tools

It sounds like you care deeply about learning as much as you can. I care about that too. I would encourage you to consider that even LLM-generated code can teach you a ton of useful new things. Go read the source code for my dumb, zero-effort space invaders clone: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM... There's a bunch of useful lessons to be picked up even from that! - Examples of CSS gradients, box shadows and flexbox layout - CSS keyframe animation - How to implement keyboard events in JavaScript - A simple but effective pattern for game loops against a Canvas element, using requestAnimationFrame - How to implement basic collision detection If you've written games like this before these may not be new to you, but I found them pretty interesting.

I think LLMs are adapting higher level concepts. For example, the following JavaScript code generated by GLM (https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/9e04fd9895fae1aa9ac78b8...) is clearly inspired by this C++ code (https://github.com/portapack-mayhem/mayhem-firmware/blob/28e...), but it is not an exact copy.

Go for it. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=github+... has a bunch of results. Here's the source code GLM-4.5 Air spat out for me on my laptop: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/space-invaders-GLM... Based on my mental model of how these things work I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even a few lines of code duplicated from one of those projects into the code that GLM-4.5 wrote for me.

This post inspired me to build (OK, vibe code) this little tool for playing with the speech synthesis browser API: https://tools.simonwillison.net/speech-synthesis Commits / prompts: https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/speech-synthesi...

OK, Codex seemed to do a decent job of fixing up the accessibility, I just shipped its changes: https://github.com/simonw/tools/issues/36

I had to switch away from Algolia - the problem is they only model "show items on the homepage" using a tag that's automatically applied to exactly 30 items, which means any filtering knocks that down to eg 15. I switched to using the older firebase API which can return up to 500 item IDs from the current (paginated) homepage - then I fetch and filter details of the first 200. https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...

I updated it to fetch 200 stories instead of 30, so even after filtering you still get hopefully 140+ things to read. https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/ccde4586a1d95ce9f5615...

I released the source: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/main/hacker-news-filter... (Apache 2 licensed) and a commit history listing the prompts I used. https://github.com/simonw/tools/commits/main/hacker-news-fil... - also displayed on the site here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#hacker-news-filtere... I don't think I need a privacy policy since the app is designed so that nothing gets logged anywhere - it works by hitting the Algolia API directly from your browser, but the filtering happens locally and is stored in localStorage so nobody on earth has the ability to see what you filtered. The API it uses is https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=front_page - which is presumably logged somewhere (covered by Algolia's privacy policy) but doesn't serve any cookies. > Why do you do these demos if you aren't upfront about all

Already fixed https://github.com/simonw/tools/commit/f95b306be7b584f388256...

Yes, it's very polarized. That being said, people have shown a lot of code produced by LLMs so I don't understand the dismissive argument you make at the end. Below is a link to a great article by Simon Willison explaining an LLM assisted workflow and the resulting coded tools. [0] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/ [1] https://github.com/simonw/tools