Simon Willison’s Weblog

Aider: Using uv as an installer. Paul Gauthier has an innovative solution for the challenge of helping end users get a copy of his Aider CLI Python utility installed in an isolated virtual environment without first needing to teach them what an "isolated virtual environment" is.

Provided you already have a Python install of version 3.8 or higher you can run this:

pip install aider-install && aider-install

The aider-install package itself depends on uv. When you run aider-install it executes the following Python code:

def install_aider():
    try:
        uv_bin = uv.find_uv_bin()
        subprocess.check_call([
            uv_bin, "tool", "install", "--force", "--python", "python3.12", "aider-chat@latest"
        ])
        subprocess.check_call([uv_bin, "tool", "update-shell"])
    except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
        print(f"Failed to install aider: {e}")
        sys.exit(1)

This first figures out the location of the uv Rust binary, then uses it to install his aider-chat package by running the equivalent of this command:

uv tool install --force --python python3.12 aider-chat@latest

This will in turn install a brand new standalone copy of Python 3.12 and tuck it away in uv's own managed directory structure where it shouldn't hurt anything else.

The aider-chat script defaults to being dropped in the XDG standard directory, which is probably ~/.local/bin - see uv's documentation. The --force flag ensures that uv will overwrite any previous attempts at installing aider-chat in that location with the new one.

Finally, running uv tool update-shell ensures that bin directory is on the user's PATH.

I think I like this. There is a LOT of stuff going on here, and experienced users may well opt for an alternative installation mechanism.

But for non-expert Python users who just want to start using Aider, I think this pattern represents quite a tasteful way of getting everything working with minimal risk of breaking the user's system.

Update: Paul adds:

Offering this install method dramatically reduced the number of GitHub issues from users with conflicted/broken python environments.

I also really like the "curl | sh" aider installer based on uv. Even users who don't have python installed can use it.

# 1:47 am / uv, paul-gauthier, aider, python

Will the future of software development run on vibes? I got a few quotes in this piece by Benj Edwards about vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for when you prompt an LLM to write code, accept all changes and keep feeding it prompts and error messages and see what you can get it to build.

Here's what I originally sent to Benj:

I really enjoy vibe coding - it's a fun way to play with the limits of these models. It's also useful for prototyping, where the aim of the exercise is to try out an idea and prove if it can work.

Where vibe coding fails is in producing maintainable code for production settings. I firmly believe that as a developer you have to take accountability for the code you produce - if you're going to put your name to it you need to be confident that you understand how and why it works - ideally to the point that you can explain it to somebody else.

Vibe coding your way to a production codebase is clearly a terrible idea. Most of the work we do as software engineers is about evolving existing systems, and for those the quality and understandability of the underlying code is crucial.

For experiments and low-stake projects where you want to explore what's possible and build fun prototypes? Go wild! But stay aware of the very real risk that a good enough prototype often faces pressure to get pushed to production.

If an LLM wrote every line of your code but you've reviewed, tested and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book - that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.

# 3:39 am / andrej-karpathy, benj-edwards, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

monolith (via) Neat CLI tool built in Rust that can create a single packaged HTML file of a web page plus all of its dependencies.

cargo install monolith # or brew install
monolith https://simonwillison.net/ > /tmp/simonwillison.html

That command produced this 1.5MB single file result. All of the linked images, CSS and JavaScript assets have had their contents inlined into base64 URIs in their src= and href= attributes.

I was intrigued as to how it works, so I dumped the whole repository into Gemini 2.0 Pro and asked for an architectural summary:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith
cd monolith
files-to-prompt . -c | llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 \
  -s 'architectural overview as markdown'

Here's what I got. Short version: it uses the reqwest, html5ever, markup5ever_rcdom and cssparser crates to fetch and parse HTML and CSS and extract, combine and rewrite the assets. It doesn't currently attempt to run any JavaScript.

# 3:37 pm / scraping, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms, rust