Notes

I’ve always found the idea of agent-based simulations fascinating. CensusAI Berlin is a small, vibe-coded app that uses open demographic data from the city of Berlin to create personas. Users can then ask these synthetic Berliners (political) questions and receive a simulated snapshot of public opinion.

Another vibe coding session later (this time with tokens & a glass of red wine 🍷) I’ve added another feature: Some articles will now be translated into either english or german, depending on the source language. It’s not an automatic process, though. I’ve created a translation.md file which I ask Opus 4.6 to execute. The model then asks me for the article it should translate and adds a disclaimer at the beginning of the text. I like this approach as it requires me to make a concious decision if an article should be translated and I can review and edit it easily.

Opus 4.6 and I have updated the website. We removed the old themes and created a new one, added a burger menu for small devices, added multilanguage toggles, simplified the index site, revamped the menu, cleaned up the codebase and introduced a better AIBadge. All within less than an hour, chilling on the couch, tokens for the model, a craft beer 🍺 for me. This is vibe coding at it’s best.

I’ve added two articles (with one in both english and german language) I wrote alongside the release of BärGPT, the new AI assistent for Berlin’s public administration. They originally appeared on the CityLAB Blog, but since leading this amazing project took the better half of the year, I figured I might as well share them here, too.

A new blog post is out: Can AI play a Text Adventure? Now with the latest models from OpenAI: the open weight gpt-oss and the brand new gpt-5, which was just relased yesterday.

Yesterday OpenAI finally dropped its new open source model called gpt-oss. As always, Simon Willison provides a great deep dive on his website. I have also included the LLM on my test page for german speaking models 🇩🇪 Germany’s Next Top Model.

Quoting Scott Werner on vibe coding: Sometimes I wonder if I’m just LARPing as a programmer now. Like those people who play elaborate games of house. “Let’s pretend this document is architecture! Let’s pretend this process is official! Let’s pretend we know what we’re doing!”

Quoting Johnny Haeusler at re:publica 2025: “Jede Generation hat also ihre Superkraft. GenX kann Systeme hacken, GenY kann Communities bauen und GenZ kann Bewegungen und Ideen viral gehen lassen. Wir können also eine ganze Menge bewegen [..]”.

Product Owner: “We can’t use a checkbox to let users uncheck their data privacy!”
UI Intern: “I know EXACTLY what you mean!”

Since I left TwiX (and not feeling at home on Mastodon or Bluesky yet), I was thinking about a format to post short ideas and comments on my website. Funny enough, Simon Willison, whose blog I strongly recommend and read daily, had the same idea apparently and introduced “notes” to his website. And just like him, I completely vibe-coded this in VS Code with Augment in half an hour. Crazy tines we live in!