I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times.
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, Grok gets caught with its pants down. Can anyone stop its viral bikini image generator? Then we're vibe coding again. Kevin and I compare notes on what we're building with Claude Code. And finally, it's a Reddit mystery. How a scammer tried to fool us all using AI-generated evidence, and how I cracked the case.
Well, Casey, happy 2026. It's good to be back. And we would like to start the year by talking about something that happened over the break, which is that there's been a big scandal brewing over at X. Boy, has there been. I imagine many of our listeners have seen by this point that X is in a lot of trouble because of the way that its Grok chatbot has been generating images of celebrities, women, children that are highly sexual, and for the most part has been declining to remove them or even really comment on what has been going on.
Yeah. So, I started seeing this over the break. Something happened where, you know, Grok, which I think people on X had been using up to that point mostly to kind of settle arguments and fact-check other people. And then all of a sudden, I started seeing people using Grok to like undress photos of mostly women. You know, 'Grok, put me in a bikini.' 'Grok, put this politician in a revealing, you know, lingerie set.' 'Grok, take off this person's pants.' Like it just seemed like this started to happen pretty much overnight in a way that was really sort of troubling and unchecked, as you said. So can you just help me understand like what actually changed here? Was there some setting that was changed? Was there some new model that was released that allowed people to do this?
So we don't have a lot of good answers to those questions. I can tell you that this trend of what is sometimes called nudifying really takes off in 2023 as these image generators start to get better, because they find that you can make a lot of money doing it. There are a lot of men in particular who will just spend tons and tons of money on making these sort of non-consensual images, as you say, mostly of women. When it comes to Grok, they had previously said that they'd licensed an image generator from a company called Black Forest Labs, and they were using that as sort of from the moment that they started using image generation. But in December 2024, they said that they were using their own image generator, which is called Aurora. And while again we don't have great details, there is at least plenty of anecdotes online that over the past several months, let's say, the guardrails around creating nudity and sexual imagery appear to have been relaxed. And so there is now at least one thriving subreddit that is devoted solely to making porn on Grok. As you said, these nudify apps have been around for several years now. But they've kind of been hard to access. Some of them relied on these open-source models. You had to kind of know how to use them, or they were sort of kicked out of the app stores for being against their policies. But what seems notable about this to me, at least, is that it's all happening not only on a major social network, but in public. Like people are literally doing this in the replies of their posts on X. So is that what's new to you about this? The sort of the publicness of it.
Absolutely. Like it is upsetting enough if, you know, some man takes an image of a woman and creates a naked version of her without her consent. Like that is a bad thing. What is so shocking about this is that you can just see it happening in real time. Like several outlets have just been going into the Grok account and they're seeing it making hundreds and thousands of images in response to user requests, and anyone can go in and view them. And of course, that is most upsetting to the victims of what I am going to call attacks, because you still have normal people using X to do things like posting a photo of me like out on a hike or whatever, and then some freak shows up in your mentions and says, 'Hey, put her in a bikini.' And then it does, and then you as the victim are looking at that in your replies.
That's crazy. So obviously X and Elon Musk are not outraged about this as many users are. They seem to sort of think the whole thing is a joke. But my question is like, are there guardrails in place? Are people sort of jailbreaking Grok to make it do this, or is this like literally a sort of mainline advertised feature of the Grok app?
It's a great question, and no, they are not jailbreaking Grok to do this. They are just sending replies on X saying, 'Grok, do this,' and then it is doing this, and they are not having to get particularly cute with their language. They are just literally asking to see images of women in bikinis.
And I mean, one question I have about this is just like, how are Apple and Google and their app stores okay with this?
Bro, thank you. Last year, I was writing about the introduction of Ani, the sexual companion bot that they got put into Grok. And I went on to the iOS store and noticed that Grok was rated for children 12 and older, and I thought that seems like pretty young to be, you know, giving access to a sexbot. So I sent a message to Apple and I said, 'What's going on?' And the message I got from the App Store team was like, 'Uh, like, well, we're looking into it.' And my honest sense at the time was that they're going to make a change. Like it's obvious that, you know, they're just going to absolutely do something. Well, they didn't make any change. And then I went on this week, Kevin, in the wake of this new, you know, CSAM nudifying scandal, and I found that Apple has changed the rating for Grok, and it is now rated for children 13 and older.
Yeah. So, sorry to all the 12-year-olds out there that were sort of having a free-for-all. You're going to have to wait till your next birthday before you can use this thing again.
That is genuinely shocking to me.
Yeah, me too. And I feel like it is one of the clearest cases I've ever heard of a blatant double standard on the part of the app stores. Like if a random startup showed up one day and said, 'Apple, I'd like to start selling my Bikini app in your app store.'
I think they would shut it down. There's no way. Absolutely.
They have policies against that kind of thing. But because it's X, because it's Elon Musk, because this app already has millions of users, maybe they feel less inclined to take action against it. I don't know. Do you have any insight into what's going on?
I don't have any insight, but I would be very confident that there are people inside Apple that have said we should change this rating, and there is someone who is sitting there saying no, if we do that, the vice president is going to tweet about it, and Marco Rubio is going to tweet about it, and Brendan Carr is going to launch an investigation against us for punishing X, right, and censoring them. So they're just in this state of paralysis because they're so terrified of standing up for the principle that women and children should not be attacked online.
Yeah. So there are some investigations going on right now, but like, do you expect this to be stopped at some point by any regulator anywhere?
So my instinct from history is like, yes, absolutely, like it is going to be stopped. France has called the sexual content clearly illegal. The UK government said that it is considering an investigation. The European Union said that it is very seriously looking into these complaints about Grok. India's IT ministry has demanded that X do something here. So I have to imagine that something is going to come out of all of that that is going to result in some sort of change. At the same time, do I think that the United States is going to intervene? Probably not. Elon posted a photo from over the break of himself having dinner with the president, right? So it seems like they're friends again, and that there just is not going to be any pushback here in X's home country.
Yeah. Well, I think that's a good overview of what's been happening and why people are talking about this. But we wanted to bring in our colleague Kate Conger. She is a reporter for the Times, friend of the pod. She's been on before, and she has been reporting on this Grok scandal this week and has actually been talking with some of the victims, some of the women who have been attacked by these Grok deepfakes, and I think we should hear their perspective as well.
Absolutely. Kate, welcome back to Hard Fork.
So, tell us a bit about the conversations you've been having with some of the victims of this behavior on Grok.
Yeah. So I think one of the big struggles for people whose images are being used in this way is how to respond and what to do about it. You know, people are obviously reaching out to X trying to get these things removed. And that process is taking sometimes a long time, sometimes it's not happening at all. And I think part of that is, as you know, we've talked about a lot, I think on the show in particular, that X has gotten rid of a lot of their content moderation folks, and they don't have large teams of people who are responding to this. You know, I've been speaking with some people who are working with children who have been deepfaked on X recently, and they are getting those images taken down, but it's taking sometimes 36, 72 hours, and these images are kind of sitting up and being commented on and exploited for quite some time. So, you know, it's a bit of a scary moment, I think, for people trying to figure out how to respond once they are put in this situation by Grok.
Can you just give us a sense of like why this is happening and what it's like for the people on the other side of it?
Why this is happening really ranges. And I've seen this happening to all kinds of different women. You know, women who are just sort of regular X users. Obviously, women with public platforms are being targeted by this. So political figures, Twitch streamers, you know, celebrities, actresses, they are all being kind of roped into this. And I think the motivations of the people who are asking for these images, you know, obviously they're sexual, but it kind of runs the gamut from, you know, wanting to create pornographic images of someone to I think wanting to just humiliate women in particular and sort of bully them, you know, tagging them in these images and really kind of trying to provoke a reaction from the women that they're making deepfakes of.
Can you give us just one specific example of someone that you've talked to and maybe tell us the story of their experience with this?
Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned I've been speaking to some folks who are working with children who have been deepfaked on Grok, and so I want to be kind of, you know, vague about the specifics of it because I don't want to further bring harassment to these kids. But, you know, there's a particular child who I'm thinking of who's been deepfaked several times. She's a somewhat public figure. And so that's where the original images are coming from, where people are asking for her clothing to be removed. And it's been pretty scary for her parents. She knows what's happening but isn't seeing it. But her parents are monitoring her social media and seeing these images pop up, which I think is really frightening for them. And then, you know, reaching out to Twitter and to advocacy groups trying to get these images removed, and, you know, just being really frustrated by the amount of time that it's taking. And I think being really outraged as well that, you know, someone can go online and request a nude image of their 14-year-old, and that this technology will comply with it in a really public fashion.
I mean, I don't know if this question is too obvious to ask, but I wonder what you can tell us about how it feels for these victims to just post what they think of as an innocuous image on X and then to go back on the site and see that it's, you know, now being turned into porn against their will.
Yeah. I think for some people it feels, you know, really angering. I'm hearing a lot of anger from folks, and also embarrassing. I've talked to some women who question whether to do anything about it or say anything about the fact that it happened to them because they feel embarrassed by it, and they don't necessarily want to draw more attention to the fact that these images of them now exist on the internet.
Can you also talk about the way that men will do this to women as a way of like bullying them out of the town square and getting them to sort of stop talking and stop participating in public life?
Yeah. I, you know, I think about this in particular with some of the politicians who I'm seeing being deepfaked. You know, it's people who, you know, female politicians who the users of X maybe don't agree with their views and are taking images of them from, you know, their public work and advocacy and requesting for those to be made nude or to depict them in a bikini or whatever the case may be. And I think there's a real, real obvious effort there to embarrass and to kind of warp these images of someone in their professional life into a really personal and intimate image.
I see what's happening, for example, with AOC. Like now, every time, you know, there's a photo of her, people will reply to it and say, 'At Grok, you know, put her in a revealing, you know, halter top or something.'
Which I think speaks to the fact that like this is not just a story about porn. This is a story about how a tool can be used to try to affect politics and like in particular to minimize women and to denigrate them and like and push them out of the conversation.
Yeah. Kate, I'm curious, like obviously we all know about the Mecca Hitler incident from last year where Grok started spewing these like anti-Semitic responses. In retrospect, a much safer version of Grok. But yes.
Yes, we pined for the days when Mecca Hitler was the worst thing that Grok could do. But in that sense, there was a sense that this was an inadvertent sort of bypassing of some safety filter. Something had gone wrong in the programming of Grok that caused it to behave this way. To me, this new image generation behavior feels much less accidental. It feels like there maybe there was even a meeting about it. This was obviously part of some plan, or at least that once users started using the technology in this way, the company did not take immediate steps to clamp down on it the way they did with Mecca Hitler. So can you tell us anything from your reporting about how this happened inside the company? Who is making the decisions about this kind of thing? Is this part of some sort of, you know, demented growth strategy over there, or like why is this happening now?
Yeah. So, first of all, this is not, I think, the beginning of Grok generating these kinds of images. As I've been tracing back through the images that Grok has been posting, finding images like this of women going back to June and July of last year. So I think this has been going on in sort of a lower volume for quite some time, and it really escalated over the holidays and with people kind of making it into a trend on X. You know, in our reporting about the Mecca Hitler incident, what we found was that Elon Musk had given a directive to the folks working on Grok that he wanted it to go viral. He wanted it to be edgier, sort of as a strategy to promote the tool and to get it onto people's radars. And, you know, the company perspective was that obviously with Mecca Hitler went too far. They turned Grok off for a couple of days, but it has been part of the strategy for Grok to try to create these viral moments. And I think to Casey's point earlier about the fact that, you know, there is this sort of silencing of women that's going on here. Grok, I want to be clear, is not the only AI tool that makes deepfake porn of women. It's far and away not the only tool, but it is the only tool that is doing that in an inherently public fashion on social media where these images can instantly spread and go viral. Right? A lot of these other image generation tools are happening in a private chat with a user, and Grok is not that. This is very, very public, and it's sort of intended to be that way and intended to drive traffic and interest. And that's the reaction that we've seen from leaders at X, right? So, you know, as this trend was picking up, Musk posted something about putting a SpaceX rocket in a bikini, kind of mocking and laughing at the fact that this trend is happening. We've seen X's head of product post about the fact that engagement during the time period that this was happening on X was higher than ever. So for them, you know, they're seeing the engagement that they're looking for. They're seeing the response. They're seeing people tapping into their X feeds and tapping into Grok, and that's being viewed as a positive.
So we talked a little bit before you came on, Kate, about, you know, the reactions that some of our countries have had, some investigations that are now underway. I want to talk about what's happening in the United States. Congress did recently pass the Take It Down Act. My understanding is that that's going to go into effect in May of this year. What is it going to require platforms to do, and do you think that it is going to be enforced in a way that is going to help the victims on Grok right now?
Right. So, Take It Down. The provision that's happening in May is that's the deadline for companies to set up a process for victims to request this kind of imagery to be removed and to face penalties if they do not remove it. So, you know, basically that would mean in this case sort of an enhancement of what X already has available for people to request that copyrighted images be removed, for instance, or to, you know, request that harassment or abuse be removed. So it's basically just asking these social media companies to build a framework for victims to go in and request takedowns. But it's not putting any legal pressure on X to not allow these images to be created to begin with.
Right. And of course, May is still four months away, and, you know, that's going to be cold comfort to some of the victims here, I suspect.
Is there any difference, Kate? Or maybe Casey, you also know the answer to this, but like my understanding is that the laws on the books now protect minors having this kind of thing done to them, and maybe that's why they are being successful, even, you know, in a delayed way, in getting these images taken down, but that adults in most states or most jurisdictions have very little recourse. Is that true?
Yes, that is true. It is illegal to produce and to possess CSAM, and so X is under more legal pressure, and I suspect that is why you're seeing them take at least some action here where they're not with adult women.
Yeah. And Take It Down will be available to adult women. So they will be able to use that process to ask for images to be removed, but, you know, there is, Casey's correct, that there isn't an automatic legal pressure on X to not create these images of adults to begin with. I have to say, on the whole, I find the response to this thing rather muted given the stakes of what is happening. Like I have covered so many backlashes against social media companies. Do you remember Cambridge Analytica? Right. Do you remember how mad people got at the idea that maybe a quiz that they had taken had resulted in some data being given to a polling firm that tried to influence the election? We almost shot the country down over that one. Now you have a website that is just taking girls' clothes off in public on demand, and it's being permitted by the website owner who is laughing about it in his own feed, and we're saying, 'Ah, what are you going to do? That's Elon. Didn't get where he is by playing by the rules.' So I just truly, like, I feel I'm losing my mind because I cannot believe we have gotten to this low, low point in the history of content moderation that this is resulting in so many shrugs by the average person.
It is really interesting, and, you know, I think it goes to show just how far Elon Musk has been able to push the Overton window on content moderation, you know, and obviously we've seen Facebook, all these other companies kind of copy his approach to roll back content moderation, roll back rules against harassment, and go with a community-moderated approach. And so, I mean, I think you're right, it's wild to see how much this has changed in a relatively short period of time.
You know, there was a time when something like this would result in this like exodus of users away from X, you know, and we'd see like Bluesky get a big surge of users, big Threads get a big surge of users. That's not happening this time. Like I guess like people who care about this stuff are all already gone, but like I don't know. We're just in such a crazy, crazy time in the history of content moderation and social platforms. And I do wonder if part of the sort of muted response to this has to do with the fact that this was all really starting to blow up in the time between Christmas and New Year's. And maybe, I don't know, maybe a lot of government officials weren't on their phones and they were hanging out with their families. I have no idea. But we're just starting to see regulators around the world issuing responses this week and saying that they want to open investigations or they've sent letters to X. But it has been a really slow response, I think, especially in comparison to other content moderation controversies.
Yeah. I think like honestly I think this will be one of those situations where unless it happens to the individual politician or maybe their daughter or their partner, that is not going to sort of rise to the level of a crisis, and then as immediately as soon as that does start to happen, we're going to start having hearings about it. But maybe that is sort of a pre-2026 mindset here. I also wonder if there's a way in which this is strategic for X. You know, they are the only explicitly right-wing-aligned social media platform that has served them quite well in dealing with the Trump administration. And there's...
Kevin, I think you're forgetting Truth Social.
That's true. I am forgetting Truth Social. I'm always doing that. And, you know, this kind of vice signaling does gross me out, but it may actually be effective in getting what they want, which is like, you know, cooperation with and forbearance from the Trump administration. And maybe it's unlikely that they'll see any consequences for this, at least during this administration.
I think what it gets them is engagement. People love porn, right? Like that's not been a secret. Like everyone has known forever that people like to look and click on porn. It's just that platforms have generally seen a lot of risks to their reputation and their larger businesses for embracing it. I think what's new about X is it's saying like, no, like let's make porn a pillar of what we do and see if that can help us keep up with the other frontier labs.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, to me it's just I don't get the business case for it because I also thought that Grok was trying to become like a full-fledged competitor to ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and like trying to get enterprise contracts and government contracts, and like if you're a Fortune 500 company, like why would you strike a deal with Grok at this point?
Truly, the funniest thing was they announced the Grok Enterprise product on like the same day that this story was blowing up. And I just love to imagine the head of enterprise sales at Grok who's like heading into his meeting with like the, you know, so this Fortune 500 company saying, 'We'd love to sell you, you know, a thousand seats of Grok to help you get business done.' And they're like, 'Well, now what's all this about the deepfake nudes?' Although, of course, Grok does have a contract with the US military.
Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, what has been really interesting to see in our reporting on Grok is that some of the differences between what Grok the chatbot is doing versus what Grok the Twitter account or the X account, I should say, is doing. And they're very different. There's more extreme political views being espoused by the X account. There are these deepfakes being generated by the X account. And often you can take the same query, put it into the actual like web browser version of the chatbot or into the app of the chatbot, and get a much more muted response. And so I think what they're doing is actually, you know, kind of having a more enterprise-friendly chatbot, which is the one that they're licensing and selling, and then this outrage-bait machine that exists on X and is getting engagement and clicks and bringing people to the social site.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one other question I have about this is whether in the absence of regulatory intervention, like maybe there's some way for the courts to get involved here. I mean, we spent the last decade arguing and talking about Section 230 and whether it shields platforms from liability for the things that happen on the social networks. And I think in most cases it does, but this to me feels different because it's not a user generating these sexualized images of people without their consent. It is literally the platform itself or the AI chatbot and system attached to the platform. Does that open up any new forms of legal liability for Grok or X?
Absolutely. You know, I read an interview with a lawyer in Bloomberg today that basically said exactly that, that they cannot hide behind Section 230 to get out of this. Like ultimately, it is their product that is creating these images. And so I do suspect that we will see efforts to hold X legally liable for some of the images that they're creating.
And I think X has really shoved the responsibility off onto its users in the cases of AI-generated images featuring children. They put up a post on their safety account, which is sort of the mouthpiece for any kinds of safety issues on the platform. They said, 'We take action against illegal content on X, including child sexual abuse material, by removing it, permanently suspending accounts, and working with local governments and law enforcement as necessary.' They go on to say, 'Anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.' So this is interesting, right? They're saying that users who request illegal material from Grok will be suspended and reported to law enforcement. But those users who are requesting the content aren't actually the ones who are posting the content. It's the Grok account that is creating these images, posting these images online. And so I think if they were being really true to their policies and saying we're going to suspend...
That would solve so many problems if they would just delete the Grok account. And I hope if one thing comes out of this, it's that.
All right. Well, Kate, thank you for this very depressing update from the front lines of content moderation, and Godspeed.
Well, Casey, since we got back from our holiday break, I have been dying to talk to you about our latest vibe coding experiments. It seems like vibe coding, which, you know, we talked about last year, had a moment over the break.
Kevin, it is time to build. We have been sort of vibe coding all year, but I must agree with you, developments over the past several weeks have made it easier than ever for somebody who is a total ignoramus when it comes to coding to make some pretty cool stuff. And since we'll be talking about AI, our disclosures: I work at the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and newcomer to the list, Perplexity, over alleged copyright violations.
Congratulations. And my boyfriend works at Anthropic.
Yeah. So I had this experience over the break of like mostly being offline for the first week of our break and trying very hard not to look at social media. I took all my social media apps off my phone. When I came back, the president of Venezuela had been captured, and everyone was talking about Claude Code on my feeds.
Now, were those two things related?
But one thing that appears to have happened is that Claude Code, which is the sort of autonomous coding agent made by Anthropic that kind of puts their Claude chatbot inside the terminal window on your computer and lets it do things autonomously, had gotten much better for reasons that I assume are related to Opus 4.5, the model that we talked about a couple weeks on the show. But I came back and saw comments from people like Andrej Karpathy, a well-known AI researcher, who said that after playing with Claude Code and similar tools, quote, 'I've never felt this much behind as a programmer.' This is someone who's probably a top 0.1% programmer in the world saying this. An engineer at Google, Jana Dogen, wrote that she had been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. And she gave Claude Code a description of the problem, and it generated what they built with a team of Google people last year in an hour. I saw similar sort of hype and praise from many different corners of the internet, including people like us who are not professional programmers, but were starting to experiment with Claude Code and seeing how much it could do and being pretty amazed by it.
Yeah, it truly had a moment over the break and was enough, I think, to get both of us to go back to our vibe coding terminals and see what we could build. And I happened to be away for a few days, and when I came home, my boyfriend had taken it upon himself to install Claude Code on my laptop, and he looked at me and said, 'It's time to build, and we're going to make some things.' So it was like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, just the two of us sitting next to the Yule log trying to vibe code.
Yes. I also spent several hours not with your boyfriend, but coding on Claude Code during my family vacation, much to the annoyance of my wife, but I did make some things that she actually thought were pretty cool. So we should talk about our experiments. I want to hear about what you've been building. I want to talk about what I've been building. But before we do that, like why is this happening right now? Why is this the moment that vibe coding has returned to the mainstream? So I think the way I want to answer that question is by taking us back about a year ago, since the last time we did a segment about vibe coding. The truth is I can really only remember one thing that we tried to vibe code at that time. That was the hot tub maintenance app, right? I had just got a hot tub. I was trying to figure out how to keep all the various chemicals in balance. Kevin was kind enough at the time to use Claude. Claude Code didn't exist to try to make an app, and we used it, and it was like sort of okay, but honestly, I didn't use it very much because it didn't work that well. I had similar results when I tried experiments at Claude. I was able to make some stuff that sort of worked, but there was absolutely nothing where I said, 'Oh, this is an actually useful thing that I'm going to use continuously in my life.' So while I was totally willing to believe that other people were, you know, having success vibe coding their own projects, if you tried to do much of this stuff a year ago, you just couldn't get that far.
Yes. And part of that is because it was actually a little clunky to do vibe coding a year ago. Like I remember building that hot tub maintenance app, and it required a lot of like copying and pasting, and like if I got an error message, Claude didn't always know like sort of how to handle that. But what has happened in the past year with Claude Code, and we should also mention like, you know, OpenAI and Google have similar tools now, but they have basically merged this into the sort of terminal app on your computer. So it's not, there's no more copying and pasting. Claude can just take instructions in plain English and go off and accomplish various tasks, and it will check in with you, but it can now do all of the orchestration and the execution itself. And I think that's important to say sort of at the top of this segment because honestly over the past year when people have talked about vibe coding, my eyes and ears have kind of glazed over because I always think, well, I'm not a software engineer. I don't know how to build stuff. I'm glad that you're able to make your little custom Chrome extension or whatever. That has no relevance to my life. We're going to talk about the stuff that we built today in the context of code, but really this is just all about like building digital tools. This is about like building things on your computer. And code is the foundation, but I think we're just now starting to move into a world where like if you have an idea and software is a part of it, you may be able to build it in a way that you haven't before.
Yes. Okay. So, Casey, tell me about what you built over the break with Claude Code.
It is something I've wanted for a really long time. I'm super happy with the result, and I'm just going to keep iterating on this thing because it is so much fun. I am truly having so much fun just tinkering. So, if Kevin, you would please go to your browser and enter into the URL bar cton.org.
Now, for I don't know 15-plus years, I have had a personal web page that's basically just like a business card, you know? It's like here's my name, here's like a link to my website. I got it on Squarespace. I paid them $200 a year. I now feel extremely silly that I've been paying them all of that money because using Claude Code, I was able to make truly the personal website of my dreams. Can I give you a tour of this thing, please? So, and by the way, listeners, I mean, stop what you're doing. Pull the car over. Stop. Put the laundry down and get out your smartphone right now. Go to cton.org. Another thing I love about this website, by the way, it's fully responsive. Like, I didn't have to build a separate version for the mobile phone. It just sort of expands and contracts depending on how big your browser window is. So, Claude came up with the design. It's sort of very dark. It uses gradients. There's all kinds of like cool fonts. There's also some fun Easter eggs. Like, Kevin, do you see how my face is right there at the top of the website? Yes. Go ahead and click on my face.
Oh, wow. You sort of like do a little jiggle.
There's like... It's very jaunty.
There's a crazy animation that you can do.
And then if you scroll down, you'll see I have my own Platformer, my newsletter, and I have Hard Fork. And I was able to just type into Claude Code, 'Hey, can you pull, I want like a little widget that has my five most recent stories that I wrote on Platformer and the five most recent episodes of Hard Fork on YouTube.' And it just built that like very quickly. And so now that will just sort of update live forever with, you know, all the new stuff that I do. I was like, 'Oh, it'd be cool if people could enter their email address onto my website so they could subscribe to Platform.' And so, 'Oh yeah, sure, we could do that.' So now there's a working box where you can just sort of type and subscribe to Platform. Or for my personal site, I wrote a little about me thing. And then I was like, okay, now we really got to show off. I'm like, 'Hey, why don't you go create a little feed?' So every time I post an update to Bluesky, you know, you can see my five most recent posts there. It did that. I noticed though that it was showing things that I had reposted without like showing the author. I was like, 'Well, I don't want reposts in my feed.' So Claude Code just went in and it got rid of all of the reposts. And so now it's only showing you my original post in the feed. It wasn't showing images. I say, 'Claude, could you please put the images into my Bluesky post that you put on my website?' It was like, 'Yeah, sure, we could do that too.' So everything that you're looking on this page, this is big. Everything that you're looking on this page, I did 90% of it in one hour.
Okay. Wow. So, like I realize if you're like a programmer, you might go on this website and be like, 'Oh, well, you know, this thing I wouldn't have done it this way or like this isn't that technically complicated.'
I truly do not know of a human designer that could have put this thing together in an hour, right? I have spent far longer just like fiddling with the settings in Squarespace, and I was just able to like get this thing absolutely cracking. I'm going to keep talking because I woke up.
No, this looks great. I should say like this to me, like it's very professional. It doesn't look like some of the early vibe coding experiments were sort of recognizably vibe coded. They sort of looked like a bad template had designed them. This looks good.
Like if I saw this and I didn't know, I would say, 'Wow, this guy's got a good web designer.'
Thank you. That's how I felt. I mean, you know, again, I encourage you to just like actually pull up the website because this thing has animations that are built into it. There are mouseover effects, right? So if you're like hover over like the Hard Fork widget, you know, like a little gradient line appears over it. So there's just all of these like cool little touches. Claude Code has a front-end design plugin that I...
use that I suspect was sort of really helpful here. So, this was sort of day one. Day two, I'm like, I'm having so much fun with it. Like, I have to keep going. Like, what else can I put on this thing? So, I was like, well, I should put a blog on it, right? And so, I start messing around. So, if you can go to cu.org.blog.
Yeah. And now I'm using a service called micro.blog, which is just kind of a dead simple blog. And I'm basically trying to recapture the spirit of 2010's Tumblr. And I'm just going to, you know, we'll see how long I keep up with this, but you know, there's a little widget that tells you what book I'm reading and what the last song I listened to on Spotify was. I put up a YouTube video that I liked recently.
Like I just realized as I was doing this that more than 20 years ago when I was in college, one of the first things I did when I got to campus was that I built a website and it was so fun. I used a software called Microsoft FrontPage. I absolutely did not understand what I was doing. Every single mistake I made, I was on Google for 30 minutes trying to figure out the mistake that I was making. And eventually I just got away from it because web design got too complicated and Squarespace came along.
And we are now back, Kevin, to the beautiful beginning where it is just fun to make websites again. You can do whatever you want on the web. And all you have to do is type what you want into a box. Are you kidding me? I am so happy about this. I am so happy about this. I'm having the time of my life.
I'm so glad. That's so funny because I also did this exact experiment over the break. I was like, I'm paying Squarespace — I looked it up, $192 a year to host my website that I built over a grueling, painstaking weekend in like 2020.
And I have been hosting it and just paying them. It is basically a glorified business card. And I thought, well, that's really stupid. And so, I would like you to open up your browser now and go to kevinroose.com.
Oh my god, I'm so excited.
