Thursday, 4th September 2025
Beyond Vibe Coding. Back in May I wrote Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means where I called out the authors of two forthcoming books on "vibe coding" for abusing that term to refer to all forms of AI-assisted development, when Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding based on the original Karpathy definition.
I'll be honest: I don't feel great about that post. I made an example of those two books to push my own agenda of encouraging "vibe coding" to avoid semantic diffusion but it felt (and feels) a bit mean.
... but maybe it had an effect? I recently spotted that Addy Osmani's book "Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming" has a new title, it's now called "Beyond Vibe Coding: From Coder to AI-Era Developer".
This title is so much better. Setting aside my earlier opinions, this positioning as a book to help people go beyond vibe coding and use LLMs as part of a professional engineering practice is a really great hook!
From Addy's new description of the book:
Vibe coding was never meant to describe all AI-assisted coding. It's a specific approach where you don't read the AI's code before running it. There's much more to consider beyond the prototype for production systems. [...]
AI-assisted engineering is a more structured approach that combines the creativity of vibe coding with the rigor of traditional engineering practices. It involves specs, rigor and emphasizes collaboration between human developers and AI tools, ensuring that the final product is not only functional but also maintainable and secure.
Amazon lists it as releasing on September 23rd. I'm looking forward to it.
Any time I share my collection of tools built using vibe coding and AI-assisted development (now at 124, here's the definitive list) someone will inevitably complain that they're mostly trivial.
A lot of them are! Here's a list of some that I think are genuinely useful and worth highlighting:
- OCR PDFs and images directly in your browser. This is the tool that started the collection, and I still use it on a regular basis. You can open any PDF in it (even PDFs that are just scanned images with no embedded text) and it will extract out the text so you can copy-and-paste it. It uses PDF.js and Tesseract.js to do that entirely in the browser. I wrote about how I originally built that here.
- Annotated Presentation Creator - this one is so useful. I use it to turn talks that I've given into full annotated presentations, where each slide is accompanied by detailed notes. I have 29 blog entries like that now and most of them were written with the help of this tool. Here's how I built that, plus follow-up prompts I used to improve it.
- Image resize, crop, and quality comparison - I use this for every single image I post to my blog. It lets me drag (or paste) an image onto the page and then shows me a comparison of different sizes and quality settings, each of which I can download and then upload to my S3 bucket. I recently added a slightly janky but mobile-accessible cropping tool as well. Prompts.
- Social Media Card Cropper - this is an even more useful image tool. Bluesky, Twitter etc all benefit from a 2x1 aspect ratio "card" image. I built this custom tool for creating those - you can paste in an image and crop and zoom it to the right dimensions. I use this all the time. Prompts.
- SVG to JPEG/PNG - every time I publish an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle I use this tool to turn that SVG into a JPEG or PNG. Prompts.
- Encrypt / decrypt message - I often run workshops where I want to distribute API keys to the workshop participants. This tool lets me encrypt a message with a passphrase, then share the resulting URL to the encrypted message and tell people (with a note on a slide) how to decrypt it. Prompt.
- Jina Reader - enter a URL, get back a Markdown version of the page. It's a thin wrapper over the Jina Reader API, but it's useful because it adds a "copy to clipboard" button which means it's one of the fastest way to turn a webpage into data on a clipboard on my mobile phone. I use this several times a week. Prompts.
- llm-prices.com - a pricing comparison and token pricing calculator for various hosted LLMs. This one started out as a tool but graduated to its own domain name. Here's the prompting development history.
- Open Sauce 2025 - an unofficial schedule for the Open Sauce conference, complete with option to export to ICS plus a search tool and now-and-next. I built this entirely on my phone using OpenAI Codex, including scraping the official schedule - full details here.
- Hacker News Multi-Term Histogram - compare search terms on Hacker News to see how their relative popularity changed over time. Prompts.
- Passkey experiment - a UI for trying out the Passkey / WebAuthn APIs that are built into browsers these days. Prompts.
- Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer - do you ever find yourself staring at a screen full of JSON that isn't completely valid because it got truncated? This tool will pretty-print it anyway. Prompts.
- Bluesky WebSocket Feed Monitor - I found out Bluesky has a Firehose API that can be accessed directly from the browser, so I vibe-coded up this tool to try it out. Prompts.
In putting this list together I realized I wanted to be able to link to the prompts for each tool... but those were hidden inside a collapsed <details><summary> element for each one. So I fired up OpenAI Codex and prompted:
Update the script that builds the colophon.html page such that the generated page has a tiny bit of extra JavaScript - when the page is loaded as e.g. https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#jina-reader.html it should notice the #jina-reader.html fragment identifier and ensure that the Development history details/summary for that particular tool is expanded when the page loads.
It authored this PR for me which fixed the problem.
Introducing EmbeddingGemma. Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google:
Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is trained on 100+ languages and is small enough to run on less than 200MB of RAM with quantization.
It's available via sentence-transformers, llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama, LMStudio and more.
As usual for these smaller models there's a Transformers.js demo (via) that runs directly in the browser (in Chrome variants) - Semantic Galaxy loads a ~400MB model and then lets you run embeddings against hundreds of text sentences, map them in a 2D space and run similarity searches to zoom to points within that space.
