe a todo for me is to add some things from here to the doc.
Since writing is also a tool, the advice on honing your tools also applies to writing. The best way to get better at writing is by writing a lot. Write daily. By writing a lot of bad prose, you will eventually learn how to write better and get more comfortable with writing. Take every opportunity to write. Maintain a blog. Read a lot. All the while, be mindful of your writing. Always consider how you can improve it further.
I feel like I’m at a place with my writing where I know how I write. But still I find these sorts of posts interesting, where people talk about the craft of writing, the tools they use and so on.
I want to be a better writer after all.
Murat is someone I was not following before. I came to know about them through this write that blog series, which I came to know after Simon Willison linked to his interview with Write that Blog.
I have several unlinked notes on writing, maybe this is a signal for me to create a common note.
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast by Simon Willison
People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders. Your coders need to have solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and churn out the code. That's changed completely. My programming work, I need two minutes every now and then to prompt my agent about what to do next. And then I can do the other stuff and I can go back. I'm much more interruptible than I used to be.
Kind of goes against the whole deep work principle. Times sure are changing.
2025: The year in LLMs by Simon Willison
My tools.simonwillison.net collection of HTML+JavaScript tools was mostly built this way: I would have an idea for a small project, prompt Claude Artifacts or ChatGPT or (more recently) Claude Code via their respective iPhone apps, then either copy the result and paste it into GitHub's web editor or wait for a PR to be created that I could then review and merge in Mobile Safari.
I have been doing this a lot this past year as well. Most of the site was done this way. First using cursor, then Codex and finally using Claude.