How Claude Code Claude Codes

15:24David Pierce:do you have a stance on which one of those is the right reaction?

15:28Boris Cherny:Yeah, so I mean, look, we started in a terminal, but pretty quickly we started experimenting with other form factors too. So we have IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains IDE. We have iOS and Android apps. I actually do probably a third of my code on the iOS app nowadays. Really? I never would have predicted that, but that's where we are. We have a web surface. There's a desktop app. So like, you know, the same desktop app that has CoWork, it also has quad code in it. So, you know, you can use the exact same quad code. So we're just like always experimenting with this. But yeah, it's like the Surface is just a little bit different for different kinds of users.

16:03Boris Cherny:So CoWork under the hood is just quad code. It's like the same agent SDK. It's the, you know, it's an awesome agent and it's the same exact one that's running everywhere. But for people that aren't engineers, we want it to be a little less foot gunny. Like we don't want people to mess up their system and things like this. So we actually ship like a whole virtual machine. We have deletion protection built in. There's a whole bunch of things that we built for less technical users that engineers would actually find kind of annoying and they wouldn't want in the way. Versus for engineers, there's something a little bit different about the tool because engineers love to customize everything.

16:37Boris Cherny:If you talk to like two engineers, they're going to use their tools totally differently. There's no two engineers that have the same setup. And so the way that we build quad code across every surface, across terminal, IDE, desktop, everything, is we want it to be the single most customizable dev tool that anyone has used. So it's very, very configurable. You can hold it however you want. You can customize it however you want. There's hundreds of ways to configure it. And what's also kind of cool is because quad code is quad code, you can just ask quad code to configure it for you. So you can just be like, you know, change the theme or, you know, like change the setting or change the setting.

17:14Boris Cherny:It can just do that for you.

17:15David Pierce:See, this is one of the things I have really enjoyed about my own experience with CloudCode is there's so much of it that is sort of relearning what's possible in certain ways. Like the idea of asking CloudCode to reskin itself because I don't like the color scheme, it just never occurred to me. I don't like the color scheme and I would like a different one, but it literally had just never occurred to me to ask this thing that is writing code for me to write that bit of code for me. And I feel like this is kind of why I'm curious about your own relationship with writing code is it just yes there are certain things you have to do but i feel like i don't know i would think of learning a new coding language is like learning how to play a new kind of instrument right where it's so a lot of the behavior is the same just pointed in new directions with new details and new systems to to figure out but this is like you know you used to play the violin and now you're on the soccer team it's just like it's a completely different way of thinking about how to use your body.

18:10David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:11Boris Cherny:The way I would think about it is like you used to play the violin and now you're conducting the orchestra.

18:16David Pierce:Okay.

18:18Boris Cherny:That is a good way to think about it. But it's also yeah, I mean the hardest thing for me is just changing expectations every time a model comes out. It's just so quick. You know, and like this thing that just never would have worked for Sonnet 4, Sonnet 3.7, now with Sonnet 4.6, it just works. And I just have to constantly re-warn this. All the stuff that I would have thought, you know, didn't work I just assume it'll work at some point.

18:41David Pierce:Do you have like a list somewhere of all the things that are broken that you try every time a new model comes out and just check some things off the list? Essentially anything that I do by hand. Oh, interesting. Okay.

18:50Boris Cherny:Yeah, yeah. So for example, like Sonnet 4, Opus 4, and even like 4.5, it was okay at this, but 4 was like not great at it. We have like a feedback group. We have this like Slack channel where all the Anthropic employees get feedback about quad code. We also have a lot of external feedback channels for customers and GitHub and things like this. and before the model was not very good at looking at the feedback channel and deciding what to do and what to fix but now actually a lot of the code that we ship for quad code you know like quad code is 100 % written by quad code at this point but also I would say maybe 20-30 % of that is quad code just looking at the feedback group figuring out the kinds of things people are reporting and then automatically fixing it and this kind of proactivity just would not have been possible with older models but with like with Opus 4.5 of Opus 4.6, it actually just started working.

19:38Yeah.

19:39David Pierce:What have you learned with co-work in particular? Because I would assume, like you said, there's a different set of person coming to co-work than to cloud code with a different set of expectations and a different set of knowledge. Are they using it kind of radically differently and making you rethink this whole system all over again?

19:57Boris Cherny:You know, the most surprising thing, so at this point, cloud code, there was some study that it writes like 4 % of all the commits in the world, you know, like all the code in the world. I think the number is actually quite a bit higher than that because it's not including private code. And also our growth has inflected since that study. It's actually going up even faster than before. So I think it's actually quite a bit higher. In the early days, though, cloud code did not grow very fast. It was not a hit originally. It took like a few months to catch on because it was just such a new idea. Co-work, on the other hand, has been a hit immediately.

20:27Boris Cherny:So as soon as we launched it, it's just been exponential since. And this is what we like to see because we also we think in exponentials. So I think the biggest thing that's been surprising is just how quickly it's been growing, how quickly people have figured out how to use this.

20:40David Pierce:Why do you think that is? What do you feel like you got right about Codwork?

20:43Boris Cherny:There was just a pent up demand, I think.

20:46David Pierce:That was like the biggest thing, like just for something a little more understandable.

20:50Boris Cherny:Yeah, more understandable. Like you saw these people on Twitter that are using like quad code to, they were growing tomato plants, like recovering corrupted photos off of like off of a hard drive. like someone like used to recover wedding photos um pietro i think who actually used to work at anthropic used it to um i think it was like genome analysis where he got his like genome sequence and then he's like quad code to look at like you know like specific sequences and stuff um quad code not intended for medical advice but he did use it there's someone that using it for like for mris so i think just this like this pent-up demand is the single greatest thing that you can see in product because it just means like people are knocking down the door and they're jumping through hoops for you know this this this terminal thing that wasn't really designed for this yeah so it was pretty obvious i think that it would have been a hit one of the most interesting things about

21:37David Pierce:co-work in particular to me has been that the product itself is really focused on uh sort of busy work i guess is the way i would put it like it's you open it up and one of the first things it offers is to organize your screenshots right where it's not it's not build a dashboard of your entire life like what one of the jokes we always make on the show is that everybody looks at ai tools and the first thing they say is i want to build a daily planner because all of my information is ever this is like the first idea everybody has about what to build with ai it's just a thing to tell me what matters in my life um but i think the the real truth of like software forever is that this thing this stuff all starts by just sort of solving relatively straightforward relatively simple problems for people.

22:23David Pierce:Like I need to do math. And so spreadsheets exist, right? Like this is what it is. And I think to me, one of the most eyeopening things about co-work was it just has a bunch of ideas of little things it can do for me that would take me a long time to do on my own that aren't hard. They're just, this is a tool that will automate away a bunch of my busy work on my computer. And, and my sense is that is the kind of thing that has just every single person in the world resonates with the idea of that in a way that strikes me as very powerful. And it's not as open-ended as you can build any kind of software you can imagine, or you can talk to this chatbot about anything.

23:03David Pierce:It's organize your screenshots. And I think that is like a surprisingly powerful bit of product to put in there like that.

23:10Boris Cherny:Yeah, absolutely. And if you want to build something, you just, you know, hit the code tab in the desktop app and you can go build whatever. Right. If you want to, if you want to organize your desktop, like I actually, I use coworker for a lot of stuff. Like I used it to pay a parking ticket the other day. I was up in Seattle. We went clamming and I used it to purchase a clamming license. So that was pretty awesome. Like I just did something else and it navigated this like actually kind of annoying government website to do it. Someone on the team is using it to pay their taxes right now. So also not financial advice.

23:38Boris Cherny:But it's actually like quite useful for all this different kinds of stuff. This is one of the things that's like also kind of hard to explain to people is like people ask, what do I use it for? And my answer is, well kind of everything it's like all the toil like all the stuff you didn't want to do by hand it can just do so you can do the stuff you actually want to do yeah so i think okay let's

23:59David Pierce:talk about doing taxes which i know is is just an example off the top of your head but i think is is a useful sort of middle ground of the kinds of stuff that i think about a lot with ai where organize my screenshots is relatively low risk right like the the idea of it might delete a thing that I didn't want it to delete, but in general, it's just going to put things in places and delete stuff off of my computer that I don't want. And I think you can get people comfortable with doing things like that on their computers fairly quickly. Have cowork do my taxes just has naturally more consequences, right?

24:34David Pierce:And I think part of, I know a question you get asked a lot. And also a thing that I think is tricky with a lot of these tools is it's one thing to have it right code that I can then go check, even if I don't, right? The responsibility is back on me to check it and make sure that I understand where it is and code is legible to me as a developer. But if I'm just a person and I'm like, co-work, go do my taxes for me, how much faith is it reasonable or fair or rational to have in co-work or cloud code or any tool to go just execute that entirely on my behalf at this point?

25:10Boris Cherny:The tools are not perfect, and it's still early, but they are surprisingly good at things that people often expect they would not be good at. And again, it just improves with every model. For something like taxes, I would definitely double check it. So like have co-work do the tax. And actually the thing that I would do is say do the taxes, but then triple check your results. And just have co-work do that work for you. And then by the time you check it, there's a very high chance it's just going to be pretty good. Yeah.

25:36David Pierce:Yeah. Actually, to your point about you can have it test itself, that actually, I think that there's something very powerful about that too. But part of the reason I bring up taxes is because the last innovation in tax software was that it will scan your W-2s for you. I remember this being a very big deal in my life where I didn't have to type out that I could just upload the PDF of my W-2 and it would just pull in all the information. and i remember for a minute it was like okay you have to check that because the the scanners the scanning system isn't perfect the software won't get it exactly right but now like i don't remember the last time i double checked the numbers i just you just you just upload the w2 it shows up in the field and you move on with your life and i i wonder it feels like we are just barreling towards that with with all of these tools too that it's like there's going to be a beat of i mean i guess it's like your experience with cloud code there's going to be a beat of i need to check its work and then a beat of well i'll spot check it and then we get to I'm just not worried about it anymore.

26:32David Pierce:And that's the right end state. It doesn't feel like we're quite there yet.

26:35Boris Cherny:Right, right. I mean, it's like two things that happen at the same time. It's like the model gets better and the product gets better. And then also as users, we get more comfortable with this thing. And both things kind of happen at the same time. Before we released Co-Work, I was using it to do all of our project management for the team when I was first testing it out. And I still actually use it for this every week. So we have a spreadsheet of kind of all the things the team is working on. and we ask the team to just like fill out their status every week. So just say like, is it on track? Is it off track?

27:03Boris Cherny:And so I just have co-work like ping people on Slack if they haven't filled it out. And so all I do is I'm like, hey, co-work, open the spreadsheet and then for anyone that hasn't filled it out, message them on Slack. It'll just do it perfectly. There's actually one person's name that it for some reason can't figure out on Slack. So I have to do that. But otherwise it just does it. And I was actually like kind of taken aback because I didn't even realize that it would be able to do this. So I would just experiment with this, double check until you're comfortable, but I think we'll be there pretty soon.

27:33David Pierce:In a case like that, does it message people on Slack as you or as a bot?

27:41Boris Cherny:I asked it to sign its messages as a co-work. Oh, that's smart.

27:45David Pierce:Okay.

27:46Boris Cherny:Yeah, and co-work actually now, it supports this thing. In QuadCode, we have this idea called clod.md. It's just like a special file, but essentially it's like all the instructions you want Quad to take into account every time. So Cowork also supports this now. So you can just say, whenever you message people on Slack, sign a message as Cowork or Bod or something. It'll just do that.

28:05David Pierce:Yeah, that's smart. Yeah, I think that kind of, there's a little bit of transparency there that I think it's interesting. I remember you said in one interview, I was watching that Cowork would occasionally, in the course of doing stuff for you, go and tweet on your behalf, and that that always felt kind of strange.

28:20Boris Cherny:Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's funny, actually. Quad code does this too pretty consistently now. When I'm like debugging something, sometimes quad will be like, hey, this code is kind of weird. Let me like look at the history. So to look at the history of the code in Git, once in a while, it sees a really weird change by someone and it'll message that engineer on Slack just to get context. It'll wait on the response. And then I've also seen it push back. So like the engineer is like, yeah, I did this change for this reason. And then quad code is like, well, I don't think that's a very good reason. And I think you actually introduced a bug.

28:51Boris Cherny:So let me like go ahead and fix that.

28:53David Pierce:How are you thinking about the rest of the UI around this stuff? I think like so much of Claude, code and co-work are very chat-based still. Does that feel like the right UI to you going forward? Or is there more work to do there?

29:08Boris Cherny:We are constantly experimenting with new ideas. I think the UI of the future has not been discovered yet. So we have a lot of experiments in flight. I would expect it to change. There's going to be a lot of things that we test. The single most important thing is just seeing what people want. And so like, you know, I'm on Twitter and threads all day and so is a lot of the team. We just love talking to people. We love getting the feedback because, you know, we have a lot of ideas. But the only way to figure out what the right ideas are are to see what people say and to see what people enjoy.

29:36David Pierce:I agree with you that the UI of the future has not been discovered yet. Do you have a hypothesis at this moment in early 2026 about what it might be?

29:45Boris Cherny:I don't yet. I don't think we found it, to be honest. I think there's a lot of ideas around like proactivity. And Claude kind of jumping in when it knows that you're going to need help. But it's kind of hard to get this boundary right because you don't want to end up with something like Flippy.

30:03David Pierce:And it speaks to, I think, the progression you're talking about a little bit. A, from playing the violin to conducting the orchestra. It's just a different set of tools that are available to you when that's what you're thinking about. But also, you mentioned going from basically code to tool use to computer use. Can you just walk me through what that progression looks like as we go through? Because I think we've heard a lot about agents to the point where I think the word agent essentially means nothing. Agent is just like magic that happens on your computer. And it's like, sure, whatever. But I think you're thinking about this in a much more sort of practical, how do we give this thing more powers kind of way?

30:45David Pierce:Why does it go code, tool use, computer use? Yeah. Oh, my God. Don't get me started.

30:50Boris Cherny:Okay, I will get started. The word agent, I feel like everyone just misuses it. It has a really specific meaning when you talk about AI research, when you talk about engineering. So an agent is an LLM that you talk to, but the LLM can use tools. This is the thing that makes it an agent. It's like it can use tools. And so if you think about without tool use, the agent can write code. So let's say you give it a prompt and it can kind of write some HTML or something. And then as a user, you take this and you kind of copy and paste it into like IDE or something like this. So this is just like the coding capability.

31:25Boris Cherny:And as the model gets smarter, it gets better and better at working with big code bases. But there's still kind of this problem that you hit where at some point you just can't give it all the context it needs. But, you know, the model actually does know the context that it needs. Because it's able to search around and it's able to look throughout the entire code base. It's able to look at Slack. It's able to look at like the history of the code. It's able to do all of this, but it's just too much information. Like you wouldn't be able to give it all the information up front. And so the answer is tools.

31:57Boris Cherny:You give the model tools and it can use a tool to look at the code. It can pull in more files. It can look at history. It can do all this stuff. And so this is why tool use is important. It's, you know, the same as a person. If you don't have tools, like you actually can't do a lot, like just with your hands, right? You need like keyboards, you need shovels. You need like, if you're cooking in the kitchen, and you need a whisk. Like these things are just very, there's not a lot you can do without it. So it's kind of the same thing for a model. And then when you think about computer use, there's just like a lot of things that are kind of hard to interact with just with tools.

32:29Boris Cherny:So if you think about like, what can you actually do with a tool on a computer? It's something like MCP or it's an API or it's a command line interface, but not everything has that. So, you know, like if you have like, I don't know, like this like clamming thing, I was getting this like clamming license And there's no API for that, but there's a website. And to use the website, you want the model to be able to use a browser. You want it to be able to use a computer. And so this is kind of this natural evolution. So you start with coding, then you move on to tools, and this is the way to interact with the world.

33:02Boris Cherny:And so you don't have to spoon feed the model context. It can just use the tools to pull in context. And then computers are kind of the last thing, because then the model can just use everything. Okay.

33:13David Pierce:Do you think as AI continues to grow and if it sort of takes over all of software and computing the way that a lot of people think it's going to, that the computer use part eventually becomes sort of obviated? Like if there were enough tools and enough MCP access and enough of the stuff that you're talking about, is computer use just sort of an elegant hack that gets around the stuff that maybe will exist later and we won't need it?

33:43Boris Cherny:Early on, in the early days of using the model for coding, people were talking about designing special programming languages to make it so the model can code better. Right. And I always thought this was kind of silly because the model can just figure it out. You know, it's not like us where, you know, there's like a programmer that likes Python. There's another one that likes JavaScript and like won't touch Python. The model is not like that. It can just write whatever language. It doesn't care. So I think it's kind of the same thing here. I think over time, the model doesn't care. Whatever tools you give it, it will be able to figure it out.

34:12Boris Cherny:And it can use those tools to do, you know, things for you.

34:15David Pierce:Talk to me about how people should think about kind of their own risk profile in giving access to their data and their computer and their files and their photos and whatever. to a system like CloudCode or Cowork? I think you have, you know, lots of incentives to tell me that it's totally fine. You can have all this stuff on my computers. We're putting the safeguards in. But how should people think about what it means to give CloudCode access to a folder on my computer? Even something like that. Yeah, totally.

34:45Boris Cherny:So I would think about it on a few levels. So the most basic level is like, why does Anthropic exist? We exist to make safe AGI. initially we have a bunch of founders that left a different AI lab and came and started Anthropics ones that people have heard of

34:59David Pierce:yeah I'm familiar

35:02Boris Cherny:but this is the reason we exist and there's a lot of core areas to safety security is actually very important if you want to get safety right privacy is very important if you want to get safety right

35:16Boris Cherny:and all of this stuff we sort of have to do we're very lucky that we care about safety and so does our most important target customer, which is enterprise and companies. You know, there's a lot of like consumers that use Anthropic products. This is awesome. And this is something we love to see. We will build for you. But actually like the main market we care about is enterprise as a company. And we're very lucky. And we picked this market on purpose because we know enterprises care a ton about safety and security and privacy. And so we build for them. And so like, if you look at the product, it's actually kind of annoying for me because like if someone has like a quad code bug report or something, I literally cannot see your data.

35:53Boris Cherny:So I need you to give me reproduction stuff so I can reproduce it. But I literally can't access the data to see this issue. So there's a lot of controls like that in place. Also, because we care about safety a lot, there's a lot of work that goes into just making the model inherently more aligned and interpretable. And this is also just, it's very important and also very related to this. And yeah, I mean, the final thing is there's just a lot of stuff that we build into the product. Like, Cowork can only see the folders that you give it access to. It cannot see anything else on your computer. We put an entire virtual machine in Cowork to make sure it's a really hard security boundary.

36:32Boris Cherny:So it can't access stuff that you don't give it access to. The biggest thing to worry about is attacks like prompt injection, anything like this that would kind of exfiltrate your data. We have a lot of protections in place for this. And Opus 4.6 is just the most aligned model that we've ever built for prompt injection in particular. And there's also a lot of like runtime classifiers and kind of safeguard that we put in place for this. But this is the biggest thing that I will think about is as you have co-work, as you have code interact with the internet, just be thoughtful about what websites it is using.

37:06Boris Cherny:And it will ask you for permission, but it's a thing to keep an eye on because this is not a solved problem yet. It's quite good, but it's not yet solved.

37:13David Pierce:That's a good one. All right. give me one like normal human co-work activity that lots of people should do that you you've either done or building or you've heard from people that not everybody might expect that

37:26Boris Cherny:they should go do and then i'm gonna let you go oh a normal human uh okay one is just like responding to email just like open my gmail look at the top three things i should respond to draft responses so you can do that quite well um a second one that i do is just like canceling subscriptions. So I actually use it to cancel like I canceled like a TV thing that I wasn't watching.

37:50David Pierce:That's the most unbelievably annoying thing to do. I'm going to make Cloud Code unsubscribe to all of my email newsletters that I don't want anymore. This is going to work for me.

38:00Boris Cherny:Yeah. I love this like dual track. Like you can use it for your write the emails and also unsubscribe for email.

38:05David Pierce:Yeah, exactly. I just never want to look at my email ever again. If Cloud can make that happen, we will have accomplished something. AGI. All right, Boris, thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing this.

38:16Boris Cherny:Yeah, yeah. Thanks, David. We'll be right back.

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41:36David Pierce:All right, we're back. Hayden Field, Verge Senior AI Reporter is here. Hi, Hayden.

41:41Allison Johnson:Hi.

41:42David Pierce:So you were here recently and we were talking about Maltbook and OpenClaw and all of the insane things that you can do on your computer with AI tools and AI agents. And we talked a little bit about privacy and kind of how to think about whether or not you should engage with these tools and install them and what kind of data you should give to them. And I've realized I've been having kind of varying levels of existential crises about AI tools. Starting with like, I had a real experience with OpenClaw where I downloaded the installer for OpenClaw onto my computer. I have a Mac mini and I have a MacBook Air.

42:18David Pierce:And I was on the MacBook Air and I downloaded OpenClaw and I was like, I'm going to use this, get into it, see what it's like, try the whole thing out. And I got literally halfway through the install process and was like, this is so stupid. Like this computer is full of all the information I care about in the world. And all of this stuff that I know about everyone that I know, including like important confidential information as a journalist, giving this unknowable AI agent access to this is insane. So that's one level. But then even like I use, I mostly use Claude for AI stuff. And one thing Claude really wants you to do is connect your Gmail and connect your Google calendar.

42:50David Pierce:And I've had moments of being like, is this an irresponsible thing to do? Like, am I being stupid giving Claude access to my email? So what I want to do as best we can is just try to think through sort of how to think about your data and AI framework. Does that seem reasonable?

43:07Allison Johnson:Perfect. I've been asking the same questions.

43:09David Pierce:Okay. So let's just start kind of big picture. I want to get into some sort of nitty gritty. I literally want you to tell me if I should give Claude access to my Gmail, but we'll get to that. You've been reporting on this a lot and talking to experts and trying to think through this for yourself. Do you have kind of big picture guidance on just how people should be thinking about this stuff?

43:28Allison Johnson:Yes. And this is perfect because the big picture is the easiest to get at, you know, because it's really a different it's a different decision for each person, depending on their risk tolerance and like the other ways they live their life. So honestly, the big picture is the easiest to kind of square and then everyone can kind of make the rules for themselves. But I did a bunch of expert interviews this week just to make sure my instincts are kind of on track with what actual privacy experts and, you know, tech leaders are thinking. And it seemed like they were in that basically it's hard to give people good advice on this stuff that stays current over time.

44:04Allison Johnson:That's what some of the privacy experts I was talking to said, You know, it's like every six months, things could change every month, every year. So, you know, as of this moment in time, a lot of people are essentially kind of ignoring the way that they usually, you know, evaluate their risk tolerance and just kind of adopting AI tools that are going viral or being talked about a lot just because of FOMO or like, you know, the promise of making your life a lot easier. We all as humans want to make our lives easier. You know, one expert I talked to said it was like the siren song or like teenager mode.

44:37Allison Johnson:It's like, you know, you're just you want to have the short term gain and make your life easier. You don't really want to think about the long term stuff sometimes. That's fine.

44:45David Pierce:But teenager mode is such a good way to think about it.

44:47Allison Johnson:Yeah, that was incredible.

44:48David Pierce:It's like not quite full like YOLO mode, like LOL, nothing matters. But it's a little bit like my brain is just not yet fully developed. Yeah.

44:57Allison Johnson:And exactly. Darktooth told me that. I was like, you know, doing your seatbelt versus just being like, oh, it's fine. I'll just drive fast on the highway. So, yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, basically you need to treat AI tools the exact same as you would treat any other service that was requesting a lot of data from you. And maybe even with a sharper eye because these companies are newer, they're less time tested, and they're also more incentivized to move quickly. And they have a little bit less, you know, regulatory frameworks on them. So, you know, a lot of times they're voluntarily complying with certain rules, you know, and that's all well and good.

45:32Allison Johnson:but you know something that a bunch of experts told me is yeah they can change that at any time you know they can kind of on the dl like shift that voluntary framework shift that little like our mission um anytime you know and there's no hammer coming down on them if they do uh they are just it's voluntary so they're doing it as a favor and you know that means that they can shift at any any given time and change how they treat your data who they share your data with how they use your data to train their own systems or not. And the other thing is these companies may get bought eventually. You know, one expert I spoke with was like, if you wouldn't feel comfortable with your employer knowing certain things about you five years from now when OpenAI gets sold and, you know, they're selling off the info to the highest bidder.

46:21Allison Johnson:Again, that was like an extreme scenario. But he was like, yeah, don't share it. So, you know, that's something to keep in mind, too with like sharing health stuff. Like, do you want insurance companies to find out certain things about you and change your premium? Again, that's an extreme scenario. Hopefully it would never happen, but you never really know because all this stuff is so new. So it's like, I'm never going to be like, don't do X, Y, or Z. For you, I can do that because I know you, but like, you know, other listeners are going to be like, no, I want to give my health data to ChattapT.

46:53Allison Johnson:It helped me so much. Like the, you know, medical system is failing me. That's fine. Yeah. The medical system sucks. So if you do want to find patterns in your health records and you feel comfortable with that level of risk tolerance, okay. Just if you do that, of course, make sure you're doing it like within like chat to PD health and not like just regular chatbot, but it's still pretty risky.

47:13David Pierce:Yeah. I think I, to, to continue using the teenage analogy, I feel like it's a little bit like the advice you hear a lot of parents give to their teenage children who are sending, let's say, sensitive pictures. This idea of you should assume that anything you send to someone or create digitally will eventually be public. And that that is your framework, is you shouldn't share anything that you wouldn't share with everybody. And I think everybody draws that line really differently, right? And there's kind of no wrong or right place to draw that line. But that is it's a pretty extreme way to draw that line.

47:49David Pierce:But given all of the stuff you're saying, we just don't know now and isn't regulated and isn't even sort of industry accepted yet. I think there are a lot of ways that, you know, we give a lot of information to Google and we give a lot of information to Facebook and whatever. But there are at least now sort of accepted norms in how that data is treated. And there would be real problematic ramifications if that changed. It doesn't seem like any of that exists in AI right now.

48:14Allison Johnson:And it's also hard because even if they do have those protections in place, you know, like most of these companies do retain some semblance of your data, even if it's like, you know, anonymized or the personal stuff is stripped out. They like use it in some degree usually. And so and we've seen like in the past like 10 years, it's pretty easy to de-anonymize data. And it's also imperfect science on like what a system knows is sensitive versus not. Like, you know, Margaret Cunningham from Darktrace was telling me like it's hard for chatbots to tell the difference between a phone number and a social security number or, you know, like a street address and an account number.

48:59Allison Johnson:So it's tough because, one, even if they're trying their best, the, like, guardrails here are not perfect. And even if they do work great, you can de-anonymize data. You know, it's I don't know for sure if, you know, like if Chachipiti Health, like, would be able to do that. But I'm just saying, like, in general, it's a pretty understood rule that anonymization systems for, you know, protecting personal data are very, very imperfect. So it's like, you know, you just really need to know the risks here before you make a decision. And if you do want to give your data over, that's fine. It's just you need to do it in an informed way without just like, you know, taking off your seatbelt and being like, whatever, like, you know, this may come back to bite me in 10 years, but I don't care.

49:43Allison Johnson:If you want to be like that, sure, but do it with an informed take. That's all I'm asking.

49:47David Pierce:Yeah, I am very much of the generation that shared every photo that anyone took at every party in college on Facebook. And then, boy, did we all learn several years later to go back and pretty ruthlessly comb through all of the pictures that we had shared on Facebook. And it feels like this is the generation that's going to go through that exact same thing.

50:07Allison Johnson:I remember I used to climb on my high school's rooftop with my friends. It was so fun. We would go up the trellis and just hang out up there. And I could never share the photos on Facebook because my mom was a teacher at the school. The building has now been torn down, so I can share that story. But it's like, yeah, I mean, that was like, thank God I decided not to share those. But yeah, we were just being super willy-nilly about everything because we grew up in the age of the internet and we wanted to have people writing on our walls and like, you know, liking our Facebook albums. So yeah, it's tough.

50:42Allison Johnson:Like I think people should, you know, kind of apply the same thought process here. Even though it feels private because it seems like a one-on-one conversation, you know, we've seen like ChatGVD records go public because like the link became searchable, you know, and like company execs were like giving financial data from their company into the system and then like any public person could search it. That has since been fixed. But things like that can happen. And you never know how, when or why they're going to happen because this technology is relatively new.

51:17David Pierce:One thing I see a lot of people wondering about and being fearful of is this idea that these companies are going to use my data to train their models. And that's both sort of the facts of our interaction, but also like you said, the the important financial data that I upload into ChatGPT is going to be used to train the next version of ChatGPT and that that is a privacy risk or breach in some way. What do you make of that? How should people think about what of their data is being used to train AI models and what that means privacy-wise?

51:51Allison Johnson:It's hard because these companies will be very careful with their wording, You know, so you never really know the full extent on how or why or if they're using your data to train their models. Like they will say, for example, ChatGPT Health, they say explicitly your health data will be kept confidential and it won't be used to train their AI models. But does that mean some anonymized, stripped down version of what you say won't be in some way used to train the models? Don't know. You know, they don't, that's the thing. They don't really go into the how here. And they don't have to because it's all voluntary.

52:36Allison Johnson:So the other part of it is it can change. You know, they can change their mind at any time. So I would say, you know, if they explicitly say for any given service, we don't use your data to train our models, you can be pretty sure that they don't for the most part, at least for that. But that may change and certainly not for the ones that they don't explicitly say that. The other thing to keep in mind here is that if it's a free product, you are the product. So if you're paying for a product, there's less of a chance they're using your data to train, or at least to a lesser extent. But if it's free, all bets are kind of off.

53:16Allison Johnson:That's what we learned with OpenClaw and what we've learned with a million products way before that. But yeah, I would say you're a little bit safer if you're paying. And if you're an enterprise user of something, you're way safer. You know, ChachVD Health specifically, you're pretty safe because they're pretty explicit about that stuff. But that's just for now. Who knows? You know, Anthropic has a similar product like that's HIPAA compliant. But still, like, you know, that's you're not bound. So I don't know. It's just a tough thing. You need to kind of operate with with a little bit of a grain of salt here.

53:47David Pierce:Yeah, that's good. Can I can I read you one that I found that just like flummoxed me forever? Yeah. And I think is a good proof of what you're talking about. So this is from Anthropics Terms of Service for Claude. It says, we do not train our models on your Gmail or calendar integration data, ensuring your private information remains private. Simple, straightforward, right? Again, so much of this comes from, I use Claude. I like the idea of being able to pull information from my Google Drive and my Gmail in Claude as I look for things. Do I do this? So I'm reading this, looking this up. That sentence makes perfect sense, right?

54:20David Pierce:We do not train our models. This is the next sentence. note if you are using our consumer products e.g. Claude free pro and max when using Claude code with those accounts that was a double parentheses i just read to you by the way and you have chosen to allow us to use your chats and coding sessions for model training then any content you copy paste from your gmail or calendar or Claude's responses which include specific information from these integrations may be used to improve our models what exactly this is what i'm saying

54:47Allison Johnson:it's like you can't really know they will be pulling all sorts of double parentheses on you They will be doing double negatives. You just don't know. So that's my thing, too. It's like, yeah, OK, like maybe it's not going to directly use your emails. But if you're copy and pasting things from your email into it, OK, it seems like it'll use that based on what you just said. And what if it's returning stuff from your email and saying, hey, here's a summary of all the emails you got today. Okay, it seems like that's also going to be used to train the boat. So it's like, okay. And again, like I said, they didn't mention enterprise there.

55:25Allison Johnson:So it's like enterprise is pretty safe, but the consumer products, you don't really know. It's just tough because there's not a lot of hard and fast rules here. And the fact that they can change these things at any time. The thing you just read, maybe that'll look a little bit different in a week or two. I have a current like a tracker set up for when these companies change like their mission statements. And like you have no idea how often I see an alert that's like, oh, this changed slightly. You know, I mean, usually it's something dumb like they took out a couple parentheses, but sometimes it's not.

55:58Allison Johnson:So, yeah, I think it's like it's a we should treat these documents as like living documents that are drafts and constantly changing. And if you're not okay with, you know, that policy looking different in a couple months, you know, err on the side of caution is how I operate. Yeah, that makes sense.

56:17David Pierce:Yeah, I think one really interesting outcome of this whole experiment for me has been that it all sort of leads to Gemini in a really funny way because Gemini offers a lot of the same things, right? Gemini can go find your YouTube information. It can go find stuff in Google Drive. It can go find stuff in Gmail. It can find stuff in your calendar. And I found the same thing in Google's terms of service. It says, when enabled, Gemini accesses your data to answer your specific requests and to do things for you. And because this data already lives at Google securely, you don't have to send sensitive data elsewhere to start personalizing your experience.

56:47David Pierce:This is a key differentiator. Like, I think that's true. This is such, I wrote this thing a few weeks ago about how Gemini is winning. And this to me is one of the key pieces of it. That's like, okay, I feel uncomfortable giving my email to someone who doesn't already have email. You know who already has access to all of my Gmail? It's Google. And so this idea that actually privacy ends up being a win for Gemini is so against what I would have expected coming into this, especially for a company like Apple, which bills itself as the privacy company, but is going to ask for all kinds of access to other data from other platforms.

57:23David Pierce:Most of the stuff that I care about already lives inside of Google. So for better or for worse, I have made this privacy agreement with Google already. And I think there are an increasing number of good reasons to get as much of your stuff out of Google as possible. But to the extent that you're comfortable with the amount of information that Google already has on you, which for most of us is all of it. Gemini ends up becoming a much simpler security tradeoff, right? It's like I'm giving my Google data over here to Google over here, not crossing some new corporate barrier.

57:56Allison Johnson:totally and you know just like with this security of anything else like the more complex you make it and the more organizations that have a hand in something the less secure it is it's the same reason why like you know if you're really really trying to like meet a whistleblower on the dl with like no trace you meet them in person somewhere like it's like that just the the more people that have a hand in something the less secure it is actually i was watching tell me lies this weekend Same thing. The more people that found out about a secret, it leaked the next day. So, yeah, I mean, I think I was talking to a guy at Checkmarks, Darren Meyer, and he said, like, we have a history in tech of giving our data to an organization to get something of value, like a tradeoff.

58:36Allison Johnson:And then when we find out later that they used our data in a way we weren't okay with, we get upset. And AI companies haven't done anything to show us they're any different and, in fact, are probably even more so like that because they haven't been time tested. So it's like, you know, yeah, I think it is interesting because I've always thought when you keep most of your stuff in one ecosystem, you know, the AI agent that can help you parse that ecosystem is probably going to operate better because it's been trained in that ecosystem. And it's going to be a little bit more useful and have less of a learning curve, less friction.

59:11Allison Johnson:So, I mean, it makes sense that, you know, Jim and I would be working well and be a little bit more secure potentially.

59:16David Pierce:I mean, it's such a funny thing, right? Because it is, you can give good security advice on both opposite ends of that spectrum, right? There is a good and reasonable case to be made that the best thing you can do for your personal data is put it a lot of places, right? So that you have fewer, the risk of each individual sort of vector of attack is smaller. And the possibility of something going wrong in a huge catastrophic way goes down. I mean, you hear these stories about people whose Gmail accounts get locked for whatever reason and their life falls apart, right? That like if you have all of your stuff in one place, all of your eggs in one basket, if something happens, it's a disaster.

59:54David Pierce:So put your stuff in lots of places. It's better. The flip side of that is now all of a sudden, if you believe in an AI future, what I'm actually doing is then recentralizing all of that stuff into a new place, which is a new vector for problems.

1:00:10Allison Johnson:Right. I think that it kind of depends on how many services you're connecting. Like, so, you know, if you have all your stuff in different places, yeah, that's clearly more secure. And each company has less of a complete profile on you. But if you're connecting Google to Cloud and you're connecting Google to ChatGPT, then it's like even more companies have a fuller profile on you. So I think that's the thing.

1:00:34David Pierce:I'm now trusting three companies with everything instead of three companies with a little or one company with a lot.

1:00:38Allison Johnson:Right. I think of it kind of like diversifying like your assets or whatever, like financially, like, you know, if you like, sure, if you have everything in like different banks, great. But if you have like and this can't happen. So this is a bad metaphor. But if you had everything and every bank, OK, that's kind of worse. So, yeah, I think it's the same thing here. It's like, you know, for example, okay, last week you and I were laughing really hard on like the ChatGPT trend on asking it to create a caricature of you based on everything I knew about you and your job. Now, I often use ChatGPT with the memory turned off, like logged out, because I just don't really need it creating like an intense profile on me.

1:01:18Allison Johnson:Do I have accounts where I let it? Yeah, because I need to test it and I'm an AI reporter. But, you know, if I'm just like doing something random, there's a lot of times that I'm like, you know what, I don't really need this to go into like my the understanding of me and what I want. And so the account that I used to do that, I had only used it for like five conversations like that were recorded. And so it didn't have that much info on me. And it did generate me in a hilarious way, like just like travel, like Paris, string lights, like it was like very basic. But yeah, I'm like, it only had five conversations to go on and some of them were like wedding planning tips.

1:01:53Allison Johnson:So who knows? Yours was, of course, like more tied to like your work. But it was just funny to see like, you know, that's a kind of good example of, you know, the type of profile that these companies are building on you based on your conversations and like what ChatGP itself or Claude itself knows about you based on everything you put into it. So it's like, you got to think critically about everything you're putting into these systems.

1:02:17David Pierce:Yeah. So it sounds like, Again, everybody can make this decision for themselves. Lay your privacy framework where you want to. You know me. You know what I do and think about and the chaos that is my computing life. It sounds like you would tell me that I should probably not put all of my Google data into Claude.

1:02:36Allison Johnson:I think not. But I also understand the temptation because emails suck. As you know from other conversations we've had on this podcast, I have like 13 ,000 unread emails in one account.

1:02:46David Pierce:Because you're a monster.

1:02:47Allison Johnson:Yeah, so I get it. I think that like, you know, if it's not that much like personal stuff, like or not that much sensitive information, you could connect it. Like, you know, if it's like work related stuff, that's like, you know, more sensitive, that's when I wouldn't ever for you. but like you know if you just have like your personal gmail in there and it's like a lot of appointment reminders and stuff like again like for other people maybe i'd say no but knowing that you value like the ease of organization and stuff so much i would say like go for it if there's not much sensitive information in there but also it's like we all have so if you delete your emails for example like i keep every email i've ever had and i just like pay for the two terabytes of data or whatever um even in my personal account so it's like the amount of stuff goes back so far i don't even know what's there.

1:03:35Allison Johnson:I wouldn't connect it. But if you like delete emails when you're not using them and stuff and like you keep it pretty like manicured, why not?

1:03:41David Pierce:Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting way because I do think my use case is exactly what you described, right? Like I just want to be able to ask Claude what my Delta frequent flyer number is and it can tell me by finding it in my email. Like that's fine. But what you're also making me realize is I remember when Alexa and Google Assistant were first coming out. My running theory was that actually what we need It is not one all-encompassing AI assistant that everything funnels into. That is like, I use Alexa to talk to my TV and to my speakers and to my car and to everything. But that actually, eventually, what we're going to have is this incredibly distributed thing where every tool is going to have something that is more specific to it.

1:04:21David Pierce:That instead of addressing Alexa to talk to my TV, I just address my TV. And that is, we got part of the way there with some of the voice assistants, but not all the way there. And I wonder if maybe I should be rooting for that outcome with AI, too, is that rather than connecting everything to Claude, that there should be I should use Gemini for my Gmail and I should use something else for my television. And I should use something like that maybe the future is many AIs and not just one.

1:04:49Allison Johnson:I think that that is a lot more secure for sure and sometimes more efficient. I mean, you can argue either way, like in a way it's less efficient because obviously not everything's in one place. But also, like, you know, chatbots on certain systems are going to work better if they've been trained in that environment. Like, we've learned that through, like, tons of, like, RL research and stuff. It's like the environment you train in is the environment you operate the best in. So, you know, like, Gemini probably would operate better within the Google ecosystem. And, you know, that makes sense. Same with, like, a chatbot for your TV that would, like, train specifically on only those use cases.

1:05:24Allison Johnson:So, I mean, it like kind of like may lead to less friction, even though it's kind of annoying to have everything in a ton of different places. It's also more secure. Like, yeah, I think you can't really go wrong with that.

1:05:34David Pierce:It does feel it also feels more, if not more secure than at least more understandable. Right. It's like I can I can make a clearer decision on what my TV should know about me than I can. This sort of all encompassing needs to know everything about me. And this goes back to open claw. Right. where it's like, okay, if I'm just giving this thing complete unfettered access to my computer, that's actually a really hard decision to make thoughtfully. You can either just say, you know, YOLO, it's worth it. And to your point about the trade-off we've made, these companies are statistically speaking correct to assume that we will trade privacy for features and convenience.

1:06:10David Pierce:We always have. Is that the right decision? Has it been the right decision every time? Often no. We have made that trade-off every time. Everybody who has ever bet that users will make that trade-off has been right. So I wonder if A, that will turn because AI is asking so much more, or B, if these companies can just keep barreling through knowing that we will continue to make that trade-off. But my hope is that at least it becomes a little more readable, right? The idea that I at least know the trade-off that I'm making in order to use this product feels very hard with a lot of these AI tools.

1:06:45David Pierce:And I think distributing it a little more would at least make it more parsable that way.

1:06:49Allison Johnson:I totally agree. And yeah, I think that's the most important thing is knowing what you're giving up so that you can actually make an informed decision on like, am I getting enough benefit from this service to make it worth it for me? Like everyone knows everything's a deal. Like, you know, it's a trade-off, but do you understand the trade-off or not? And, you know, these companies need to make it crystal clear what the trade-off is and in what cases and not try to like try any funny business with like the double negatives and the double parentheticals. Like, just be honest. What are you giving up?

1:07:17Allison Johnson:And let people make that decision for them. And, you know, a ton of people will be like, yeah, I'm fine with that. You know, everyone knows everything about me anyway. Don't care. A ton of people will be like, whoa, I don't want to do that at all, especially because this company is like only a few years old and I don't know what is going to happen three years from now, four years from now. Yeah. I mean, and also like, you know, people that I remember when like fridges became smart for the first time And people were really worried that like, you know, if you bought a ton of beer and like not enough fruit, that health insurance companies would somehow get that data.

1:07:48Allison Johnson:It's like you just I don't know. It's you just need to know the trade off you're making and then see if it's worth it for you. For me, like a smart fridge, it's not something I really need. I don't need to be seeing ads on the front screen of my fridge either, you know. But like, you know, for a chatbot that's like parsing all your my 12 ,000 emails, maybe it's worth it. Who knows? But like, yeah, you just need to be able to accurately understand what you're giving up.

1:08:10David Pierce:Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, I should confess here at the end that I already connected my Gmail to Claude and I am now regretting that decision. So I'm going to go undo that for now. But Hayden, thank you as always for being here. This is great. I appreciate it.

1:08:21Allison Johnson:Thanks so much.

1:08:22David Pierce:All right. We got to take a break. We'll be right back.

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1:11:15David Pierce:All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We're not that hard to find. Like it's not there are no good excuses for not hitting up the Vergecast hotline. Do you know what I mean? Here with me this time, the Verge's senior phone reviewer, Alison Johnson. Hello.

1:11:33Allison Johnson:Hello.

1:11:33David Pierce:I caught you just before you were about to disappear into the beginnings of phone season.

1:11:39Allison Johnson:Yes. My family will not see me for a week and a half. I'm going to be just among the phones.

1:11:45David Pierce:Yeah. So it's Samsung Unpacked and then Mobile World Congress.

1:11:50Allison Johnson:Yeah.

1:11:51David Pierce:Which is in Spain still? It is in Spain. Okay. And then we think potentially maybe an iPhone like right after that, right?

1:11:58Allison Johnson:Yeah, just for fun. Everybody was just like, what if an iPhone?

1:12:03David Pierce:You know, why not? Yeah. What if we iPhone?

1:12:06Allison Johnson:Let's do it.

1:12:07David Pierce:So our question is actually sort of tangentially about this. And I think is the kind of question a lot of people either are asking or about to start asking very quickly about their phone purchases. Let me just play this question for you.

1:12:22Hayden Field:Hi, VergeCast. My name is Lucas. and I was wondering if I should do a kind of mid-cycle upgrade for my phone right now. So I've got a 15 Pro Max. I've had it, you know, a couple of years and it works fine. It's a perfectly fine iPhone. It'll probably be fine for another year or two. But I'm worried that with the price of RAM constantly going up, that the next phone I get is going to be significantly more expensive.

1:12:52David Pierce:And I'm wondering if I should do just like a mid-cycle upgrade now to kind of future proof so I don't have to worry about something really expensive later. So, Allison, agree or disagree that this question either is or should be on a lot of people's minds right now?

1:13:10Allison Johnson:Totally legitimate concern. I'm going to be honest. I was in the kind of like, oh, sure, RAM is a problem, but I don't build PCs. Like, so whatever kind of camp. Our friend and colleague, Sean Hollister, wrote a great article about why the RAM crisis is coming for all of us. So definitely check that out if you haven't. And yeah, and I think it is, I'm already like fielding this question on our internal Slack, you know, and people in the similar situation as Lucas that are sort of like, I was thinking I would probably upgrade maybe a year or two from now, but should I pull that timeline forward?

1:13:55Allison Johnson:And I think the question is real. I think that price increases in one way or another are coming for smartphones and everything else, apparently.

1:14:06David Pierce:Okay, so let's take this very tactically in two directions. I think the one is Lucas specifically has a 15 Pro Max, presumably wants another iPhone. And I think so 15 Pro Max is now a two generations old phone. I think you would probably assume that Lucas would be looking to upgrade, especially if you're a person who's a Pro Max, not this cycle, but potentially next cycle. I think Lucas is probably going to buy a 19 Pro Max would be my guess. Skip the 17, that's fine. The 18 will be what it's going to be, but in the normal course of events, he's probably two years away from an upgrade. But I think the question of should I buy now to reset that cycle to give myself four more years for this to get better, what do you think?

1:15:00Allison Johnson:Here's where I've kind of landed. I think it is a factor to consider, but I don't think it should be the only one. The 15 Pro Max is an interesting case of like, yeah, you are probably after you're more interested in the latest and nicest hardware, probably more so than someone else. So that seems like a factor towards maybe upgrade a little sooner. But there's a lot of things I'm unsure about how this is actually going to shake out for prices. Apple especially hates raising prices on the iPhone. And they'll do that sneaky thing that they all do where they kind of like just take away the lower priced option, take the like lower storage option off the table.

1:15:48Allison Johnson:So they didn't really raise the price. But, you know, you can't buy that cheaper version anyway. So maybe that's not going to affect Lucas directly. But there are all kinds of pressures, I think. You know, the weirdness with tariffs that's been happening. the RAM thing. And it's going to manifest in ways that I think lead to a more expensive iPhone. But I think you should buy a new phone when it's the time to buy a new phone. Thinking of the RAM situation could be one factor in that purchase.

1:16:29David Pierce:Yeah, I think I agree. And I think for Lucas in particular, and the reason I want to focus on his use case super specifically, is I did not expect my advice to be wait, but I think the answer is wait. Like the 15 Pro Max is still a very good phone that will be a very good phone for at least two or three more years, right? Like the idea of it being sort of so vastly outdated that the camera is not up to snuff and that it can't do the things that you want to do, I think it's pretty unlikely in, let's say, the next two years. And, you know, knock on wood, it also seems pretty unlikely that all of the things that have led to this particular RAM shortage being this bad right now are also pretty unlikely to all be accelerating at this pace still in the next couple of years.

1:17:17David Pierce:either the bubble is going to pop and a bunch of weird stuff is going to happen or people will start to ramp up the capacity to build more of this stuff like one way or another i think we are headed to a not a permanent ram shortage um fast forward to 2029 and somebody plays this clip back to me and reminds me of what a moron i am like maybe but it does seem to me that like if you're in the position of saying okay i my phone is going to be very good for two more years is that a risk worth taking? I would kind of say the answer is yes. Where I feel differently is people who are like, I was going to buy a phone sometime in the next year or so, right?

1:18:00David Pierce:People who are like, I'm not tied to the upgrade cycle. I buy a new phone when I need a phone. Most of those people right now, I would tell to just go buy a phone.

1:18:09Allison Johnson:Yeah.

1:18:09David Pierce:Do you agree with that?

1:18:10Allison Johnson:Yeah, like the case in our internal Slack was someone had a Pixel 7a. Perfect example. Yeah, and I'm like, you know what? You've gotten your money's worth on that phone. I think you're safely in the zone of like upgrade now, upgrade next year, and just adding that factor of the RAM situation. Maybe that tips you toward like, yeah, upgrade now. Um, but I, yeah, I do think it's, it, it kind of has to be time already, not sort of, oh, maybe next year will be time or next year I'm going to start thinking about it. Um, that, that's where I'm landing. And like, you know, looking, you can always, uh, change out the battery.

1:18:59Allison Johnson:There's always refurbished options, you know, in a year or two, if the flagship phone prices are crazy. I think, I don't know.

1:19:08David Pierce:Do you remember during the pandemic when the car prices went nuts and not only did new car prices go nuts, used car prices went nuts? We had a harder time buying a used car than a new car in like 2021. It was insane. And so part of me is worried that like everybody's going to have the, oh, I'll just buy a refurbished idea. And actually that's going to become a strange market too.

1:19:29Allison Johnson:Yeah.

1:19:30David Pierce:But in general, I think you're right. It's not if you're less of the of the mode of like, I need the best phone right now, the minute it comes out, you do have a much larger set of probably more stable options. Yeah. So is there anyone you would tell to wait a minute and like you're we're about to go into phone season. We're going to get Samsung phones. People are going to hear and watch this on Tuesday. very soon after we're going to get new Samsung phones. You're going to MWC to see stuff. We're hearing some inklings about, you know, there's presumably more pixels to come. There's more iPhones to come.

1:20:09David Pierce:Is there anything that you are like, wait, there's something coming. Don't buy it until you at least see what the new thing is.

1:20:18Allison Johnson:I think the good answer is like, no, phones are kind of boring right now, which like works in our favor. You know, if this is a time when they're getting more expensive, it's just not as important to upgrade every year, every two years, even every three years. I think you're fine, you know. So and I think that the manufacturers, you know, we're already seeing this with the I think the Pixel 10a was a very iterative like hardware upgrade, maybe in an effort to keep that price point down considering everything. So it's kind of a good thing that phones are boring right now, and it might be the case for a little bit.

1:21:03David Pierce:That's a really interesting point, actually, that maybe the outcome is not that your iPhone is about to get, you know, several hundred dollars more expensive, but that actually the upgrade from this one to the next one is going to be even smaller so that they can keep the price in range. That makes a lot of sense.

1:21:20Allison Johnson:Yeah, we might not see, I think it's pretty likely we won't see, you know, like incremental increases in RAM every year the way we have been. And yeah, Apple hates, hates putting a higher price tag on something. So I think they will, they will pull all kinds of strings before they have to do that. Yeah.

1:21:40David Pierce:So, okay. I think this feels right. So if you have a device that you like and you feel confident about for a couple more years, you can feel okay waiting. But if you're like, oh, I should probably go get a new, go get it.

1:21:52Allison Johnson:Yeah.

1:21:53David Pierce:Like, don't wait. Just go get the thing. All phones are good now. It's going to be fine. Just go buy the thing. This is how I feel. I just bought new Sony headphones not that long ago for exactly this reason. It's like tariffs, all the shortages, everything is complicated. Like, I need a new pair of headphones. I'm just going to go. I'm going to go do it. I don't need them this minute, but I'm going to need them soon, and I'm just going to go do it.

1:22:12Allison Johnson:Yeah, yeah. We did that with the PS5, which we were so late to the PS5. But we were like, it's time to get one. And then the price increases kind of came up. is like, okay, now's the time. And I have zero regrets about that.

1:22:25David Pierce:Yeah, that's a perfect example.

1:22:27Allison Johnson:Yeah.

1:22:27David Pierce:All right, Lucas, I hope this helps. Let us know what you ended up deciding. I feel like given that Lucas has a 15 Pro Max, the odds of him hearing this and going, screw you, I'm buying a 17 Pro Max is like pretty high. Yeah. But Lucas, let us know what you do. Allison, thank you as always. Yeah, no problem. All right, that's it for the VergeCast. Thank you to Allison and Hayden and Boris for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. As always, if you have thoughts, feedback, if you want to keep sending me stuff that you're vibe coding, this has been my favorite thing in my email inbox over the last couple of weeks is I asked on this show for people to send me examples of things that you've been vibe coding.

1:23:01David Pierce:And I have heard incredible stuff. I think at some point on the show, I'm just going to sit here and just like read people's emails out loud for 10 minutes because you should hear some of the stuff that other folks are building. It's so cool and so interesting. And if you're building something that you think is cool and exciting, I want to hear about it. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. vergecast at theverge.com is the email. Keep it all coming. This show is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. And this episode was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. I'll be back with Nilay on Friday to talk about all of the news.

1:23:32David Pierce:There's policy stuff still happening. There's Epstein files stuff still happening. Gadget season is back. We got Samsung phones. We have a lot to talk about. It's going to be awesome. See you then. Rock and roll.

1:24:06Hayden Field:StepStone.

1:24:12Hayden Field:for all jobs.