Simon Willison's Weblog: oreilly

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

Sharing My Location Just the Way I Like It

2008-03-31T20:34:22+00:00

Sharing My Location Just the Way I Like It

Fire Eagle gets a great write-up from Brady Forrest over on the O’Reilly Radar.

Tags: brady-forrest, fireeagle, location, oreilly, oreillyradar, wikinear

Dangers of remote Javascript

2008-01-20T09:49:06+00:00

Dangers of remote Javascript

Perl.com got hit by a JavaScript porn redirect when the domain of one of their advertisers expired and was bought by a porn company. Nat Torkington suggests keeping track of the expiration dates on any third party domains that are serving JavaScript on your site.

Tags: domains, javascript, nat-torkington, oreilly, perldotcom, security, xss

Introduction to Neogeography

2007-01-27T00:09:59+00:00

Introduction to Neogeography

Having run in to Andrew Turner at last year’s EuroOSCON, this is the first O’Reilly Short Cuts PDF that I’ve been seriously tempted to buy.

Via Ed Parsons

Tags: andrew-turner, eurooscon, mapping, neogeography, oreilly

Giving away the index

2005-05-04T01:16:45+00:00

My final year project is due in two weeks, and I'm going to be running on silent for most of them. I have, however, upgraded to Tiger and playing with Spotlight has given me plenty to think about.

Giving away the index

The great benefit of having an electronic version of a book you own in dead-tree format to hand is that you can search it. Publishers generally don't hand out free digital copies because, well, they want you to buy the books, not freely distribute electronic copies.

The thing is, you don't need a digital copy of a book to be able to search it; you just need a full-text index of it (if you don't understand what this means, go and read Tim Bray's series On Search). An index isn't enough to reconstruct the book, but it is enough to answer questions like "on what pages of Eric Meyer on CSS are float layouts discussed?"

Imagine if technical publishers made binary full-text index files of their titles available for download, for free in some kind of open standard format. Readers could query them using Spotlight or similar technologies, and gain the ability to search the titles they own all without needing to rely on centralised, artificially limited services such as Amazon's Search Inside the Book.

O'Reilly, I'm looking at you.

Full-text phishing

On a darker note, one thing about Spotlight that has given me pause is the immense ease with which it can uncover passwords saved amongst my email. Lost password reminders, new account details, invitations to sign up for services - they're all hidden away in my mail archive. Spotlight makes it trivial to dig them back up again, and offers the APIs for applications to do so as well. Combine this with a piece of spyware / some trojan horse and you've got the ultimate vector for phishing attacks.

This problem isn't limited to Macs either; Google and MSN's Desktop Search engines could be used for much the same purpose, and full-text search is bound to end up built in to Windows sooner or later. For the moment, the safest thing to do is either delete those pesky emails or move them to a folder that is excluded from Spotlight's index. Somehow I doubt many people will think to take such precautions.

And with that off my chest, it's time to get back to my dissertation.

Tags: oreilly, search, security