Version 5

Simon Willison released inaturalist-clumper 0.1 on May 15, 2026 — a tool for grouping iNaturalist nature sightings into clusters and publishing them to a blog [1][2]. The GitHub data repository is named inaturalist-clumps and contains a clumps.json file that appears to store the grouped observation data [3][4]. A tool page on simonwillison.net dated May 1 suggests the project was in active development for at least two weeks before the formal release [5]. Willison used the tool live during PyCon US 2026 in Los Angeles, logging bird sightings before and after the conference [6][8].

The project is a compact example of Willison's practice-first open-source style: ship only after real production use has shaped the design, then demonstrate the workflow at a major developer conference. The separation between the clumper tool and the inaturalist-clumps data repository hints at a deliberate architecture — one that may scale to batch or historical imports — though the design details remain undocumented publicly.

Simon Willison released inaturalist-clumper 0.1 on May 15, 2026, a lightweight Python tool for grouping iNaturalist nature sightings into clusters and publishing them to a blog [1][2]. The project has a two-repository structure: inaturalist-clumper is the installable tool, while a separate GitHub repository named inaturalist-clumps stores the grouped observation data in a clumps.json file [3][4]. That data file suggests the tool's output is structured JSON describing clusters of sightings, rather than raw observation dumps — a design choice that would simplify templating for blog posts. A tool page on simonwillison.net dated May 1, 2026 titled 'Tool: iNaturalist Sightings' [5] indicates Willison was publicly documenting the project at least two weeks before the formal 0.1 release, consistent with his account that the tool had been running in production for several weeks before he settled on a release version [1].

The release coincided with PyCon US 2026 in Los Angeles, where Willison used the tool in practice. On the morning before the conference opened, he went on a bird walk and logged a Western Gull — spotted near a Starbucks — and a Rock Pigeon, publishing both to his blog via the tool [6]. A New Stack article covering the conference places Willison at PyCon giving a talk titled 'Hacking LLMs for Fun and Profit,' framing his conference presence as primarily LLM-focused even as the iNaturalist work ran in the background [7]. By May 18, as PyCon concluded, Willison walked near the Los Angeles River and spotted a Brown Pelican, Glaucous-winged Gull, Snowy Egret, and Canada Goose before departing [8]. The three posts — tool release, pre-conference sighting, post-conference sighting — form a coherent end-to-end demonstration of the workflow.

External amplification reached multiple audiences. Tech curator B Devanarayanan surfaced the launch in a digest alongside the Cerebras $60B IPO and OpenAI's Codex mobile announcement [9], and a Chinese-language blog, 雅俗共赏, covered the release for a non-English developer readership [10]. Neither has followed up since May 16, and no new technical coverage, forks, or contributor activity have been observed since May 18. The story has produced no new signal in the days since.