Simonw Has Vibe-Coded 124 Useful Tools
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
simonwillison.netTechstory
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Vibe CodingCLI ToolsSoftware Development
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Vibe Coding
CLI Tools
Software Development
The post highlights 124 tools created by simonw through 'vibe coding', sparking discussion on the value and nature of these small, often throwaway tools.
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Sep 4, 2025 at 10:25 PM EDT
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Most of these have extremely limited scope, and are probably not going to be invested in long term as software requires, they're throwaway.
Which is exactly what horrible find to xargs to inline perl was.
I personally feel less annoyed by this vibe mania when I think of them this way.
Note: two of them seem at face value to be equivalent to gpg or imagemagick CLI calls but hyper (over IMO) specialised.
We failed at creating automation tools for the users (even if Apple tried that with AppleScript or Automator), but vibe coding throwaway scripts is not the answer.
I actually have a separate collection of vibe-coded UV+Python scripts on that site here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/python/
https://tools.simonwillison.net/bullish-bearish
Come on..
That aid I've found the bullish-bearish one totally useful myself, it finally helped me remember which was which!
Why not giraffe and mouse or something clearer?
[1]Which now make sense to make since cost is almost zero...
Hey LLM, give me some examples for X Y Z tools, and provide doc snippets for the command line parameters being used in the examples.
Rather than spending 2-3 hours scouring the Internet and having 50 tabs open, you can have it in minutes.
If you have to resort to this kind of hyperbole to make vibe-coding seem useful, maybe it isn't that useful?
Even better when you have them all in a repo w/ an agent like Codex or Claude Code to constantly tweak/remix them as needed.