Over the past week I've been experimenting with vibe coding: asking LLMs such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini write entire apps as if I had absolutely no programming ability at all. LLMs can easily solve programming challenges or interview questions. But I wanted to see how far the current LLMs can go when asked to make complete apps, and what kinds of failure patterns emerge. From the role of a non-programmer, I would only be able to fix bugs by describing them to the LLM. For simplicity, I choose small apps written in Python that use only the standard library and the tkinter package for the GUI. This blog post details the failures: the kinds of apps that AI just isn't capable of making.

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The nominees for the Python Software Foundation's Board of Directors 2025 election have been announced. You can find a full list on the nominees page. This year there are 4 seats open on the PSF Board. You can see who is currently on the board on the PSF Officers & Directors page. I'm pleased to announce I'm endorsing the following nominees: Abigail Dogbe, Archana Vaidheeswaran, Daniele Procida, Jannis Leidel, Sheena O'Connell, Simon Willison

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There is a phrase used when teaching recursion and recursive functions, leap of faith. In researching my book, The Recursive Book of Recursion, I found that most explanation of this technique were vague or even misleading. In this article, I'll go into what the leap of faith is and how it can help you write your recursive functions.

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Here are some recursive functions that are technically correct and technically recursive.

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The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is now available for purchase or to read for free online. It has updated content and several new chapters, but one chapter that was left on the cutting room floor was "Working with Audio, Video, and Webcams". I present the 26-page rough draft chapter in this blog, where you can learn how to write Python code that records and plays multimedia content.

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TurtleSC provides a mini-language of shortcut instructions to carry out turtle.py function calls, like 'f 100' instead of forward(100). Git Repo, PyPI Project Page.

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This article and its content were written, reviewed, and verified by a human, Al Sweigart. In my research I found that most "GitHub vs GitLab" articles are AI slop containing false or outdated information. I wrote this article with links to actual documentation pages, and not just copying what every other article on this topic says. For those who have heard of this "Git stuff," here's a summary of the differences and details. My hot take: For the needs of most individual or small group users, they're basically the same. GitLab seems to be more oriented towards self-hosting and custom configuration. Wikipedia has an extensive comparison list of source code repo hosting servers.

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At PyCon 2025, I handed out a pocket-sized zine that lets you play a procedurally generated choose-your-own-adventure version of tic-tac-toe. The zine itself is available as a PDF for viewing on your computer and a PDF for double-sided printing. Here's how I made it using Python.

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Part 5 of a tutorial series on the Fabric.js canvas/graphics library for JavaScript, we'll learn how to change the size of shapes by scaling them with the scale() method. We'll also get some more practice drawing in general. We'll draw this forest:

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Part 5 of a tutorial series on the Fabric.js canvas/graphics library for JavaScript, where we learn about grouping, cloning, and rotating shapes.

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