Hello and welcome to the first cast, flagship podcast of The Verge. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show we have a challenge. The way this is going to work, we're going to do a bunch of these in a row. But the way this is going to work is we have gathered a bunch of people. We're going to give them all a challenge, and then we are going to go off for several weeks and report back on what we found. Today we are starting with two of my colleagues, Jake Kastrenakes and Hayden Field, and we are going to do a vibe coding challenge. The first thing we're going to do is kind of lay the land, talk about where we all are in our vibe coding experiences, and then we're going to all go see who can do the best in vibe coding. It's a lot of fun. I'm very excited about this project in part because it's going to get me to actually get some work done for a change for the podcast. It's going to be awesome. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 29th, 2026.
Mythos is back. Kind of the Anthropic model that was once deemed too dangerous to release publicly, and actually threw even more chaos into the already chaotic relationship between Anthropic and the US government, is now being released to a Trump administration-approved list of organizations. Who those organizations are, who they will be, whether you'll ever get to use Fable 5 again, hard to say. Nobody seems to quite understand the AI regulatory environment right now. And given that the Supreme Court also ruled today that President Trump has the authority to fire two FCC commissioners, which changes the way that agencies work, whatever happens here, it will start with the White House.
Meanwhile, Comcast is splitting into two companies. In the latest of a seemingly endless supply of media mergers and unmergers, now there will be Comcast, the internet, cable, and mobile carrier, and there will be NBCUniversal, which is the studios, theme parks, and streaming networks, including Peacock. None of this, by the way, applies to Versent, which Comcast spun off in 2024. The media business just continues to be chaos. And a fun side note of this, by the way, is that I have a new disclosure to do here. I guess it's going to be something like Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, the parent company of The Verge. I'm going to have to get used to that one.
And finally, quick PSA for you. WhatsApp is rolling out username support later this year so that you can find people and be found without having to share phone numbers. The feature is not live yet, but you might be able to go to settings, account, username, and reserve yours. There are like 3 billion people on WhatsApp, so you should probably move fast. You can read more about all of this at theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Monday, June 29th. All right, now it is time for some vibe coding shenanigans. Joining me now, The Verge's senior AI reporter, Hayden Field. Hi, Hayden.
And The Verge's executive editor, Jake Kastrenakes.
It's actually chief shenanigans reporter. Thank you.
Chief shenanigans reporter. What I want to do here is something that you guys actually did a little bit of while I was on parental leave last year, which is just all simultaneously attempt to go on a technology adventure together. You guys all did vibe coding projects last year, and I listened to that episode of The Vergecast with like sheer rage because none of you tried hard enough and you all gave up too fast. And we're going to do some new stuff. So I have assembled the three of us, and the way that this is going to work is at the end of this episode I'm going to give all three of us a task, and it is largely a vibe coding-based task, and we are going to regroup in a month and just share what we have done on that task. You will be relentlessly shamed for not doing a good job or trying hard enough. But the world is your oyster. So, we're going to get to the task at the end, but what we were going to do is a task ahead of this. The first assignment I gave both of you was basically like go vibe code something that you have made that is useful and interesting in your daily life. And you both were kind of like, we've done this already. So, we're going to start our experience with some show and tell. And Jake, I want you to go first and tell us a little bit about your vibe coding setup and some of the stuff that you've built.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like what I should actually start with is the failures, okay, which is it turns out so when we did this last year, vibe coding as somebody who has no coding knowledge, it wasn't there, like it didn't work. Like we tried stuff and it was constantly flopping.
And then when I checked back in again, you know, this winter, oh, it had changed a lot. And so the thing you will find if you start experimenting with vibe coding is like you're going to make a lot of stuff that in the moment you're like, I'm cooking, like this is amazing, and then you use it and you're like, I have no use for this, like this is total garbage. So I made a bunch of tools that I thought would be useful for work. Different kinds of news digests, different kinds of things that would, you know, pull together Twitter feeds. Things that would... I just one time I told Claude, I was like, hey, find every single, you know, open US government database that is relevant to The Verge and, you know, pull all of the files that are relevant to companies we cover and then just like do some analysis on them. And it was just like, cool, let me just go get the API for like the Treasury, and it just like did it and it built it, and then I had all this data and I was like, there's nothing, like I don't know what to do with this. So, it's gotten there, like the technology has advanced a lot, but I think the thing that I found is that finding an idea that is useful to you specifically is harder than building it now, which is nice.
This is, I mean, this is like increasingly supported by the data, by the way, right? That like you look out into the vibe coding world and everybody is building tons of stuff that amounts to nothing. And this is becoming like an enterprise crisis because everybody's like, we're using all these tokens for nothing. What is the point of any of this money that we're spending? So you've encountered the same problem that every Fortune 500 company is having in spades right now.
Except I only paid like $20 a month, so it was not so bad. Eventually I did strike something though, right? So I found a small focused problem I have at work, which is that I have a lot of meetings with people on our team every single week, right? And by the time the next week rolls around, I have forgotten everything we talked about. And that's because like I've tried a million different systems for taking notes for these meetings. And every single time it's just I don't read my old notes back. They're kind of a mess. They're in different places. I had just like a long-running TextEdit doc. Like it's not good. And so I kind of thought like, oh wait, what if I have a notes app that is specifically for meetings with our team and I can list everybody's names and I will have it automatically roll forward every single new entry with the action items from our last meeting and I can have it automatically summarize, you know, the past few weeks of notes. And so now when I go to have one of these meetings each week, I'm like super prepared because it's giving me like a brief on what we've been talking about. I have the action items that I'm supposed to be coming in with. And this has been great for me. And so like this was the first thing I built that was really, really successful.
Okay. Wait, can you just pause for one second? Hayden, I want to know how that description makes you feel. I once described a vibe coding project to Nilay and he told me that it sounded like I was describing a dream to him and that has hurt my feelings ever since he said that. I want to know like does Jake's description of what he vibe coded do anything for you?
Yeah, I mean, I don't know, with vibe coding I feel like the simpler the better. Like it's usually solving a problem that like is really easy but you just can't get it together. That's how mine was at least, what I built. And so this seemed similar. It's like, yeah, he could, you know, take the notes and look back at them, but he's not. So he's like figuring out a small tiny fix that's going to make him look. So I feel like, yeah, I mean, it seems like simple enough to work in my opinion. Like, you gave us the prompt of the toothbrush test, like something you're going to use twice a day, and that's what I kept thinking about. So it's like this seems to pass that, you know? I feel like people try to like go too crazy with it and then they just, like we were talking about, it just flops and like they never use it again.
The feature creep problem is so real in vibe coding because you're like, I can do anything. Maybe I'll just do everything and it just all falls completely on its face.
I know exactly what Nilay is saying though because as a piece of software, like I think it's pretty polished, right? I could share it around, other people could use it. But doing this has made me re-appreciate people who actually make software so much more because this thing is precisely designed to solve my problems and it doesn't make sense for anybody else. It is specifically tuned to my workflow and I don't... I suddenly I'm like, how do you... if I'm passionate and I'm going to make a notes app, like how do I know it's a thing other people want? Like how do I know that it's an interesting idea? Because we cover this stuff all the time, David, like you've written about 9 million to-do apps and each of them has like an interesting marketable idea and like I don't know what that is for my app, but it doesn't matter because it's only for me. But that's why it's so... it's like I can't pitch this to somebody.
Jake, one more question for you before we get to Hayden's project. What is broken about the app that you made yourself?
I mean, this app is like really simple. It's basically just a Safari web view with some notes that I have. I hate to tell you, but like I haven't found it yet though. I have like out of paranoia like once a week I ask Claude to review it and be like, hey, make sure the data isn't going to fall apart. Make sure it's not going to delete all my notes. Like make sure I'm not going to lose everything.
Can I just make a quick suggestion? Just go back to Claude and say, hey, can we back all of this up as text files? Just do that for me and it'll make me feel better.
All right, I'll look into it. You're going to end up with like a web cache problem that is just everything's going to fall apart if it starts with localhost:3000. You've made mistakes.
That's my other vibe coding app. Do you want to tell us about that real fast?
Well, I made an entire email client.
Oh my god, I can't wait to hear about this. This is my dream.
Dude, okay, so like I've had this same email address for like over 10 years and it's been public the entire time. And so I get so much garbage. And so I was like, okay, how can I figure this out? How can I create an experience where I don't have to deal with a million emails at once? And the answer is just labels. Like it's just Gmail labels. But Gmail labels are like on the... they're like hidden in the corner. There's like not a fast way to access them. And I was like, oh, you know what would be perfect? You know how Gmail has like the big tabs up top for like promotions and whatever?
I was like, oh, what if I just put my labels up there? That would like solve my exact problem? Gmail doesn't let you do that. You can't choose what goes up there. So I was like, okay, I'll just build an entire app that puts my labels up there. And it's great. And it makes it super easy for me to like triage my emails because it like shows me all the stuff that's from like you guys, my co-workers. It has stuff from like known trusted contacts who I want to hear from. It has a tab for like literally like 5,000 plus unread newsletters. It's great. I love it.
You basically built yourself like a sucky Superhuman, which people pay $30 a month for. Like, that's kind of great. Some PM at Gmail is listening to this and is going to get a promotion by going and launching what you just described as a new version of Gmail.
I would really appreciate that, but yeah, but it's also like I had to like enable a bunch of weird Gmail API things. Every single time I did something, I would be like, Claude, please do not accidentally send emails to my entire contact list. Like it's a little scary. Like I would rather kind of not do this like a local notes app. Like the worst thing that happens is that I go into a meeting with you, David, and I forget what we talked about last week. Like it's fine. This one, the worst thing that happens is that I accidentally like spam every single person who ever...
You hack your own email. Yeah.
But for your localhost thing, it's like for some reason that I haven't quite felt like dealing with. I have to log in once a week and then the login involves me going back into my browser and there's this localhost thing and I just...
Yeah, it's fine. This is the kind of stuff that I really get a kick out of because my own experience, which we'll get to in a minute, is I have built a bunch of software that has a bunch of bugs that I would find completely reprehensible in anybody else's software, but in mine I'm like, ah, it's fine, I can deal with this. I don't know how to fix it anyway. Hayden, let's get to you. Have you been vibe coding? What have you built for yourself?
Yes. Okay. So I have been vibe coding. What I made was a habit tracker, which I know everyone makes, but for me, I have ADD. And so I really desperately need one. Like I've learned about myself that I can't like start a new habit without accountability basically. You know, it takes like 6 weeks, 3 to 6 weeks of me having accountability with someone else or with like an inanimate object, whatever, a habit tracker. I need to have some sort of accountability for like 3 to 6 weeks and then I'm set. I'm in it. I don't need the accountability anymore, but it is very tough for me to start a new habit. So every time I join a new gym, like I make five gym friends, I'm like, I got to really lock in here, you know, because I'm not going to do something just for myself. I have to just not disappoint someone else or not get a star on my habit tracker or whatever that is going to make me do the thing, not just the long-term knowledge that I'll be healthy or something. So at least in the beginning. So basically, I used to download all these different habit tracker apps, like you guys were talking about with to-do list apps and, you know, note-taking apps. And so I've tried like every habit tracker app. There's always something that bothers me about it or it's really expensive. I even downloaded this one that I loved for a while called Habit, but the problems with it were that you couldn't create a habit that wasn't every day. Like for example, I need to take my iron supplement every other day and it's something I'm always going to forget because you have to do it on an empty stomach at night and you have to take it with your vitamin C. So it's just like for an ADD person, that's just too many details to recall on the fly. And so yeah, or I don't want to work out every single day, but I also don't want to be like shamed for not working out every day. And if I see it on the thing and it's like workout and then I don't check it off, I will feel shame. Even if it's not a big deal, I just, you know, I have to feel like I'm succeeding in order to have motivation. Basically, that's how I work. And so what I made was a habit tracker app that has like a section for daily habits. It's extremely simple. It's like rectangles that each have a color and then when you swipe across the habit to mark you completed it, it becomes a deeper color and stars rain down. So you get a reward, you get a gold star.
Is this like a native mobile app you made yourself?
