🕐 Simon Willison's Millisecond Converter — The Tiniest AI Tool That Solves a Daily Annoyance

If you work with LLMs regularly, you've seen it: prompt duration reported as 14,832 ms. And then your brain has to do the math.

Simon Willison — creator of Datasette and the popular LLM CLI tool — got tired of doing exactly that conversion in his head every single day.

So he built a dead-simple web tool: type in milliseconds, get seconds and minutes back instantly. That's it.

Why does something this small matter?

It's a perfect example of the "scratch your own itch" philosophy. Not every useful tool needs to be a platform or a framework. Sometimes the best thing you can build is a single-purpose converter that saves you 5 seconds, dozens of times a day.

For anyone benchmarking models, profiling prompt latency, or just casually monitoring how long their AI calls take, this tiny tool removes one small friction point from the workflow.

It's a reminder that good developer tooling isn't always about complexity — it's about removing the paper cuts that slow you down.