A billion fake dollars are at stake in our first vibe-coding competition | The Vergecast

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Hello, Bears. Uh, as David has described, you each have $1 billion to invest in a number of vibe-coded projects that our lovely, brilliant listeners have taken time out of their days to share with you. They are across the world. Literally two continents' worth of listeners are represented here today. Uh, and uh, just for, for recordkeeping, a billion dollars is 1,000 million. Please only bid in increments of $1 million.

All right, let's get this show on the road. So, each of, each of our listeners are going to give you a little uh two-minute elevator pitch and then we will open things up for Q&A and then you may bid as much of your fake money as you want. Our first listener joins us from Washington DC. This is John.

Bears. I um so hi. Um

Hi. So um I have this, I'm going to step back. So this is uh this is a Skylight which uh I don't know if you guys have ever um, you're a dad um David. So, this is like a thing that normally hangs on your wall and it's supposed to be able to uh like you know plan your kids' like you know appointments that kind of thing. Um and it's basically just an Android tablet without a battery and it plugs into the wall and uh my wife bought this and I did not like it very much. I did not think it worked very well. So um through uh the use of uh AI I um got it working and uh obviously it's not working perfectly well. But if we go here, um, I can show you, um, you know, there's a dashboard. Um, I can actually, uh, control the lights in my home. And, uh, my favorite little bit is I can actually like do a, uh, grocery list app. And, um, once I've done it, it actually comes up as a little, uh, receipt. And I've made this specifically because, uh, I needed like, you know, I'm at the fridge and I, or my wife usually is at the fridge. She needs to, you know, send something to me to be like, can you please pick this up? Rather than having one running grocery list, I like getting them as tickets. And so now I get these Telegram messages and they go into TickTick. Um, but what's really cool about it is it's actually like completely adaptable because it's all just a web interface on the back. And so I can actually like go into Claude as it were or whatever and say, "Hey, I want an app that does this. I want an app that tells me where the metro is. I want an app that shows me uh, you know, what the PTOIC is doing right now. I want an app that sets timers." Um, and you know, plugs into Home Assistant. So, you know, I want an app that, for instance, like I've plugged my car into Home Assistant. So, I want a tab where I can press a button and it turns on the climate control and tells me how long it'll be to go to work. And if I'm running late, then like, you know, can I get a Lime bike or something else instead? I think it's really cool that it's like, it isn't anything. It's just a blank slate and you know, through just talking to it and spending a lot of money on tokens, um, you can get it to do whatever you want and that's what I've really enjoyed about it.

Yeah. And it, it actually hangs on your wall. So, it's got, you know, mounting points on the back and uh you can actually, so it, it looks just like a picture and you can upload whatever photo you want and it statically just has a picture frame and you tap it and then it, you know, goes to your dashboard.

Yeah. I mean, that's literally where I have it. So, I mean it's, it's actually like, ah, the fridge is here and this is behind the fridge and so you know when my wife opens it up and she's like there is no, there are no grapes in the house and what the hell is going on here and she can just angrily be like it and actually says like who's ordering, you know, so my wife can go and be like, you know, grapes and then type it in and then I'll get a text being like where the hell are the grapes?

Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's just a really old crappy Android tablet.

Well, here's the really cool thing actually that I love about this and I feel David, David might really like this. Um, if I use TickTick and my wife uses Trello. If I add something for her, it goes to Trello. If she adds something for me, it goes to TickTick. And as if you're familiar with TickTick, they live in Trello. They live in the cloud. It lives absolutely everywhere. And so I get it on my watch. I get it wherever. And um because all this does actually tick an um MCP. So it has an MCP server. There's like a TickTick MCP server and so like you know on the back end there's like a cloud server running on a uh it's actually running on a broken uh a headless MacBook Air uh that I removed the screen from and um so it just pushes that into the cloud and so I can access it from anywhere but that's what I thought was really cool about it actually is this solved a really specific problem which is Skylight really wants you locked into this app right um and into this ecosystem that doesn't talk to anything whereas this I like literally wiped it like there's no Skylight on this at all anymore. This is just um basically just a, a web, a web page that's running on the server. So it also what's nice is it doesn't matter how slow this particular tablet is. And in fact, I have an accessory for it, which is an old uh like Kindle Fire, Amazon Fire 6 inch, like but it's like literally 10 years old. And I noticed it's got a, it's a nice small screen, really high DPI. And this can run a server that then goes onto that and by kind of turning it into a kiosk, I can actually tap it and hang it on my wall and control like lights and stuff in the house. So, you know, it's really adaptable.

Hayden is down to a poultry $900 million worth of personal wealth. Embarrassing.

is Sarah joining us from Chicago, Illinois.

Hi, David. Hi, Hayden.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

So, um, I'm a parent of a two-year-old, and for me, the hardest part of parenting is like the cognitive load. It's the million things you have to remember. It's the 200 decisions you make every single day. And for me, where it really hit was 9:00 p.m. when I was trying to pack my son's lunch for daycare the next day, trying to remember what my pediatrician told me, what foods my son's been eating that he actually likes, whether or not I've served him something before, and at the end of it, I, I don't actually know what's in my fridge. So, I created this app. It's a combination meal tracker logger and it helps me keep track of what's in my pantry as well as what my son has been eating. So, it works like this. I go to the grocery store and then I come home from the grocery store and I toggle over to my pantry app and I tell it what kinds of things I just bought. Today, I just bought snap peas and I bought him some apples and some other things, right? And I can import it into my pantry, which keeps track of what's available to me, as well as whether or not my son likes it when I decide to serve him a meal. Um, I can go to the planner tab, which has all of his meals for the day. I can either do this ahead of time, if I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for the week, or what more often happens for me is after he's eaten a meal, I like, "Oh, yeah, this is what he ate today." So, I think today at lunch he had something like um a uh grapes and then uh you know he had some meatballs, I'm pretty sure, right? And I can add those to his lunch. Uh after he's done eating, then when I go back to the main tab, it will ask me how his meal was and I can tell it how much of that meal that he ate that particular day. So today I know at breakfast he ate all of his yogurt. He ate all his apples and he had some oats. I can also make a note if I'm running low on something or if I run out on something which is useful for me later. Um anytime something is low or out it goes into a shopping list that I can either look at directly through the app or I can copy and paste into another app. And then for me, the most important thing in terms of trying to keep track of like whether I'm giving him a variety of foods in the planner section, there's a weekly tab which lets me look at the entire week and see very quickly what have I been serving him? Have I been giving him a variety of things or have I given him chicken nuggets every single day the last week?

I think, I think that's a fabulous idea. So, I'll say first of all, there's already a shopping tab which has things broken out by section. So, when you run low or out, I do think the next step would be trying to integrate this with something that can suggest things. And the nice thing is um there's a lot of work already been done out there that said if your kid likes this very basic thing, here's how to slowly graduate them to something that's maybe more adult. So you go from chicken nuggets to a slightly different brand of chicken nuggets to shredded chicken to like a chicken breast with a dill sauce or something on it. So I think we could integrate that in to say, hey, if your kid regularly eats or likes this kind of thing, here's the next step up to get them to move towards what we might call a more adult palate.

Yeah, it is mostly a mobile experience, although I've set it up so that you can um push the data to sort of a central place and then sync it across devices. So, actually when I enter my uh shopping list for the, or when I come home from the grocery store and I enter my foods, I usually do that on my computer and then sync it to the cloud. That also lets you sync across devices if both parents are responsible for meal prep or, or grocery shopping or anything like that.

I think it would be relatively simple. I think it's just a matter of connecting the app with an API key to something like Claude or uh ChatGPT and then giving it that, that underlying instruction to say, "Hey, on this particular window, this is where I want you to generate these kinds of instructions." I think that would be pretty simple to do.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

So, just to recap, recap where we're at, David has so far not acquired any projects. Uh Hayden is down to a mere $785 million and she has the uh John's tablet from which you can request groceries and also Sarah's uh child meal tracker.

All right, coming up next we have Eddie from New Jersey.

Hey, how's it going, David? How's it going, Hayden?

Yeah. So, uh I don't really, I guess my, I don't have so much as a front-end app as much as like a backend tool for podcasting, media management, that kind of thing. So,

Yeah. So, I, I manage most of the media at my church. Um and so I have like the whole archive. Um and every once in a while I get a question that's like, "Oh, you remember when the pastor talked about this?" And I'm like, "I honestly, I vaguely remember that, but that may have been like three or four years ago." So, I started working on this tool last winter where I could basically summarize and pump all this data into uh into a Gemini notebook and then have it search for me. And so, the tool is pretty crude, but I can uh I can just share my screen here and show you uh sort of the workflow that I have. Yeah. So, this is just a um a, a command line interface. It's really just a Python script that I had Gemini vibe code for me. And all you really do is uh you put all of the MP3 files for whatever you want to art, um put into this uh in a folder with this script and you run it. Uh it uses a Gemini API key. So you need to make your own API key and then it loads a Whisper model and transcribes um each MP3 file sort of one at a time. So, it's going through this sermon called Understanding Above Knowledge, and it'll just go through, and it'll, you know, it kind of keeps you updated that it's not frozen as it goes by. Uh, and it takes a little while on my laptop, but on my desktop, it's a little bit faster. And if you're running a GPU, it'll be even faster. Um, but you can load up as many as you want. Just let it run overnight. And then what it does once it has the transcript is it'll, it'll take small chunks of it and send it to uh I just use the one of the free models that um Google Cloud offers and so it chunks it into about 10 different parts to keep the context window manageable and then it um summarizes each of those sections. So it kind of gets rid of a lot of that transcript um and repeated sentences and stuff like that. And at the end it gives you sort of a little summary for each one. It just gives you how many times it sent it to the cloud and does some hallucination checks to make sure it's not like totally making stuff up because that was happening earlier. Like it was worse six months ago when I was doing this, but it seems to be better now. And then what you get out of it is just this basically this giant markdown file. So this is the sermon database for my church for the year of 2025. And so it's got all roughly 50 sermons in there. And it's just the title, the date, and then the summary. And then I put all of these markdown files into a uh Gemini notebook. And this is shared with um most of the people at my church. And they can just go in and they can chat with this thing. I hope none of them use it for pastoral advice. But um I give like an example prompt here. Like we can just say like I'm looking for a sermon about how to make important life decisions. And it'll go through and it'll search through all of these four years of sermons that I have in here. And it'll, it'll pull out um specific ones that you can then go find on our Podbean or on our Apple podcast and stuff. And so I, I, you know, for this audience I think for me what's most relevant is that um you know sometimes Nilay likes to just like drop these like random Easter eggs on and I've been listening to the show for like four or five years and sometimes I still have no idea what he's talking about. So I think it would be really nice to just be like yo what did, what, what is Nilay talking about? And he's always like, "The OGs will know." And I'm like, "Now I can pretend to be an OG." You know,

Yeah, it, it really depends. So, it probably won't. Um although it depends on how long they talked about it. So, I've like, I've, I've tried searching things based on like anecdotes because um you know sometimes you tell a story in the middle of a sermon to, to like show a point and like it will pick up on that stuff even if it's a short story but yeah like one-liners it might not pick up on that.

Yeah, I mean I, I think like I, I kind of do this manually moving like going backwards, but I think moving forward it would be nice to either have it automated from our YouTube stream or even like when we upload something to, we use Podbean as our RSS host. Like if Podbean even just like added this or we, or here you guys bought it, made it and sold it to them and they just added this to um to their uh website where you could, you could go to your favorite podcast and you, there would just be a search bar right there and