Simon Willison's Weblog: books

Beyond Vibe Coding

2025-09-04T20:58:21+00:00

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.

Tags: books, oreilly, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, addy-osmani, vibe-coding

Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what "vibe coding" means

2025-05-01T14:26:35+00:00

Vibe coding does not mean "using AI tools to help write code". It means "generating code with AI without caring about the code that is produced". See Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding for my previous writing on this subject. This is a hill I am willing to die on. I fear it will be the death of me.

I just learned about not one but two forthcoming books that use vibe coding in the title and abuse that very clear definition!

Vibe Coding by Gene Kim and Steve Yegge (published by IT Revolution) carries the subtitle "Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond" - exactly what vibe coding is not.

Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming by Addy Osmani (published by O'Reilly Media) likewise talks about how professional engineers can integrate AI-assisted coding tools into their workflow.

Update 4th September 2025: Addy Osmani's book is now titled Beyond Vibe Coding: From Coder to AI-Era Developer, which I think is a much better title!

Original post continues below.

I fear it may be too late for these authors and publishers to fix their embarrassing mistakes: they've already designed the cover art!

I wonder if this a new record for the time from a term being coined to the first published books that use that term entirely incorrectly.

Vibe coding was only coined by Andrej Karpathy on February 6th, 84 days ago. I will once again quote Andrej's tweet, with my own highlights for emphasis:

There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard.

I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away.

It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding—I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Andrej could not have stated this more clearly: vibe coding is when you forget that the code even exists, as a fun way to build throwaway projects. It's not the same thing as using LLM tools as part of your process for responsibly building production code.

I know it's harder now that tweets are longer than 480 characters, but it's vitally important you read to the end of the tweet before publishing a book about something!

Now what do we call books on about real vibe coding?

This is the aspect of this whole thing that most disappoints me.

I think there is a real need for a book on actual vibe coding: helping people who are not software developers - and who don't want to become developers - learn how to use vibe coding techniques safely, effectively and responsibly to solve their problems.

This is a rich, deep topic! Most of the population of the world are never going to learn to code, but thanks to vibe coding tools those people now have a path to building custom software.

Everyone deserves the right to automate tedious things in their lives with a computer. They shouldn't have to learn programming in order to do that. That is who vibe coding is for. It's not for people who are software engineers already!

There are so many questions to be answered here. What kind of projects can be built in this way? How can you avoid the traps around security, privacy, reliability and a risk of over-spending? How can you navigate the jagged frontier of things that can be achieved in this way versus things that are completely impossible?

A book for people like that could be a genuine bestseller! But because three authors and the staff of two publishers didn't read to the end of the tweet we now need to find a new buzzy term for that, despite having the perfect term for it already.

I'm fully aware that I've lost at this point - Semantic Diffusion is an unstoppable force. What next? A book about prompt injection that's actually about jailbreaking?

I'd like the publishers and authors responsible to at least understand how much potential value - in terms of both helping out more people and making more money - they have left on the table because they didn't read all the way to the end of the tweet.

Tags: books, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, vibe-coding, semantic-diffusion

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies

2024-04-25T03:41:12+00:00

No, Most Books Don't Sell Only a Dozen Copies

I linked to a story the other day about book sales claiming "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies", based on numbers released in the Penguin antitrust lawsuit. It turns out those numbers were interpreted incorrectly.

In this piece from September 2022 Lincoln Michel addresses this and other common misconceptions about book statistics.

Understanding these numbers requires understanding a whole lot of intricacies about how publishing actually works. Here's one illustrative snippet:

"Take the statistic that most published books only sell 99 copies. This seems shocking on its face. But if you dig into it, you’ll notice it was counting one year’s sales of all books that were in BookScan’s system. That’s quite different statistic than saying most books don’t sell 100 copies in total! A book could easily be a bestseller in, say, 1960 and sell only a trickle of copies today."

The top comment on the post comes from Kristen McLean of NPD BookScan, the organization who's numbers were misrepresented is the trial. She wasn't certain how the numbers had been sliced to get that 90% result, but in her own analysis of "frontlist sales for the top 10 publishers by unit volume in the U.S. Trade market" she found that 14.7% sold less than 12 copies and the 51.4% spot was for books selling less than a thousand.

Tags: books, publishing, statistics

No one buys books

2024-04-22T21:55:04+00:00

No one buys books

Fascinating insights into the book publishing industry gathered by Elle Griffin from details that came out during the Penguin vs. DOJ antitrust lawsuit.

Publishing turns out to be similar to VC investing: a tiny percentage of books are hits that cover the costs for the vast majority that didn't sell well. The DOJ found that, of 58,000 books published in a year, "90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies."

UPDATE: This story is inaccurate: those statistics were grossly misinterpreted during the trial. See this post for updated information.

Here's an even better debunking: Yes, People Do Buy Books (subtitle: "Despite viral claims, Americans buy over a billion books a year").

Via Hacker News

Tags: books, publishing

goodreads-to-sqlite

2019-10-14T04:07:53+00:00

goodreads-to-sqlite

This is so cool! Tobias Kunze built a Python CLI tool to import your Goodreads data into a SQLite database, inspired by github-to-sqlite and my various other Dogsheep tools. It’s the first Dogsheep style tool I’ve seen that wasn’t built by me—and Tobias’ write-up includes some neat examples of queries you can run against your Goodreads data. I’ve now started using Goodreads and I’m importing my books into my own private Dogsheep Datasette instance.

Via @rixxtr

Tags: books, cli, sqlite, datasette, dogsheep

Good travel book for recently retired man?

2016-11-26T04:15:00+00:00

My answer to Good travel book for recently retired man? on Ask MetaFilter

The new Atlas Obscura coffee table book is worth a look.

Tags: ask-metafilter, books, christmas, travel, gifts, presents

Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cookbooks (unrelated!)

2016-09-11T22:23:00+00:00

My answer to Lovecraft-inspired fiction and cookbooks (unrelated!) on Ask MetaFilter

Have you considered the Laundry Files series by Charles Stross? They are novels about a secret UK government department which fights off lovecraftian threats while suffering through the typical burucracry you would expect from the UK government.

Tags: ask-metafilter, books, charlie-stross, cookbooks, fiction

What are the best books/tutorials to begin learning about memcached?

2013-04-08T14:51:00+00:00

My answer to What are the best books/tutorials to begin learning about memcached? on Quora

There isn't really enough of memcached to justify a whole book - it's a pretty straight-forward API.

It's always interesting hearing about advanced usage patterns for it though. Again, these don't necessarily justify a book but they are frequently presented at conferences.

Here's one video that may be relevant: High Performance Caching with Rails - a session at GoRuCo 2012 by Matt Duncan

Here's our full collection of 36 slides and video from talks about memcached: Conference coverage about Memcached on Lanyrd

Tags: books, memcached, programming, tutorials, web-development, quora

What are some good book discovery and recommendation sites?

2010-11-10T18:11:00+00:00

My answer to What are some good book discovery and recommendation sites? on Quora

I really like http://readernaut.com/ - here's an example profile: http://readernaut.com/nathan/

Tags: books, startups, quora

Dive Into HTML 5

2009-08-20T14:40:23+00:00

Dive Into HTML 5

Mark Pilgrim’s free online book on HTML 5—currently just one chapter on canvas (which neatly illustrates the coordinate system using a diagram rendered using canvas itself) but certain to become an invaluable resource for anyone looking to take advantage of HTML 5.

Tags: books, canvas, html5, mark-pilgrim, web-standards

Ask MetaFilter's best introductory books

2009-05-12T11:23:13+00:00

Ask MetaFilter's best introductory books

Part of Phil Gyford’s ongoing quest to “learn about everything”, a list of the best introductory books to a wide range of topics collated from a thread on Ask MetaFilter.

Tags: ask-metafilter, books, education, phil-gyford

Almost Perfect

2009-04-05T19:30:44+00:00

Almost Perfect

W. E. Peterson’s book on the rise and fall of WordPerfect Corporation, originally published in 1994 and now available for free online.

Via Jeff Atwood

Tags: books, history, wepeterson, wordperfect

Introduction to Information Retrieval

2009-02-09T20:54:01+00:00

Introduction to Information Retrieval

This looks excellent—a modern guide to implementing search engines written by some of the engineers behind Yahoo! Search. The full text is available online, but it looks like it’s well worth investing in the dead tree edition.

Via Greg Linden

Tags: books, freebooks, search, yahoo-search

The Django Book: Version 2.0

2009-01-09T14:54:24+00:00

The Django Book: Version 2.0

Adrian’s working on a new edition of the Django Book updated to cover version 1.0. As with the first edition, it will be available free online in addition to a published Apress paperback. The first three chapters are now available.

Via Adrian Holovaty

Tags: adrian-holovaty, apress, books, django, python

JavaScript: The Good Parts

2008-04-19T16:38:52+00:00

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Douglas Crockford’s soon-to-be-published book on the subset of JavaScript that he recommends. Promises to be “short, but dense”—if it’s half as good as his JavaScript lectures this is going to be a must-have.

Tags: books, douglas-crockford, javascript

The Principles Of Project Management

2008-03-26T12:12:40+00:00

The Principles Of Project Management

Meri’s book has been published by SitePoint.

Via Drew McClellan

Tags: books, meriwilliams, project-management, sitepoint

The Art & Science of JavaScript

2008-01-12T19:05:27+00:00

The Art & Science of JavaScript

The JavaScript book I contributed to is now shipping! My chapter describes how to build a Flickr / Google Maps mashup entirely using client-side code (via JSON-P).

Tags: books, flickr, google-maps, javascript, json, jsonp, sitepoint, theartandscienceofjavascript, writing

"The Definitive Guide to Django" is now shipping from Amazon

2007-12-11T21:12:37+00:00

"The Definitive Guide to Django" is now shipping from Amazon

The book looks absolutely fantastic (bias disclosure: I contributed the newforms chapter)—huge congratulations to Adrian and Jacob.

Tags: adrian-holovaty, amazon, apress, books, django, django-book, jacob-kaplan-moss

Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears

2007-11-16T21:16:02+00:00

Professional Python Frameworks: Web 2.0 Programming with Django and Turbogears

Apparently published by Wrox in October 2007, beating the “official” Django book by just over a month. Has anyone seen this on bookshelves yet?

Tags: books, django, python, web2, wrox

Roy Orbison in Cling-film, the novel

2007-10-17T15:58:05+00:00

Roy Orbison in Cling-film, the novel

If you missed the original internet meme you might be a bit baffled by this one, but I picked up a copy of the novel today and it completely lives up to the standard set by the short stories.

Tags: books, clingfilm, funny, memes, royorbison, royorbisoninclingfilm

The Art & Science of JavaScript

2007-10-15T22:35:10+00:00

The Art & Science of JavaScript

My first author credit: I’m contributing a chapter to SitePoint’s next JavaScript tome.

Tags: books, javascript, publishing, sitepoint, theartandscienceofjavascript

Programming Erlang

2007-03-03T08:49:52+00:00

Programming Erlang

A book on Erlang from the creator of the language himself, out in July but available to buy now as a beta PDF.

Tags: books, erlang, joe-armstrong

Stuart's book

2005-06-03T13:44:02+00:00

I meant to mention this earlier, but Stuart's book, DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM, has been published. I worked as a technical editor on the book, and I'm proud to have been associated with it. Don't worry about the hairy title (apparently you have to have DHTML in it or bookshops won't know where to put it / people won't know what it's about), the inside is pure gold. In their usual style, SitePoint have posted the first four chapters online for your perusal so you don't have to take my word for it, you can try it out for yourself.

Tags: books, javascript, sitepoint, stuart-langridge