Simon Willison’s Weblog

I've added a new content type to my blog: notes. These join my existing types: entries, bookmarks and quotations.

A note is a little bit like a bookmark without a link. They're for short form writing - thoughts or images that don't warrant a full entry with a title. The kind of things I used to post to Twitter, but that don't feel right to cross-post to multiple social networks (Mastodon and Bluesky, for example.)

I was partly inspired by Molly White's short thoughts, notes, links, and musings.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but the amount of work involved in modifying all of the parts of my site that handle the three different content types was daunting. Then this evening I tried running my blog's source code (using files-to-prompt and LLM) through the new Gemini 2.5 Pro:

files-to-prompt . -e py -c | \
  llm -m gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 -s \
  'I want to add a new type of content called a Note,
  similar to quotation and bookmark and entry but it
  only has a markdown text body. Output all of the
  code I need to add for that feature and tell me
  which files to add  the code to.'

Gemini gave me a detailed 13 step plan covering all of the tedious changes I'd been avoiding having to figure out!

The code is in this PR, which touched 18 different files. The whole project took around 45 minutes start to finish.

(I used Claude to brainstorm names for the feature - I had it come up with possible nouns and then "rank those by least pretentious to most pretentious", and "notes" came out on top.)

This is now far too long for a note and should really be upgraded to an entry, but I need to post a first note to make sure everything is working as it should.