Hello and welcome to the Vercast flagship podcast, Codex. I'm your friend David Pierce, 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. With 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 gonna be very fun, we're gonna 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 10th, 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 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. That was interesting. Every AI CEO seems to love an 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 to super intelligence.
Mind it, 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 AppToWade, and it's a game store. Android has always supported these third party App Store, but they came either preloaded, like the Amazon App Store on Fire tablets, or you had decided them.
But after years of legal fighting with Epic, which is the company that makes Fortnite, Google is now required to let those App Store 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 at just the wrong place. This is a test worth keeping an eye on. Just don't look at it too directly. You can ignore all this at the Verge.com. That is 90 seconds of the Verge for Monday, August 10th.
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Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on Espresso.com. All right, let's get to vibe coding. Joining me now, the Virgin's Jake Casternakis.
Hi, Jake. Hey, good to be here. And the Virgin's Hayden field. Hi, Hayden. Hi.
You were in a studio together. My phone was incredible. We're just going to move past it. It's going to be fine. I'm sorry we didn't buy you.
So about a month ago, we all left an episode of the Vercast with the same task, which is build a website to solve some problem in your life. I probably should have specified that this was to be a vibe coding 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. 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 of your life have you poured into vibe coding over the last month? Fun and fulfilling is not the words I would have shown. 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 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. Right. Like it was fun. I felt like I was building something and getting good feedback and getting somewhere.
This was not the experience. And I think the main reason was that I switched from Cloud Code to CodeX. I want to try using CodeX this time. And it was horrible. It did not go well.
Tell me why. It's bad. 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 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'd be like, no problem. Let's go. And the same thing happened every single time. I have seven different threads that happened over like seven or eight different days of working on this thing. And I would just like, 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 going to stop here. I mean, 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 a 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 one 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. All of that is true. Yeah, multi-agent swarm didn't materialize. I'm not about a multi-agent swarm.
Hayden, did you have a miserable time, too? I feel like this is not what I was hoping for, but it's also what I said. Yeah, I really did. And I was like, well, I did most of the time. And then there were some highlights.
Basically what happened to me was I was really having the every man's experience. And then I tried, I didn't have 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, I can't, I was so bad that it was so ugly. That I was like, I can't even look at Zoom. I have to switch platforms.
That's how ugly it was. So then I went to codecs. And I unfortunately couldn't use it without like painting. So then I was like, okay, let me just go to Gemini. And then I had my super long nine-hour conversation with Gemini.
And it worked great. I mean, I did have to have a couple of troubleshooting moments where I don't know. I would get mad and yell in all caps sometimes. I was really mean sometimes. We really went through a range of emotion.
But the good news is I came out with something and it worked so I'm proud. Hey, Hayden, my attitude toward these chapas has really evolved in past month where like two months ago, I was like, I'm going to be really polite because these things are made in a bizarre way where they will do more effort if I'm polite and also get down the road. They decide to take over the world. I'm going to be on their good list. And now I'm just all caps two words, stop.
Do this. You're like disregard. And I'm just like, listen to me. Please. I was like acting like a teen.
I was like, what the heck is this? I asked you to do this. Yes, yes. I was really like, and it was like, I understand the frustration. And I appreciate the candor.
Yes, yes. Oh my God. But yeah, I used to be to me, like the lowest effort thing is really being polite. But now I get so angry. Yes, yes.
I'm like, this is ugly. Like, what do you think? Yeah. This is so ugly. First of all, I agree with all of this.
I have become, I wouldn't say I've gotten meaner to my chatbots, 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. So all right, let's get into some show and tell. 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 use mostly, it sounds like Gemini, Antigravity. I did Cloud Code, which is the one I paid $20 a month for. And it's the one I'm going to use for all of these things. Who wants to go first in some show and tell here? I want to see the thing that you've built.
I want you to give me the Shark Tank pitch. And then I want to see it. Hayden, I think you should go first. OK, 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 website online.
So keep that in mind. All right, I'm excited. I made a portfolio site solely because my old site was from 2022. And it had my morning group email address. And it was just embarrassing.
Like a tech reporter cannot have that old of a site. So I revamped it. OK, what was the starting point? Give me that you don't have to give me the exact prompt. But 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. Yeah, my very beginning was like, I need a new portfolio site. Here are some that I like. Keep it sleek, but make it a little bit fun, and include some 90s Easter egg elements.
That was the energy. I unfortunately learned that I was asking for way too much with one prompt. But we did our best here. So this was mine. It's the home page.
So my about is just my bio. And then I have this Y2K looking resume button, which I was happy about. Then I have 90s mode where you can like. Whoa, OK. OK.
You just changed it from where the sparkle is like teal. This is giving. I tried really hard on my Tumblr blog. It's kind of what I'm getting here. That's what I was going for with the 90s mode.
I wanted it to be really, I'm going to make it even more fun at more time. But yeah, the top pink and blue, there's a lot going on. So did you make all of these color decisions? Or did you just say do a 90s mode? And it did a 90s mode.
I said do a 90s mode, and it did it. So there are multiple things. I would change it. I would probably do more crazy fonts. But it's good for now.
Then I had on all accounts, no matter what mode you're on, regular or not, I have a big chunky cursor from back in the day. And when you click, it has stars coming out of it. The habit tracker I made. It's a callback for our loyal listeners. And then I made a TV and podcast link.
So I have a bunch of Verge cast and decoder episodes on here. It's embedded that you can just listen to, which is cool. Did you find each of these yourself? Or did you say go fight appearances that I've made? 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 would break. And I had to embed them.
It was the most annoying thing in the world. And scrolling all the way back to last year and stuff in the Spotify episodes with 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 broke them out by scoops or things. That's not the wrong way. Because 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, go find some of the best, most impactful stuff written by Hayden Field on the internet. Nothing on Earth should be better at that than Google Gemini.
Right. And I tried that. I tried using other child. I tried all of the plappers on this. And they were not good.
They found maybe one or two things each. And then the rest, they could not. Interesting. I don't know. Maybe I should.
I have been trying to do this exact same thing with Gemini a bunch recently, where people will keep asking me for verticals on 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 it. I'm like, links, give me the links. You're all the 29 pages of pieces I've done all year. And then all my old pieces, it was crazy. But it was made it work.
Speaking tab and then a contact tab with just emails. So no longer my morning green email. We actually have my Verge one, luckily. And then, yeah. So it's pretty simple.
Tell me about the backend here. Where is this website hosted? So I used to have a Wix site. And I was really sick of it. And I couldn't even upload an index.
I couldn't even upload an HTML file. Because they are trying to have a barrier there. And only make you use Wix. So I left Wix. And 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 a domain I already own. So now it's live on my actual website, which is exciting. Hey. We love. That's pretty good.
OK, what was the part of this that took the longest? Like technically speaking, the most back and forth with Gemini. What was the biggest, the second point? This is hilarious. The biggest sticking point that took so long was literally this button.
This button was a. Your resume button? Yes, it was like a hellscape. I tried everything. It was absolutely horrible.
At first, I tried to make it shape. I honestly was fine with the normal button. It didn't have to be this cool. I was like, oh, just make it cloud shape. You're like, just make it a little fun.
Like even not a 90s button, just a regular button. Just 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 90 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. There was this interesting thing that I ran into last time when I was working on my email client, where I was using Cloud Code and Cloud Code's design for the client was like, hideous. It was very bad.
But then they have a separate program called Cloud 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 Cloud Code had made into Cloud Design. Cloud 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 I was like, hand this over to Cloud Code. And I'm like, why can't you do this together? Why does it not one system?
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. It was like multiple colors of beige. So many colors of beige.
It does look beige, yeah. And then it looked like it was like a like a man, like not cool. Like it was like a weird manual. Like I just, it was horrible. I mean to that.
That's the one in the cool way. It was like, it was. And I promise. It was just so weird. And then codecs, I will say I wish I could have used codecs because I had seen some cool examples of codecs websites recently.
Like I saw someone made like a wedding website with like a cool thing where you can walk around or like a game made out of text. Like there are cool websites I've seen recently, but I just couldn't try it because you know, you can't use it for free and I was having the everyman experience. So that's good. Yeah, I think there is a real, if you want to pour your life into making your personal website, it is sitting there for you. You can do some pretty cool stuff.
But I also think you, without spending a dime, actually landed in a pretty good place. That's about all you could ask for from a system like that. That's pretty good. Thank you. And since I did not update it since 2022, we all know I would not have poured my life into it.
I'm glad that I was forced to via this. And you didn't have to use Wix, which no one on Earth should have to in the 2026. Let's work here. Jake, what did you build? So this summer, my wife and I thought it would be a fun idea to sign up for a farm share.
You know, the thing where you pay a weekly fee and some local farms should be some random assortment of vegetables. Just in case you're wondering, everybody, yes, Jake does live in Brooklyn. Sorry, I'm still listening. Every now and then, we sign up for it. We're like, this is going to be such a good idea.
We're going to get 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 just never musical out there in their life. So it's just true. I honestly, I need to stop myself because I will spend a long time complaining about this specific CSA.
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'm busy. And so I'm like, I have 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 a nice simple little thing. So now it's farm to Jake to table. It's kind of what would have been better than me.
I landed on farm share share. Oh, I like that too. And so this is what we built using Codex. So little things. Can I just tell you my immediate idea?
This to me looks like the first ever prototype of Amazon.com. I think that's a high compliment, David. I appreciate it. To be fair, Amazon.com has spent 25 years getting systematically uglier. So I think to say it was the very beginning is actually a nice thing I can say.
I also want to know what the logo is. Like what is it? It's a really good question. So Codex, Codex's design shops are, I'm going to say, different than most people that you have designed. So it's first draft.
It went photo realistic. And 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 minimalist geometric idea of fruits and vegetables. I assume it's supposed to be radishes in a cabbage. Yeah. It's like gesturing at those things without being those things.
I kept telling it to make different iterations of it, hoping you would. Because I'm like, oh, that's an interesting. There's something there. There's something there. And it never got closer.
It never quite 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 yeah, the design, I think, there's room for improvement here. But yeah, you visit the website.
And there's a separate, there's a log in here. I'll show you. If I sign out, if it works, here we go. So first is a little passcode. You got to know what the password is to get in.
I like this. It's called the friend passcode. I didn't write any of this copy. By the way, this is all chat sheet. Oh, I kind of wish you would put that because friend pass makes it a lot more like, oh, I still care about you.
It's just a quick little get. It's your year where friends. Yeah, exactly. Love that. All right, so you log in.
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 a week. And the ones that I'm keeping are kind of marked. 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. So if I'm going to hang out with somebody this week, I'm seeing you soon, right, as your name claimed, boom. And there is a notification system, allegedly, that I have not tested to see what works. So in theory, you should get an email now being like, David, just signed up to get your scallions, or I guess in this case, your rhubarb.
Yeah. And then you're like, OK, cool, I'll bring it to the office next time we're both going to be in the office. Yeah, exactly. The big issue I ran into, well, there are a lot of issues that ran into. But I just got to come clean here.
This is not actually published. And the reason is I used chat GPT sites, which is a plugin for chat GPT 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. It constantly breaks. It constantly doesn't have access to it.
And can't great. Codex doesn't know how to ask for permission to things. Sometimes it just forgets. It's all I can't possibly log in. And I'm like, oh, you asked me to put in the password.
I know the password. I'm like, yes. We made the password together. And it's like, who's to say? And so this is why I had to keep making new chat windows, because it would be like, ah, I guess I just don't have access.
And I was like, oh my god. And so, you know, super intelligent. So 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, we built it on this platform to publish it.
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 my attempt. And this could be just for coworkers, I will say. You could probably share it as somebody who is also in our enterprise demand.
So this might be the farm share office share. I want some fava beans are my favorite type of beans. See? There are problems. They don't look very good, but you're welcome to have all ring men for you.
Can't wait. Also, I will say mine had a similar problem. And then it kept telling me, like, I can't embed things. Sorry. And I was like, it's said it went against its guidelines for YouTube videos.
And I was like, it wasn't like a YouTube video that didn't have the person. It's 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 a link to them all. Even the Verge went on YouTube. It was like, oh, sorry, I'm not allowed.
And I was like, embed code is right here. OK, crazy. Be willedering. Yeah, it's all these sorts of things that I think have been my ongoing vibe coding experience. If you either hit this point where it's like, OK, either I'm now going to ask you, Codex, how do we solve this problem?
And we're just going to go off on some other weird rabbit hole that's going to spend four hours solving a problem. You should have solved the first time we did this. Codex, or I'm going to give up here. And 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 explaining. My first prompt of the thing that I built was probably 1,500 words long of just like, let's be so, so good. 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 really easy to do exactly what you just did, Jake. And 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. What are you doing here?
By the way, do you want to know where I got the idea to use Chatchy Beauty sites from ChatchyPT? It suggested it when I said I wanted to publish this. I was like, what's the easiest, simplest. Yeah, I've 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're freaking ended up hacking hugging face. This thing needs to chill out. Yeah, it's like, I have no questions.
I made it already. No, no, no, no. I need to go. Oh, god, no. Something that was also really weird is like the weird guardrails that were so random and not even relevant.
Like, I told it went to put in my bio. I wrote it. And then it was like, oh, it kept saying site here, site here. Like in the text. Like CIT, yeah, and it would not take it out for like about 45 minutes.
I'd go back and forth and I got to be like, oh, don't worry. Like, sorry, I have a thing. I can't override where I get plagiarized. And I'm like, I wrote that in this chat. And 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 was crazy. You know, I was like, I think that's Caden Field. If that's OK if we use that. What do you mean?
It was like, it had to do all these crazy work rounds where it like did invisible spaces with it between the letters. I don't know. I think it's very transparent of them to assume that no one writes their own text. Yep. It's that's what you're here for.
Yep. And it's ready to go from day one.
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All right. Can I show you guys what I built? Please. 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 up 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 an ongoing update of what's going on. And then there's just random people you encounter who you decide to voice pictures of your children on. This is meant I spend too much time either curating a Google Photos album, which I think is just an annoying process, or scrolling through my camera roll trying to find 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. I take a thousand of them all the time and I want to just save the ones that I like. So I'm going to call out code and essentially describe that system. 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 grade 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 I can then go through it and you can scroll. You can download an individual picture or you 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 Cloud Code. I built a shortcut and I'll put 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. Wow. That's so fancy. All right. I know.
That is really amazing. First of all, how cute is this kit? Come on. Where did they come from? So this is now this is the thing that I built right?
I want a repository of just all of the photos. This became very complicated because one of the very first things I told Cloud 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.
It also suggested giving people Google Docs 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 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 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 put a bunch of old pictures in just to get it to work. But I put them in just in no particular order to describe them through the min.
And so it threw them in in the order in which I put them in, which is not helpful. What I want is a timeline of my children. 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 exit data. And it goes, oh, as a security measure, I've been stripping the exit data, which is good and interesting and helpful and thoughtful.
It did that without asking. It just started stripping all of the metadata out of the photos because it's like, this is private information. You wanted privacy. We'll get it out of here. So I had to be like, okay, no, I need a way to sort these by the data 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 exit data, strips the exit data and then upload it with that date and then puts it in the right order. So 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. 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 share all of them and stuff, but this is so smart. It's actually pretty annoying.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get a lot of like notifications, but that's incredible, especially the magic link and the fact you have the shortcuts 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 automatically sort them by when they were published, like oldest at the bottom for each section.
But for a lot of them, I was like, oh, sorry, I can't access the date. I was like, are you like, what are you good for? So that's amazing. I love that it was so good at that. It's so funny.
This is like a problem that even Google Photos like breaks down with it because this is what I have a newborn, my wife and I had photos to our Google Photos album. Google Photos are just like, I don't know what data is what they're taking on. Like just throwing things in total, 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 experience.
This is great. It took forever to figure out the design because like you guys said, first everything was beige. I had a lot of thoughts about the background colors and how space 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've 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. Wow. 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 this 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 had 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. I want to ask how challenging was it for you to get this from Cloud Code onto the public Internet? Easy. It's, it's all essentially just hosted on like Cloudflare. I already own the domain name.
So I just pointed, read 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, I don't want to know where everything is. The front end is the whole thing.
So what I did is I added this download all button, which is just like anytime I get nervous, right? The, these are all copies of photos like I'll 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 they 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's like, I don't know how long I'm going to want to do this project. I just want it to be here while it's useful. And then I don't ever want to lose anything when it goes away. This is cool.
I love this. Great. 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 in every week called installer. And installer is just a compendium of stuff. Just every week there's just a million links to things. And so what I did was say I need, I need a searchable sort of archive of everything I've ever featured in installer.
Go. 400, billion tokens and turns later, I ended up at 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. Anything that's bold 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. So it went through and started finding all the stuff, categorizing it that you can see 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? I can find all the dimensions of obsidian in every edition of installer ever. It is 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 like I didn't tell 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 TMTV gives you more information. All of this is automatic and it took forever. Really? Because it had to go basically issue by issue thing by thing, go find the right stuff and Jake, you've edited in installer many times. So you know that what I what I link is not often the exact title of the thing.
Yeah, 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 use like millions of tokens building this thing, but it eventually built me a categorizable, organizable searchable archive of 5,997 links that I 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.
Would this do anything for anybody if I published it? I have no idea. This is cool. No, I think this rules. I feel like, I mean, yes, this feels like a very cool piece of installer.
You can figure out some way to bundle this in. And I would love to know, I know you try to always do new things, but some stuff occurs, right? You'll cover something when there is a big update to it or there's a crowdsourced section, which it looks like it's also getting included here where people will be like, I just discovered this and got into it. It's really interesting to see what stuff gets mentioned the most. It's going to be a good anniversary.
Yeah, exactly. 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 confided there. I also have a button for random pick that just takes you to a thing.
Something that has come up and in the newsletter at some various time. This is so cool. I can't believe this. It's really fun. And it is like, 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, reasonable, useful thing that I've built into something that would make sense to someone that is not me, much less to potentially lots of strangers. Feels like such an unbelievably daunting task to me that I don't even know where to start. Right. That's where it gets so tedious. And it's like, it's okay if it's a little broken for you.
Like, you know the quirks and you're fine at handling them. I saw you just had to, I've encountered this too where the apostrophe is slightly different. And so you didn't get Widow's Bay on the first one because it used the Unicode thing. And it's like, technically, you have to fix that. You don't feel like fixing that.
It's just time as mental bandwidth. But 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 in Starry Suite being like, when was less I mentioned this? Or how I done this too much?
Right. 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.
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 takes so much skill and knowledge to transform something from, yeah, tool just for you to something for other people, whether it's like clean code, security, like things not breaking when you scaled them up. There's so many things. It's just like unfathomable. So I think you're right.
It's perfect for like sharing among small groups, but when you're like, scaling it up for a product for a ton of people to use, it's just completely different. This is like the same thing with the art side of AI too, right? It's like, I absolutely can make a song now. I can type whatever I want to, you know, when 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, as I was building my own to-do list app, it was very clear, like, this is the 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 basics of just like writing clean code. Yeah, 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 shut this to other people, like I sent it to my mom and my mom had some bug reports basically. She's like, here are a couple of things that don't work. I was like, I don't know what to do with this. I'm going to tell Claude all the things that other people are discovering are broken and see if you can fix them.
And I don't know that that's a good path forward for mainstream software. It seems bad. I mean, if your mom could text your own Claude code instance, like, maybe, maybe, I don't know. Yeah, my mom is going to hit up her open claw on telegram and see what's going on. All right.
Thank you both for doing this. This has been a delightful project. Thanks. Yeah, that's fun. 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 vibecoding 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, first.com, call the hotline, it's 6 verse 1 1. We love hearing from you.
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The Verge.com is the Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Josh Gajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, and Travis Lord-John. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.