Someone built a browser that generates every website from scratch, and it impressed me more than it should

Published Aug 8, 2026, 6:00 PM EDT Mahnoor Faisal is a tech journalist covering AI and productivity tools with bylines at XDA, SlashGear, MakeUseOf, Laptop Mag, and Android Police. She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen, and has since penned hundreds of articles. This includes in-depth coverage of AI tools like NotebookLM to breaking news across the AI space. Her passion for technology started when she received her first iPod Touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday, and she's been deep in the tech world ever since. Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, Mahnoor brings both a journalist's eye and a technical foundation to her coverage of how AI is reshaping the way we work and learn. I absolutely love weird apps. Especially the ones built around a single, oddly specific idea. These are the kind of project where you can tell someone made it just because they had a bizarre idea and couldn't let it go until it existed. Up until a few months ago, actually bringing such an idea to reality wasn't something just anyone could do. You needed to commit to learning how to code or find someone who already knew. While that was a route worth going down if the idea you had was something you truly believed in, it was overkill for the smaller and stranger ideas. AI-assisted coding and vibe-coding have completely changed this. Now, a bizarre idea and a free afternoon are pretty much all you need to turn "wouldn't it be funny if" into something real you can actually tap on. While I spend a lot of my time bringing my own ideas to life, I have a lot more fun playing around with what others build. So when I saw a Google DeepMind engineer had built a browser that treats every URL as a prompt, I had to take it for a spin. A Google engineer built a "browser" called Gem It invents websites on demand On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser that doesn't really...browse. Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over to Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite model and asks it to generate a webpage on the spot. If you enter a real address, it builds its own interpretation of that site rather than loading the actual thing. If you enter an address that doesn't exist, Gemini simply invents a website to fill the gap. In other words, you're not visiting the internet so much as browsing one the model dreams up as you go. The premise behind it is surprisingly grounded. Thatte's reasoning was that with a model as fast and cheap as Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, there's almost no practical difference anymore between loading a website and generating a brand-new one on the fly. Given that this tool is powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and it's just a side project rather than a full-fledged tool, it doesn't come with Gemini access baked in. Gem requires you to bring your own Gemini API key to get it working. Every URL you enter fires off a request to the model, so Gem needs a key linked to your Google account to actually generate anything, with the usage billed to you. You can grab a key for free from Google AI Studio, paste it into Gem's settings, and you're ready to start typing URLs. While you can get started for free, I ran into the limits within two minutes of playing around. So, I did need to enable billing on my API key and decided to load $10 into it. We were off to a rocky start As soon as I put in my API key, the first website I decided to try Gem with was XDA. Strangely, the exact XDA interface you and I are used to popped up, and I was instantly disappointed. I expected Gemini to conjure its own version of the site from scratch, not load the real thing. Then I noticed a button with the Gemini logo in the bottom-right corner. I tapped it, and a menu of remixing options appeared: Dark mode, Reader, Neubrutalist, Broadsheet, Blueprint, Comic book, Punk zine, Notebook, Chalkboard, Receipt, Teletext, System 7, Wes Anderson, Cyber neon, Clay, Frosted, Geocities, Matrix, Museum, Windows 95, Terminal, Vaporwave, and Hide images. So, I started hitting random options, and the frontend morphed before my eyes. Every new edit took practically no time to load, and within a second or two, the same XDA articles would reappear wearing a completely different skin. While it was fun seeing the interface I'm so used to transform within seconds, I was frankly still disappointed at that point. It was fun, but as I opened new websites and cycled through the same menu on each one, it started to feel repetitive. Every site had the exact same set of skins, so once I'd seen what Punk zine or Geocities did to XDA, I'd basically seen what it'd do to everything. But then I tried entering an address I knew didn't exist. I decided to enter my own name, and I didn't really know what I was expecting here. This output was what convinced me the tool had more going on than a preset menu. Instead of an error or a blank page, Gem spun up what I would describe as a portfolio website for me. The webpage it spun up had an accurate description of me, and even linked three articles I've actually written (though it did mix around the publication names on its own). There was also a Where My Work Appears section with all the publications I've written for accurately listed. It even included accurate facts, like the fact that I'd been writing professionally since the age of sixteen. I've used multiple AI tools to build portfolio websites for me, and even wrote an article pitting multiple AI models against each other to see which could build the best portfolio site for me. I've had models spend minutes on building webpages, and what Gem built in two seconds has genuinely been better than some of what those tools produced with far more time and context to work with. The same webpage also included buttons for Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and a Get in Touch button. Out of curiosity, I decided to hit the LinkedIn button. My first thought when the LinkedIn page loaded was "when did my LinkedIn follower count hit 5000+" before reality caught up. Of course, my follower count hadn't jumped — the LinkedIn page wasn't real either. Gem had simply generated its own version of it, complete with a made-up follower number and details I never wrote. That said, the facts included were real, but they weren't written by me. Gem also rewrites the actual content I'm now Jonathon Dupree After Gem generated a portfolio for me, I then tried heading to an address that does exist once again. This time, I entered XDA's sister site, MUO. Instead of being greeted with the interface I'm familiar with, it was a Geminified interface this time. The content of the page itself seemed accurate and hadn't been altered. At first glance, MUO was still MUO, just wearing a different skin. I spotted an article of my own and clicked it to see what new webpage Gem would generate, and, once again, the interface wasn't the actual MUO one. But this time, something else caught my eye. I didn't recognize the content on the page... even though it was supposedly my own article. Turns out, Gemini hadn't just restyled the page and had rewritten it. The headline and the underlying research were still mine, but the entire body of the article had been reworded into something I never actually wrote. The funniest part was that the byline wasn't even mine. It credited someone named Jonathon Dupree! It's a fun app to play around with All in all, this was an oddly delightful app wrapped around a genuinely unsettling idea. Gem is, without question, one of the more fun weird apps I've played with this year. It's clearly not meant to be an actual browser, but it does show off just how capable a model like Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite has become