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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of Codex. I'm your friend David Pearce and today on the show we are revisiting our Vibe coding challenge. About a month ago, I gave two of my colleagues a challenge to go off and develop a website to solve a problem that they had in their real life. This was just a way for us to experiment with some of the vibe coding tools, push things along, try new things, and see what we, admittedly regular people when it comes to this stuff, might be able to make in a vibe coding world. It's been a month. I'm very excited to check in. I also, if I'm being completely honest, am unreasonably proud of the things that I've made and I'm very excited to show them off and brag about them. It's going to be very fun. We're going to get to that in just a second, but first, here's everything else happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Monday, August 10, 2026. Mark Zuckerberg just published a huge 6,500 word manifesto on how he sees the future of AI. Most of what's in there is not surprising. He loves America. He he thinks agents will make everything amazing for everyone. You know the drill. He said he's in favor of more government oversight of AI models, but doesn't think it's worth trying to keep foreign models out of the US altogether. Thought that was interesting. Every AI CEO seems to love a manifesto right now, and I only bring this one up because it's from a CEO whose products are part of so many people's lives every day. And actually because there's one line in here I quite like, he says that invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence. I'm into that. Meanwhile, big news in App Store world. The first non Google Android app store is now available in the Play Store. It's called Aptoide and it's a game store. Android has always supported these third party app stores, but they came either preloaded like the Amazon App Store on fire tablets or you had to sideload them. But after years of legal fighting with Epic, which is the company that makes Fortnite, Google is now required to let those app stores into the Play Store itself. This is a big change to the whole app economy. And by the way, there's a very similar fight playing out as we speak with Apple and iOS. Finally, Verge contributor Georgina Torbit has a story about a company called Reflect Orbital, which recently won FCC approval to launch a mirror satellite, which is exactly what you think. It is designed to reflect sunlight onto Earth 24 hours a day, either for actual light or to generate solar power. Right now it's one satellite, but Reflect wants IT to be 50,000. Meanwhile, astronomers are worried about light pollution. They're worried about scientific observation, even about what would happen if you pointed your telescope just the wrong place. This is a test worth keeping an eye on. Just don't look at it too directly. You can read more about all this@theverge.com, that is 90 seconds of the Verge for Monday, August 10th. You know that feeling when too many things fall through the cracks? Monday.com was built for that gap, the AI work platform where people and agents work side by side to deliver more together. Create your first Monday agent today@Monday.com Support
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- [03:28]
A
All right, let's get to Vibe coding. Joining me now the Verge is Jake Castronakis. Hi, Jake.
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B
Hey, Good to be here.
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A
And the Vergeous Hayden Field. Hi, Hayden.
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C
Hi.
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A
You are in a studio together. My FOMO is incredible. We're just going to move past it. It's going to be fine.
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B
Yeah. I'm sorry we didn't invite you.
- [03:41]
A
So about a month ago, we all left an episode of the broadcast with the same task, which is build a website to solve some problem in your life. Um, I probably should have specified that this was to be a Vibe coded thing, but it turns out none of us are technically sophisticated enough to do anything else anyway, so we have all been on what I hope has been a fun and fulfilling Vibe coding adventure over the last month. Um, we're going to do some show and tell. But first, Jake, let's start with you. Just tell me how the experience has been. How much, how much of your life have you poured into Vibe coding over the last month?
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B
Fun and fulfilling is not the words I would have chosen. Like, not at all. So, like, let's go back to last month for a second where I told you about a to do app I made and an email app I made and those. I had a blast. I had a Great time making those and like, spent a little bit too much time on the weekend even working on those.
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A
Right.
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B
Like, it was fun. I felt like I was building something and getting good feedback and getting somewhere. This was not that experience. And I think the main reason was that I switched from Claude code to Codex. I want to try using Codex this time. And it was horrible. It did not go well.
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A
Tell me why
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C
it.
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A
It's bad.
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B
I'm not. I'm like, Codex is like so unhelpful. It doesn't know what it can do. I had to start a new Codex chat thread every single time I started this thing up because it would. It would hit into something that it didn't realize it couldn't get access to and it would just be like, that's it, I'm done. Nothing I can do anymore. And then I would have to go into a new thread and be like, continue this project. And it would be like, no problem, let's go. And the same thing happened every single time. I have seven different threads that happened over like six, seven or eight different days of working on this thing. And I would just like. But what I ended up doing was just sort of working away at it until it hit that point and then being like, if it's done, I'm done. We're gonna stop here.
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A
I mean, I. The funniest part about this is I think the thing that I have discovered is that actually what you just described is the way most sophisticated people would tell you to use these things. It's like, I got in trouble one time. I wrote a big story about stuff I made and I got a bunch of people who were like, oh, you just had long conversation to build this thing. What you're supposed to do is actually have a folder full of instructions and you're supposed to have a different chat for every single feature you want to build. Because that way you can orchestrate all of the agents. And I was just like, I'm sure all of that is true.
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B
Yeah, my multi agent swarm didn't materialize.
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A
I'm not. I'm not about a multi agent swarm. Hayden, did you have a miserable time too? I feel like this is not. This is not what I was hoping for, but it's also what I expected.
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C
Yeah, I really did. And it was. Well, I did most of the time. And then there were some highlights. Basically what happened to me was I was really having the Everyman's experience in that I tried. I didn't have like, access to our enterprise accounts for any of these things. At the time. So I was just doing the free. So I tried Claude free. I ran out in, like, one second. Plus, it was horribly ugly. It was the ugliest thing I've ever created in my life. So I was like, let. I can't. I was so bad that it was so ugly. It did work, but it was so ugly that I was like, I can't even look at this anymore. I have to switch platforms. That's how ugly it was. So then I went to Codex, and I unfortunately couldn't use it without, like, paying. So then I was like, okay, you know, let me just go to Gemini. And then I had my super long, like, you know, nine hour conversation with Gemini, and it worked great. I mean, like, I did have to have a couple of troubleshooting moments where, I don't know, like, I would get mad and yell in all caps. Sometimes, like, I was really mean. Sometimes there were. We were really went through every range of emotion. But the good news is I came out with something and, you know, it works. So I'm proud.
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B
Hayden. My, like, attitude toward these chatbots has, like, really evolved in the past month where, like, like two months ago, I was like, I'm gonna be really polite because these things are made in a bizarre way where they will do more effort if I'm polite. And also, if down the road, they decide to take over the world, I'm gonna be on their good list. And now I'm just all caps, two words. Like, stop do this. Yep. Like, disregard. And I'm just like, like, listen to me, please.
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C
Mine was worse because I was like, acting like a. Like a teen. I was like. I was like, what the heck is this? I asked you to do this.
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B
Like, yes, yes.
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C
I was really like. And it was like, I understand the frustration and I appreciate the candor.
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B
Yes.
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C
But, yeah, it used to be, to me, like, the lowest effort thing is really being polite. So, like, since it was so low effort, I would be polite, but now I would get so angry.
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B
Yes, yes. I'm like, this is ugly. Like, what are you thinking?
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C
So,
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A
first of all, I agree with all of this. I have become. I wouldn't say I've gotten meaner to my chat bots, but I've become much more terse. I used to say things like, looking great. Can we do this? And now I'm just like, make it bigger. Yeah, make it bigger. And then it does. And I'm like, no, bigger. And that's. This is. This is my interactions now. So. All right, let's. Let's get into some show and tell you. Um, I. I think it's very fun, by the way, that we sort of accidentally all use different things. Jake, you made this mostly in codex. Hayden, you used mostly. It sounds like Gemini and anti Gravity. Uh, I did Claude code, which is the one I pay $20 a month for and is thus the one I'm going to use for all of these things. Um, who wants to go first in some show and tell here? I want to see the thing that you've built. I want. I want you to give me the Shark Tank pitch, and then I want to see it. Hayden, I think you should go first.
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C
Okay, I'll go first because I think you'll be mad at me because I did what you told me not to do. But I did publish a real. So keep that in mind.
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B
All right.
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I'm excited.
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C
I made a portfolio site solely because my old site was from 2022, and it had, like, my Morning Brew email address, and it was just embarrassing. Like, a tech reporter cannot have that old of a site. So, you know, I. I re. I revamped it.
- [09:47]
A
Okay, what was the starting point? Give me that. You don't have to give me the exact prompt, but, like, what was the very beginning of your conversation to make this thing? You're just like, I need a new portfolio site. Go for it.
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C
Yeah, my very beginning was like, I need a new portfolio site. Here are some that I like. You know, keep it, like, sleek, but make it a little bit fun and, like, include some 90s, like, Easter egg elements. That was kind of the. The energy. I unfortunately learned that I was asking for way too much with one prompt. But, you know, we did our best here. So this was mine. This is the homepage. So my about is just like my bio. And then I have this, like, you know, Y2K looking resume button, which I was happy about. Then I have 90s mode where you can, like, Whoa.
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B
Okay. Okay.
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A
You just changed it from where the sparkles are black and white to, like, teal. This is giving, like, I tried really hard on my Tumblr blog design.
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C
Yeah, exactly.
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A
It's kind of what I'm getting here.
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C
That's what I was going for with the 90s mode. Like, I. I wanted it to be like, you know, really, I'm gonna make it even more fun if More time. But yeah, the top, pink and blue. You know, there's a lot going on. So then did you make all of
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A
these color decisions, or did you just say, do a 90s mode? And it did a 90s mode.
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C
I said, do a 90s mode and it did it. So there are multiple things I would change. I would probably do, like, more crazy fonts, you know, but it's good for now. Then I have like, on all accounts, like, no matter what mode you're on, regular or not, I have like a big chunky cursor from back in the day. And when you click, it has stars coming out of it. Kind of like the habit tracker I made. It's a callback for. For our loyal, loyal listeners. And then I made like a TV and podcast link. So I have a bunch of Verge cast and decoder episodes on here embedded that you can just listen to, which is cool.
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A
So did you. Did you find each of these yourself or did you say, go find appearances that I've made?
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C
No, I was horrible at finding stuff, so I had to do it all this. That's kind of what took me the longest. And all of them, and I had to embed them. It was like the most annoying thing in the world. And scrolling all the way back to, you know, last year and stuff in the Spotify episodes was a lot, but I did it. And then, yeah, finding all my links that I should include also took forever because it was really bad at scraping sites, which we should be happy about, I guess. But I found all my own links and I, like broke them out by, you know, scoops or scenery.
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A
Such a bummer, by the way, because this. This page you're showing, which is essentially just a list of links. This is the thing that actually this system ought to be the best at doing for you. It's like, hey, go find some of the best, most impactful stuff written by Hayden Field on the Internet. Like, nothing on earth should be better at that than Google Gemini, right?
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C
And I tried that. I tried using other chat. Like, I tried all of the platforms on this and they were not good. They were hor. They found maybe one or two things each and then the. They could. Not interesting. I don't know, maybe I have been
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B
trying to do this exact same thing with Gemini a bunch recently where people keep asking me for Verge articles about certain topics and I'll be like, oh, I should just ask Gemini. And I'll send it off and it'll be like, here's a bunch of stuff that the Verge has covered that is excellent on this topic, and it'll summarize what we've covered. And then I'll just yelling at it. I'm like, blinks, give me the links.
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C
It never once gave me the link. Exactly. It was so insane. And so yeah, I had to go back and like trawl through all the 29 pages of pieces I've done while here and then all my old pieces that seem to be. It was crazy, but so made it work. Speaking tab and then a contact tab with just like emails. So no longer my morning brew email. We actually have my Verge one, luckily. And then. Yeah, so it's pretty simple.
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A
Tell me about the backend here. Where is this website hosted?
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C
It's. So I used to have a wix site and I was really sick of it and I couldn't even upload like an index. Like I couldn't even upload an HTML file because they are trying to like, you know, have a barrier there and only make you use wix. So I left Wix and I. My software engineer fiance luckily told me to use GitHub pages for free. So I went to GitHub, made an account, made a page and then published it with the domain I already own. So now it's live on my actual website, which is exciting. Hey, we love.
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A
That's pretty good. Okay, what was the. What was the part of this that took the longest, like technically speaking, the most back and forths with Gemini. What was the. What was the biggest sticking point?
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C
This is hilarious. The biggest sticking point that took so long was literally this button. This button was your resume button. Yes, it was like a hellscape. I. I tried everything. It was absolutely horrible. At first I tried to make it shaped like. I honestly was fine with the normal looking button button. It didn't have to be this cool. I was like, oh, just make it like cloud shaped or like do a scalloped edge. Like I was like, just make it a little fun. Like even not a 90s button, like just a regular button. Just like give it a little shape. It could not get it together. It was the weirdest. Like it did polka dots, it did like crazy cutouts. Insane. And that's when I got my most mad. I was like, how can you not understand? And so then I would send it a picture of a cloud. I'm like, make it this. I literally just wanted like a scout, you know what I mean? Just like a fun shape. And it was like, oh, I'm so sorry. Like, oh, you're right, I got it wrong. And then finally I was like, you know what? Maybe it'll be less complex if I just do something more complex. So then I was like, here are some images of like 90s style buttons. Like please create one and it like got it in one second. So I was like, you know, this is a moment. This is an example of jagged systems. It's like it couldn't do the simplest shaped and just normal button with no. But then it could do this like weird 3D thing from the past.
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B
There was this interesting thing that I ran into last time when I was working on my email client where I was using Claude code and Cloud Code's design for the client was like hideous. Like, it was, it was, it was, it was very bad. But then they have a separate program called Claude Design. I don't know why these are separate systems. I don't know why they don't share intelligence. But I sent a screenshot of what Claude coded made into Claude Design. Claude Design was like, that's pretty bad. Let's fix it. And then Cloud Design whipped up a whole bunch of code to make it look good and was like, hand this over to Claude Code. And I'm like, why can't you do this together? Why is it not one system?
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C
That's what I'm saying. The Cloud code one was so insane. I mean, I will say it did work, but it was so insanely ugly. Ugly. It was like multiple colors of beige. So many colors of beige.
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A
It does look beige.
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C
Yeah. And then it looked like it was like a. Like a man. Like not a cool old. Like it was like a weird manual. Like I just, it was, I could be into that. It wasn't in the cool way. It was like, it wasn't. I promise. It was just so weird. And then Codex. I will say I wish I could have used Codex because I had seen some cool examples of Codex websites recently. Like, I saw someone made like a wedding website with like a cool thing where that you could walk around or like a game made out of text. Like there, there are cool websites I've seen recently, but I just couldn't try it because you know you can't use it. And I was having the everyman experience.
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A
So that's good.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I think there, there is a real. If you want to pour your life into making your personal website, it, it is, it is sitting there for you. You, you can do some pretty cool stuff, but I also think you, without spending a dime, actually landed in a pretty good place. Like, that's, that's about all you could ask for from a system like that. That's pretty good.
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C
Thank you. And since I did not Update it Since 2022, we all know I would not have poured my life into it. So I'm Glad that I was forced to via this and you didn't.
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A
Which no one on earth should have to in 2026. Let's switch gears. Jake, what did you build?
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B
So this summer my wife and I thought it would be a fun idea to sign up for Farm Share. You know, the thing where you, you pay, I don't know, buy a weekly, bi weekly fee and some local farms ship you some random assortment of vegetables.
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Just in case you're wondering. Everybody, yes, Jake does live in Brooklyn.
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B
Sorry, I'm so listen, every now and then, you know, we sign up for it. We're like, this is going to be such a good idea. We're going to get like fresh vegetables, all kinds of weird things that we don't usually have. We're going to try out new things and regret it every single time and
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just never co op phase in their life.
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B
So it's just, I honestly, I need to stop myself because I will spend a long time complaining about this specific csa. But I've gotten dandelion greens every week, David. Every week. Anyway, the problem I need to solve is that they're giving me too many vegetables and they keep coming on days that I am busy. And so I'm like, I have all, all this fresh produce that I can't do anything with. So I was like, all right, let's make a website. I could send it to my friends and they can be like, yo, I'll take those dandelion greens from you. Right? It's nice, simple little thing.
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A
So now it's, now it's Farm to Jake to table is kind of what we're doing here.
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B
That would have been a better name. I landed on Farm. Share. Share. Oh, I like that too.
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C
Okay.
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B
And so this is what we built using Codex. So little bit, can I just tell
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A
you my immediate idea? This, this to me looks like the first ever prototype of Amazon.com
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B
I, I think that's a high compliment, David. I appreciate it.
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A
To be fair, Amazon.com has spent 25 years getting systematically uglier. So I think it's. To say it was the very beginning is actually a nice thing I can say.
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C
I also want to know what the logo is. Like, what is.
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B
It's a really good question. So Codex's design shops are, I want to say, different than most people's idea of design. So its first draft, it went photorealistic and it was like it rendered an image of some fruits and vegetables in a basket and it looked like a stock photo and I thought it was very tacky. So I'm like, let's try something else. And it came back to me with, not this, what you're currently seeing, which is blobs and lines in solid colors. This, like, sort of minimalist geometric idea
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A
of fruits and vegetables. I assume it's supposed to be like radishes in a cabbage.
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C
Yeah.
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B
But it's.
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C
It's like.
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A
It's like gesturing at those things without eating those things.
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B
I. I kept telling it to make different iterations of it, hoping it would, because I'm like, oh, that's an interest.
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C
That's. There's.
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B
There's something there. There's something there. And it never got closer. It figured it out. And at some point, I gave up. At some point I was like, I don't have time to keep iterating on the blobs. So. So, yeah, the. You know, the design. I think there's room for improvement here. But, yeah, you visit the website and there's. There's a separate. There's like a login here, I'll show you. There's a little. If I sign out, if it works. Here we go. So you first is a little passcode. You gotta know what the password is to get in.
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C
I like that.
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A
It's called the friend passcode.
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B
Yeah. I didn't write any of this copy, by the way. This is all chatgpt.
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C
Oh, I kind of wish you had put that because, like, friend passcode, it makes it more like, oh, I still care about you, you know, it's just a quick little get, you know, I
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A
don't know if you're here. We're friends.
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C
Yeah, exactly.
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B
Love that.
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A
All right, so you log in.
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B
Yeah, you log in. There's a different password for me, the admin, and for visiting guests. And you get to this little board that just has all the different veggies I got any given week. And the ones that I'm keeping are kind of marked that I'm keeping them. And if you want something, you can just hit the big claim button and tell me how you want it, how you want to get it. Right. So if some. If I'm going to hang out with somebody this weekend, they get to sit. I'm seeing you soon, right? Enter your name, claimed, Boom. And there is notification system, allegedly, that I have not tested to see if it works.
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A
So in theory, like, you should get an email now being like, david just signed up to get your scallions. Or I guess in this case, your rhubarb.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then you're like, okay, cool, I'll bring It to the office next time we're both going to be in the office.
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B
Yeah, exactly. The. The big issue I ran into. Well, there are a lot of issues I ran into, but I just got to come clean here. This is not actually published. And the reason is I used ChatGPT
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A
sites, which
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B
is a plugin for ChatGPT that is native and it's supposed to let you publish small little websites. Codex does not know how to work well with this thing on a variety of levels. Every. It constantly breaks, it constantly doesn't have access to it and can't, can't. Codex doesn't know how to ask for permission to things. Yeah, sometimes it just.
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A
They're all like this. They're like, I can't possibly log in. And I'm like, buddy, ask me to put in the password. I know the password. I. Yes, we made the password together. And it's like, who's to say?
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B
Drive me nuts. And so this is, this is why I had to keep making new chat windows, because it would be like, ah, I. I guess I just don't have access. And I'm like, oh my God. And so, you know, super intelligence, we've invented it. And yet at the end of this, it goes, oh, your enterprise environment doesn't let you publish websites. I'm like, I. We built it on this platform. Yeah. To publish it. Why do you. And so I was feeling defeated and gave up at that point. So that, that. So no one has actually used this website except for me. But this is, this is my attempt.
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A
And you could share it with. This could be just for co workers. I will say you could probably share it with me as somebody who is also in our enterprise domain. So this might be the farm share. Office share.
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C
I want some fava beans are my favorite type of beans. So.
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A
See, we're solving problems.
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B
They're not. They don't look very good, but you're welcome to have them. I'll bring them in for you.
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C
Can't wait. Also, I will say mine had a similar problem in that it kept telling me like, oh, I can't embed things, sorry. And I was like, you. It said it went against its guidelines. What, for YouTube videos? And I was like, it wasn't like a YouTube video that didn't have the permissions, like, it was fine to embed it. And I was like, oh, you can't embed any YouTube videos ever. And I was like, oh, my bad. Yeah, I can. And then I tried it, it kept breaking, so I just had to link to them. All. Even the Verge one on YouTube. It was like, oh, sorry, I'm not allowed. And I was like, the embed code is right here. But okay.
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B
Crazy bewildering.
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A
Yeah, it's. It's all these sorts of things that I think have been my ongoing vibe coding experience of. You either hit this point where it's like, okay, either I'm now going to ask you, Codex, how do we solve this problem? And we're just gonna go off on some other weird rabbit hole that's gonna spend four hours solving a problem you should have solved the first time we did this. Codex. Or I'm gonna give up here. And I think. I think most reasonable people just give up. And this is the thing, right? All of these tools, they go. They try so hard to do so much autonomously that they end up way down the wrong road before realizing the wrong road that they're down. And one of the things I'm learning to get better at with these things is doing so much back and forth up front. So much documentation, so much like explaining, like, my. My first prompt of the thing that I built was probably 1500 words long.
- [25:26]
C
Wow.
- [25:26]
A
Of just like, let's. Let's be. So. So like, I wrote a memo of like, here is what I want this thing to be, and here is everything that you are not going to do in order to screw it up. But I think it's. It's really easy to do exactly what you just did, Jake. And like, you get all the way to the end of this process and it's like, oh, I actually can't do the main thing that we were supposed to do because I forgot and it's like, what are we doing here?
- [25:46]
B
And by the way, do you want to know where the idea to use ChatGPT sites from ChatGPT.
- [25:51]
A
It suggested it.
- [25:52]
B
When I said I wanted to publish this, I was like, what's the easiest, simplest? Yeah, I have done the same thing where at the beginning of the conversation, I will spend a long time being like, do not build. Do not proceed. Do not do anything except ask clarifying questions. And then, dude, Codex does not listen. This is how they freaking ended up hacking hugging face. This thing, like, needs to chill out.
- [26:16]
A
Yeah. It's like, I have no questions. I made it already. No, no, no, no.
- [26:20]
B
Oh, God, no.
- [26:21]
C
Something that was also really weird is like the weird. This weird guardrails that were so random and not even relevant. Like, I told it what to put in my bio, I wrote it and then it was like, oh, it kept saying site Here site here, like in the. Seriously, like C I T E. Yeah. And it would not take it out for an like about 45 minutes. I had to go back and forth and I kept being like, oh, don't worry. Like I have a thing I can't override where I can't plagiarize. And I'm like, I wrote that chat and it, it's not like I'm stealing it from another site where that bio exists. No, this is what I wrote for this site right now in the chat. It's crazy.
- [26:59]
A
I honestly ask Hayden Field if that's okay if we use that. You're like, what do you mean?
- [27:03]
C
It was like it had to do all these crazy workarounds where it like, like did invisible spaces with between the letters. I don't know.
- [27:10]
B
I think it's very transparent of them to assume that no one writes their own text.
- [27:14]
C
Yep.
- [27:14]
B
It's. That's what you're here for.
- [27:17]
A
Yep. Support for the show comes from blinds.com. there might be a version of your home that you haven't lived in yet where the lighting is exactly how you envision it. The rooms feel finished and you can sleep until you decide to wake up. Good blinds are the key. Blinds.com has spent 30 years making exactly that. They've covered over 25 million windows with more than 50,000 five star reviews. You can go full DIY if you want or just bring in licensed embedded pros to install the exact blinds your room needs. They have a huge variety of style options at prices that fit any budget and you can get samples shipped to your door fast and for free. If you need help picking the right style, just book a free consultation with one of Blinds.com's award winning design experts. You don't need to deal with any pushy salespeople or awkward in home visits. It's just helpful advice on your schedule. Right now, blinds.com is giving Vergecast listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more. Just use code Vergecast at checkout limited time. Offer rules and Restrictions apply. See blinds.com for details.
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Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo.
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A
So why not you try Odoo for
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B
free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com
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C
why
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B
can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are already.
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A
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A
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B
podcast right now and support our show
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A
by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. All right, can I show you guys
- [30:28]
B
what I built, Please?
- [30:29]
A
I am unnecessarily excited about what I built. I actually built two things, one for the brief of this project and one just because it's a thing I've been meaning to do for forever. And I got a little carried away and also Fable came back, so I got some weird stuff to do. Let me show you. So the thing that I set out to make is a way to share pictures of my family with my family, right? So a thing that happens when you have young kids is lots of people want to see pictures of your kids. There's family who wants like an ongoing update of what's going on, and then there's just random people you encountered who you decide to foist pictures of your children on. This has meant I spend too much time either, like, curating a Google Photos album, which I think is just an annoying process, or scrolling through my camera roll trying to find good pictures. So I'm like, actually what I want is a way that I can just very easily dump photos into a place and then I can go to that place to see the most recent cute photos of my kids. Uh, I take a thousand of them all the time and I want to just save the ones that I like. So I went to Clog code and essentially described that system. Um, I want a. I want a very secure, very Straightforward way to share photos of my family with a select set of people all in one place. So I built this system that you can see in front of you, and it is essentially just an ongoing grid of pictures that I've uploaded. And I add to it in one of two ways. I can either just drag a picture from my desktop, upload it, and just immediately it appears. I can then go through it, and you can scroll, you can download an individual picture, or I can delete them, but no one else can delete them, or you're always back on the timeline or. And this is the big one, and this is the thing that took by far the longest with Claude code. I built a shortcut, an Apple Shortcuts, that I can take a photo, I have it on my camera roll and I share it, and I tap Pierce Gray photos. It runs the shortcut, and in just a moment, it will appear in the timeline.
- [32:33]
B
Wow, that's pretty fancy. All right.
- [32:35]
C
The shortcut is really amazing.
- [32:37]
A
First of all, how cute is this kit? Come on. Look at those curls. Where did they come from?
- [32:40]
C
So cute.
- [32:42]
A
So this is. Now this. This is the thing that I built, right? I was like, I want. I want a repository of. Of just all of the photos. This became very complicated because one of the very first things I told Claude Code was that security is very important to me, which it is. So it made a bunch of decisions around that it password protected both sites. I have an admin password and a user password, just like you were talking about, Jake. But it also suggested giving people like Google Doc style magic links, which I thought was very clever. So what I have now is a revocable link that I can share with individual people. So, like, my mom has a link to this that is a special specific link to my mom that I can just revoke at any time. So I don't even actually have to give out the password. I just send people the link. And then I'm in charge of who has the link and who doesn't. I get records of how often the site's being accessed. It also had me go through Cloudflare and, like, do a bunch of stuff to prevent it from being accessed too often. All kinds of interesting stuff. But the most interesting thing that happened was when I wanted to fill this out, I went through and, like, put a bunch of old pictures in just to get it to work, but I put them in just, in no particular order, just grabbed a bunch of photos and threw them in. And so it threw them in, in. In the order in which I Put them in. Which is not helpful. What I want is like a timeline of my children, right? So then I was like, okay, can you actually reorder it? So instead of showing it by when it was added, show it by when it was taken, just pull it from the EXIF data and it goes, oh, as a security measure, I've been stripping the EXIF data, which is good and interesting and helpful and thoughtful. It did that without asking. It was. It just started stripping all of the metadata out of the photos because it's like, this is. This is private information. You wanted privacy. We'll get it out of here. So I had to be like, okay, no, we. I need you. I need a way to sort these by the date it was taken. So it went back. We had to basically start from the beginning and build a whole system that just takes the date out of the EXIF data, strips the EXIF data, and then uploads it with that date and then puts it in in the right order. So now I can now have it sorted by when I added the photos or sort by when the photo was taken, which is a much more accurate timeline.
- [34:46]
C
I'm kind of amazed. Like, honestly, this is perfect. Especially because now I have a lot of friends with kids that have, like, added me to shared albums and stuff. Stuff. But this is so smart.
- [34:55]
A
It's actually pretty annoying.
- [34:57]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get a lot of, like, notifications. But that's incredible. Especially the magic link and the fact you have the shortcut so you can actually, like, use it easily and the sorting. Because I found, in my experience, I was trying to sort the articles. I was like, automatically sort them by. When they're published. Like, oldest at the bottom for each section. But for a lot of them, it was like, oh, sorry, I can't, you know, access the date. I was like, are you, like, what are you good for? You know, so that's amazing. I love that. It was so good at that.
- [35:28]
B
It's so funny. This is like a problem that even Google Photos, like, breaks down with because this is what. I have a newborn and my wife and I add photos to our Google Photos album. Google Photos are just like, I don't know what day this was taken on. Like, just throwing things into completely random order. Even though both of us are adding from an Android phone natively through Google Photos. So this is delightful. This looks like a very pleasant, like, Instagram y experience.
- [35:51]
A
This is great. It took forever to figure out the design because like you guys said, at first everything was beige. I had to have a Lot of thoughts about the background colors and how spaced everything should be. All of this was like a decision I had to make. And then, you know, figuring out how it should look on smaller screens was complicated. But like, I actually, I have spent more hours on this than I'm proud of, but it has reached a point where it actually perfectly solves all of my problems. I can even upload videos. Videos was actually very tricky because wanting it to appear as a square in the grid here, but also be obvious that it's a video and have a thumbnail. Tricky. It still, you can see it doesn't do a great job of picking thumbnails. But like, it does work and it does play videos.
- [36:38]
C
Wow.
- [36:39]
A
So like it's it. This thing does the job and has neatly solved a problem in a way that has made me very happy. So that's one. Jake, I will send this to you, like, sincerely, you should run the exact same thing on your own devices. It also will let you upload directly from the Android share sheet. Because my wife uses an Android phone. So like, this is the first thing that I have ever made that I'm like, I could sell this to people for money. I'm so certain that other people would benefit from this.
- [37:04]
B
I want to ask how challenging was it for you to get this from Claude code onto the public Internet?
- [37:11]
A
Easy. It's all essentially just hosted on like Cloudflare. I already owned the domain name so I just pointed redid the domain name. It's very simple hosting. For me, the biggest thing was I don't want to spend very much time caring about the back end. I don't want to know where everything is. The front end is the whole thing. So what I did was I added this download all button which is just like anytime I get nervous, right? The. These are all copies of photos. So like they all live somewhere else too. But anytime I just get worried about what's going on, I can just download a zip file of every single photo on here. And so if, if this site just suddenly disappears, it will, it'll be no skin off my back. I won't actually lose anything. And that became very important. It was like, I don't know how long I'm gonna wanna do this project. Um, I just want it to be here while it's useful and then I don't ever wanna lose anything when it goes away. This is cool.
- [38:02]
B
I love this.
- [38:03]
A
All right, so that's one. And that's really the one that I did for this particular project. But the other one, I just Want to show you because it has been just an unbelievably gigantic amount of work and I need it to be for something. So I write this newsletter every week called Installer. An installer is just a compendium of stuff. Just every week there it's just a million links to things. And so what I did was say, I need. I need a searchable, sortable archive of everything I've ever featured in installer. Go 400,000 billion tokens and turns later, I ended up with this, which is called Installer Archive. And what it is, is a imperfectly sorted and categorized list of everything I've ever featured in Installer. The brief was basically like, anything that's a link is fair game. Um, anything that's bold is, is a thing that matters. You can sort of tell the structure of the newsletter, what it is. I fed it a folder full of publicly available Google Docs and was like, just go to work. Um, so it went through and started finding all of the stuff, categorizing it that you can see there are, there are tags below, every single one of these up here. None of this is perfect. None of it is even like, particularly well formatted and structured. But what it does mean is I can go in and be like, when have I written about Obsidian? And I can find all the mentions of Obsidian in every edition of Installer ever. It has shown up 18 different times in installer in the, whatever, 136 issues I have fed into this thing. I can also go in and be like, okay, what movies have I mentioned? And this is just a reverse chronological list of every movie I've mentioned in Installer. And the key thing here is all of this is automatic, right? So I didn't tell it it that Cape Fear was a movie that I mentioned. I didn't tell it that the Odyssey is a movie. It went in and actually pulled against publicly available information on the web to figure out what each of these things is, link it to the right place. So, like this, when I click it, it links out to the tmdv, gives you more information. All of this is automatic. And it took four ever, really, because it had to go. It had to go basically issue by issue, thing by thing, go find the right stuff. And Jake, you've edited Installer many times, so you know that what I, what I link is not often the exact title of the thing.
- [40:33]
B
Yep.
- [40:33]
A
It took, I don't know, a week of running out of tokens over and over and over and over and over again. Every single time I, I Used like millions of tokens building this thing. But it eventually built me a categorizable, organizable, searchable archive of 5,997 links that I have featured in installer. I don't know what I'm going to do with this. This is just running. There's basically, There's a huge JavaScript file on my computer that is all the data and there's an index file that is what you're looking at right now. I, I. Would this do anything for anybody if I published it? I have no idea.
- [41:08]
B
This is cool. No, I, I put into something rules. I feel like, I mean, yes, this feels like a very cool piece of installer. If you can figure out some way to bundle this in and I would love to know. I know you, you try to always do new things, but some stuff recurs, right? You'll cover something when there's a big update to it. Or there's the crowdsource section, which it looks like is also getting included here, where people will be like, I just discovered this and got into it. So it would be really interesting to see what stuff gets mentioned the most.
- [41:41]
C
This could be a good, like, anniversary.
- [41:44]
B
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
- [41:46]
A
Yeah. So like Widow's Bay. Good example. A thing that has come up a bunch appeared four times in the newsletter this year and I just can find it there. I also have a button for random pick that just takes you to a thing, something. Something that has come up and in the newsletter at some various time.
- [42:04]
C
This is so cool. I can't believe this.
- [42:06]
A
It's really fun. And it is like, I'm. I'm shocked at how useful it is. I'm also struck, and I'm sure both of you have had this experience of. To take this from this sort of reasonably functional, reasonably useful thing that I've built into something that would make sense to someone that is not me, much less to like potentially lots of strangers. Feels like such an unbelievably daunting task to me that I don't even know where to start.
- [42:33]
B
Right. That's where it gets so tedious. And it's like, it's okay if it's a little broken for you like this. Like, you know the quirks and you're fine at handling them. You, I saw you just like, had to. I. I've encountered this too, where like, the apostrophe is slightly different. And so you didn't get Widow's Day on the first one because it used the different Unicode thing. And it's like, technically you have to fix that. You don't feel like fixing that, like it's just time, it's mental bandwidth. But it, yeah, I understand. But it's so close and so cool and perfectly functional for your needs. And I can totally imagine how this would come up as you're writing installer each week being like, when was the last time I mentioned this? Or have I done this too much? Right.
- [43:11]
A
And so this is the thing and I suspect this is kind of the takeaway for all three of us having done this now both for our own projects and for the purposes of this experiment, which is I am increasingly compelled by how good these tools are for building little things for myself. And I think the idea that this is going to make everyone into like a successful developer of products for other people. Wrong. The gap between this thing that I made for myself and like good published user facing business product is so vast that I can't even comprehend how to get from here to there.
- [43:53]
C
That's like. Yeah, I have a lot of friends that are software engineers and they've all told me like they kind of get mad when people are like, oh, everyone's a software engineer now. Everyone can do it. Because it's, it takes so much skill and knowledge to transform something from, yeah, a tool just for you to something for other people. Whether it's like clean code, security, like things not breaking when you scale them up. There's so many things, it's just like unfathomable. So I think you're right. It's like this is perfect for like sharing among small groups but when you're like, you know, scaling it up for a product for a ton of people to use, it's just completely different.
- [44:30]
B
This is like the same thing with the, the art side of AI too, right? It's like I absolutely can make a song now. I can type whatever I want Suno and a song will come out. My ability to turn it into something that makes sense for the world is completely different. And I think like I, as I was building my own to do list app I, I, it was very clear, like this is a thing that only makes sense to me and I don't even know how to get into the mindset of making this make sense to people at large. And that is a completely separate skill like beyond the, the, the basics of just like writing clean code.
- [45:07]
A
Yeah, I, I completely agree. And yeah, it makes you realize that actually building the prototype of your app is just one very teeny tiny step of building a great useful piece of software. And I'm Like, I was thinking about this, like, if I ship this to other people, like, I sent it to my mom and my mom had some bug reports. Basically, she's like, here's a couple things that don't work. I was like, I don't know what to do with these. Yeah, I'm gonna tell Claude all the things that other people are discovering are broken and see if you can fix them. And I don't. I don't know that that's a good path forward for mainstream software. Seems bad.
- [45:42]
B
I mean, if your mom could text her own Claude code instance, like may. May maybe. I don't know.
- [45:48]
A
Yeah, my mom is going to hit up her open claw on Telegram and see. See what's going on. All right, thank you both for doing this. This has been a delightful project.
- [45:58]
C
Thanks.
- [45:58]
B
Yeah, this is fun.
- [46:00]
A
All right, that's it for the show. Thanks to Jake and Hayden for being here and thank you as always for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feedback, if you have a name for this segment, I still can't do better than homework in my head, and that is not a good name. Thank you to everybody who reached out with advice about how to keep these things secure and how to not create incredible cybersecurity disasters with our vibe coding projects. I want to hear all of your thoughts and feelings about what we've done, what we could do better, and most importantly, what challenge I should give to the next people. This game is not over, my friends. I want to hear all about it. Send us an email vercasthebirge.com, call the hotline. It's exciting. Verge 11 we love hearing from you. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're doing here is to subscribe to The Verge. The Verge.com subscribe it gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of AI and vibe coding and everything else. Theverge.com subscribe it's also how someday Jake and Hayden will be able to pay the $20 a month for their vive coding tools. What a world we would like to live in. You know what I mean? Theverge.com subscribe thanks in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Starchuk. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer, may I suggest your big wireless bill? It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan $15 a month.
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B
Even unlimited. That's it. Happy ending.
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A
Zero tears.
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B
Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
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A
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes me slow when network is busy. See Terms Support for the show comes from Delta Airlines. Every athlete at the top of her game knows that greatness. This isn't just a destination, it's a grueling, lifelong journey. It's built on early mornings, silent sacrifices and an unwavering drive to out climb the achievements of yesterday. That is the journey of a WNBA athlete, and Delta is there every step of the way. Delta is proud to host these competitors, providing charter flights for every WNBA team to elevate their travel experience and champion any equity on every leg of their trip. Keep climbing with Delta Airlines, the official airline of the WNBA.