Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 7th October 2025

Vibe engineering

I feel like vibe coding is pretty well established now as covering the fast, loose and irresponsible way of building software with AI—entirely prompt-driven, and with no attention paid to how the code actually works. This leaves us with a terminology gap: what should we call the other end of the spectrum, where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce?

[... 1,313 words]

For quite some I wanted to write a small static image gallery so I can share my pictures with friends and family. Of course there are a gazillion tools like this, but, well, sometimes I just want to roll my own. [...]

I used the old, well tested technique I call brain coding, where you start with an empty vim buffer and type some code (Perl, HTML, CSS) until you're happy with the result. It helps to think a bit (aka use your brain) during this process.

Thomas Klausner, coining "brain coding"

# 4:03 pm / definitions, vibe-coding

Google released a new Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model today, specially designed to help operate a GUI interface by interacting with visible elements using a virtual mouse and keyboard.

I tried the demo hosted by Browserbase at gemini.browserbase.com and was delighted and slightly horrified when it appeared to kick things off by first navigating to Google.com and solving their CAPTCHA in order to run a search!

I wrote a post about it and included this screenshot, but then learned that Browserbase itself has CAPTCHA solving built in and, as shown in this longer video, it was Browserbase that solved the CAPTCHA even while Gemini was thinking about doing so itself.

I deeply regret this error. I've deleted various social media posts about the original entry and linked back to this retraction instead.

# 10 pm / gemini, retractions