Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule webapp for a conference on my phone

6 simonw 7 7/17/2025, 7:49:01 PM simonwillison.net ↗

Comments (7)

dbushell · 3h ago
The web app makes 176 requests and downloads 130 megabytes.

It's also <div> soup and largely inaccessible.

These and other issues could be fixed fairly quickly with a little care (if anyone cares).

simonw · 3h ago
!!!

Yeah, it turns out those speaker avatar images are 1MB+ PNGs! And there are 170 of them.

What a fantastic cautionary tale about vibe-coding on a mobile phone (where performance analysis tools aren't easily available.)

I just fixed that with Codex - thanks for the tip: https://chatgpt.com/s/cd_6879631d99c48191b1ab7f84dfab8dea

As far as accessibility goes... yeah, the lack of semantic markup is pretty shocking! I'll remember to prompt for that next time I try anything like this.

I just tried it in VoiceOver on iOS and the page was at least navigable - the buttons for the days work - but yeah, I'd be very ashamed to ship something like this if it wasn't a 20 minute demo (and I'm a bit ashamed even given that.)

I'm running "Make open-sauce-2025.html accessible to screenreaders" in Codex now to see what happens.

simonw · 2h ago
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
dbushell · 2h ago
it's concerning these vibe coding tools must be coerced into semantic markup

could that be solved by prefixing every prompt with a reminder?

yen223 · 21m ago
> it's concerning these vibe coding tools must be coerced into semantic markup

These things are becoming more and more humanlike every day

simonw · 2h ago
Definitely. If I had a Claude.md or agents.md or whatever in that repo saying "make mobile friendly sites that use semantic HTML and are accessible for screenreaders" I bet I'd get much better results from them.
dbushell · 2h ago
would have been fun to see how conference wifi handled that :)