Pencils down: We share our vibe-coded websites

21:24David Pierce:If you're here, we're friends. Yeah, exactly. Love that. All right. So you log in. Yeah, you log in. there's a different password for me, the admin, and for visiting guests. And you get to this little board that just has all the different veggies I got any given week. And the ones that I'm keeping are kind of marked that I'm keeping them. And if you want something, you can just hit the big claim button and tell me how you want it, how you want to get it, right? So if I'm going to hang out with somebody this week and they get to say, I'm seeing you soon, right? That's your name, claimed. Boom. And there is a notification system, allegedly, that I have not tested to see if it works.

22:05David Pierce:So in theory, like, you should get an email now being like, David just signed up to get your scallions, or I guess in this case, your rhubarb. Yeah. And then you're like, okay, cool, I'll bring it to the office next time. We're both going to be in the office. Yeah, exactly. Okay. The big issue I ran into, well, there are a lot of issues I ran into, but I just got to come clean here. this is not actually published. And the reason is I used ChatGPT Sites, which is a plugin for ChatGPT that is native and it's supposed to let you publish small little websites. Codex does not know how to work well with this thing on a variety of levels.

22:48It constantly breaks. It constantly doesn't have access to it. Codex doesn't know how to ask for permission to things. sometimes they're all like this. They're like, oh, I can't possibly log in.

23:00David Pierce:And I'm like, buddy, ask me to put in the password. I know the password. We made the password together. And it's like, who's to say? It drives me nuts. And so this is why I had to keep making new chat windows because it would be like, ah, I guess I just don't have access. And I'd be like, oh, my God. And so, you know, super intelligence. We've invented it. And yet at the end of this, it goes, oh, your enterprise environment doesn't let you publish websites. I'm like, we built it on this platform to publish it. And so I was feeling defeated and gave up at that point. So no one has actually used this website except for me.

23:44But this is my attempt.

23:46David Pierce:You could share it. This could be just for coworkers, I will say. You could probably share it with me as somebody who is also in our enterprise domain. So this might be the farm share, office share. I want some fava beans are my favorite type of beans. See, we're solving problems. They don't look very good, but you're welcome to have them. I'll bring them in for you. Can't wait. Also, I will say mine had a similar problem in that it kept telling me, like, oh, I can't embed things. Sorry. And I was like, it said it went against its guidelines for YouTube videos. And I was like, it wasn't like a YouTube video that didn't have the purgations.

24:20Like, it was fine to embed it. and I was like, oh, you can't embed any YouTube videos ever. And I was like, oh my bad, yeah, I can. And then I tried it, it kept breaking. So I just had to link to them all. Even the Verge one on YouTube, it was like, oh, sorry, I'm not allowed. And I was like, the embed code is right here, but okay, crazy.

24:36David Pierce:Bewildering. Yeah, it's all these sorts of things that I think have been my ongoing vibe coding experience. If you either hit this point where it's like, okay, either I'm now going to ask you, Codex, how do we solve this problem? and we're just going to go off on some other weird rabbit hole that's going to spend four hours solving a problem you should have solved the first time we did this codex, or I'm going to give up here. And I think most reasonable people just give up. And this is the thing, right? All of these tools, they go, they try so hard to do so much autonomously that they end up way down the wrong road before realizing the wrong road that they're down.

25:13David Pierce:And one of the things I'm learning to get better at with these things is doing so much back and forth up front so much documentation, so much like explaining, like my, my first prompt of the thing that I built was probably 1500 words long of just like, let's, let's be so, so like I wrote a memo of like, here is what I want this thing to be. And here is everything that you are not going to do in order to screw it up. Uh, but I think it's, it's really easy to do exactly what you just did, Jake. And like, you get all the way to the end of this process and it's like, Oh, I actually can't do the main thing that we were supposed to do.

25:46David Pierce:Cause I forgot. And it's like, what are we doing? And by the way, do you want to know where I got the idea to use ChatGPT sites? From ChatGPT! It suggested it when I said I wanted to publish this. I was like, what's the easiest, simplest? Yeah. I have done the same thing where at the beginning of the conversation, I will spend a long time being like, do not build. Do not proceed. Do not do anything except ask clarifying questions. And then, dude, Codex does not listen. This is how they frigging ended up hacking Hugging Face. This thing needs to chill out. Yeah. It's like, I have no questions. I made it already.

26:20David Pierce:No, no, no, no. I need you to have questions. Oh, God, no. Something that was also really weird is like the weird guardrails that were so random and not even relevant. Like I told it what to put in my bio. I wrote it. And then it was like, oh, it kept saying cite here, cite here. Like in the text. Like C-I-T-E. Yeah. And it would not take it out for like about 45 minutes. I had to go back and forth. And it kept being like, oh, don't worry. like sorry I have a thing I can't override where I can't plagiarize and I'm like I wrote that oh my god and it's not like I'm stealing it from another site where that bio exists no this is what I wrote for this site right now in the chat you know crazy I honestly ask Hayden Field if that's okay if we use that you're like what do you mean it was like I had to do all these crazy workarounds where it like like did invisible spaces with between the letters I don't know I think it's very transparent of them to assume that no one writes their own text.

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30:30All right.

30:31David Pierce:Can I show you guys what I built? Please. I am unnecessarily excited about what I built. I actually built two things. One for the brief of this project and one just because it's a thing I've been meaning to do for forever and I got a little carried away. And also Fable came back. So I got some weird stuff to do. Let me show you. So the thing that I set out to make is a way to share pictures of my family with my family, right? So a thing that happens when you have young kids is lots of people want to see pictures of your kids. There's family who wants like an ongoing update of what's going on. And then there's just random people you encountered who you decide to foist pictures of your children on.

31:10David Pierce:This has meant I spend too much time either like curating a Google Photos album, which I think is just an annoying process, or scrolling through my camera roll trying to find good pictures. So I'm like, actually what I want is a way that I can just very easily dump photos into a place and then I can go to that place to see the most recent cute photos of my kids. I take a thousand of them all the time and I wanna just save the ones that I like. So I went to Cloud Code and essentially described that system. I want a very secure, very straightforward way to share photos of my family with a select set of people all in one place.

31:44David Pierce:So I built this system that you can see in front of you And it is essentially just an ongoing grid of pictures that I've uploaded. And I add to it in one of two ways. I can either just drag a picture from my desktop, upload it, and just immediately it appears. I can then go through it and you can scroll. You can download an individual picture or I can delete them, but no one else can delete them. Or you're always back on the timeline. or, and this is the big one, and this is the thing that took by far the longest with Cloud Code, I built a shortcut in Apple Shortcuts that I can take a photo. I have it on my camera roll and I share it and I tap Pierce Gray Photos.

32:30David Pierce:It runs the shortcut and in just a moment, it will appear in the timeline. Wow. That's pretty fancy. All right. The shortcut is really amazing. First of all, how cute is this kit? Come on. This is extremely cute. Where did they come from? So this is now, this is the thing that I built, right? I was like, I want a repository of just all of the photos. This became very complicated because one of the very first things I told CloudCode was that security is very important to me, which it is. So it made a bunch of decisions around that. It password protected both sites. I have an admin password and a user password, just like you were talking about, Jake.

33:05David Pierce:But it also suggested giving people like Google Docs style magic links, which I thought was very clever. So what I have now is a revocable link that I can share with individual people. So like my mom has a link to this that is a special specific link to my mom that I can just revoke at any time. So I don't even actually have to give out the password. I just send people the link and then I'm in charge of who has the link and who doesn't. I get records of how often the site's being accessed. It also had me go through Cloudflare and like do a bunch of stuff to prevent it from being accessed too often.

33:37David Pierce:All kinds of interesting stuff. But the most interesting thing that happened was when I wanted to fill this out, I went through and like put a bunch of old pictures in just to get it to work. But I put them in just in no particular order, just grabbed a bunch of photos and threw them in. And so it threw them in in the order in which I put them in, which is not helpful. What I want is like a timeline of my children. Right. So then I was like, OK, can you actually reorder it? So instead of showing it by when it was added, show it by when it was taken, just pull it from the EXIF data. and it goes, oh, as a security measure, I've been stripping the EXIF data, which is good and interesting and helpful and thoughtful.

34:15David Pierce:It did that without asking. It just started stripping all of the metadata out of the photos because it's like, this is private information. You wanted privacy. We'll get it out of here. So I had to be like, okay, no, I need a way to sort these by the date it was taken. So it went back. We had to basically start from the beginning and build a whole system that just takes the date out of the exif data, strips the exif data, and then uploads it with that date and then puts it in the right order. So I can now have it sorted by when I added the photos or sort by when the photo was taken, which is a much more accurate timeline.

34:49I'm kind of amazed. Honestly, this is perfect, especially because now I have a lot of friends with kids that have added me to shared albums and stuff. But this is so smart. It's actually pretty annoying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get a lot of like notifications, but that's incredible, especially the magic link and the fact you have the shortcut so you can actually like use it easily and the sorting, because I found in my experience, I was trying to sort the articles. I was like automatically sort them by when they're published, like oldest at the bottom for each section. But for a lot of them, I was like, oh, sorry, I can't, you know, access the date.

35:26I was like, are you like, what are you good for? You know, so that's amazing. I love that it was so good at that. It's so funny. This is like a problem that even Google Photos like breaks down with because this is what I have a newborn and my wife and I add photos to our Google Photos album. Google Photos is just like, I don't know what day this was taken on. Like just throwing things in completely random order, even though both of us are adding from an Android phone natively through Google. So this is delightful. This looks like a very pleasant like Instagram experience.

35:55David Pierce:This is great. It took forever to figure out the design because like you guys said, at first, everything was beige. I had to have a lot of thoughts about the background colors and how spaced everything should be. All of this was like a decision I had to make. And then, you know, figuring out how it should look on smaller screens was complicated. But like I actually I have spent more hours on this than I'm proud of, but it has reached a point where it actually perfectly solves all of my problems. I can even upload videos. videos was actually very tricky because wanting it to appear as a square in the grid here, but also be obvious that it's a video and have a thumbnail tricky.

36:35David Pierce:It's still you can see doesn't do a great job of picking thumbnails, but like it does work and it does play videos. Wow. So like it's it this thing does the job and has neatly solved a problem in a way that has made me very happy. So that's one. Jake, I will send this to you. Like, sincerely, Literally, you should run this exact same thing on your own devices. It also will let you upload directly from the Android share sheet because my wife uses an Android phone. So, like, this is the first thing that I have ever made that I'm like, I could sell this to people for money. I'm so certain that other people would benefit from this.

37:06I want to ask, how challenging was it for you to get this from Cloud Code onto the public Internet?

37:14David Pierce:Easy. It's all essentially just hosted on, like, Cloudflare. I already own the domain name. So I just pointed, redid the domain name. It's very simple hosting. For me, the biggest thing was I don't want to spend very much time caring about the backend. I don't want to know where everything is. The front end is the whole thing. So what I did is I added this download all button, which is just like, anytime I get nervous, right? These are all copies of photos. So like they all live somewhere else too. But anytime I just get worried about what's going on, I can just download a zip file of every single photo on here.

37:48David Pierce:And so if this site just suddenly disappears, it'll be no skin off my back. I won't actually lose anything. And that became very important. It was like, I don't know how long I'm going to want to do this project. I just want it to be here while it's useful. And then I don't ever want to lose anything when it goes away. This is cool. I love this. All right. So that's one. And that's really the one that I did for this particular project. But the other one I just want to show you because it has been just an unbelievably gigantic amount of work and I need it to be for something. So I write this newsletter every week called Installer.

38:25David Pierce:An Installer is just a compendium of stuff. Just every week there is just a million links to things. And so what I did was say I need a searchable, sortable archive of everything I've ever featured in Installer. Go. So 400 ,000 billion tokens and turns later, I ended up with this, which is called Installer Archive. And what it is, is an imperfectly sorted and categorized list of everything I've ever featured in Installer. The brief was basically like anything that's a link is fair game. Anything that's bold is a thing that matters. You can sort of tell the structure of the newsletter what it is.

39:07David Pierce:I fed it a folder full of publicly available Google Docs and was like, just go to work. So it went through and started finding all of the stuff, categorizing it that you can see there are there are tags below every single one of these up here. None of this is perfect. None of it is even like particularly well formatted and structured. But what it does mean is I can go in and be like, when have I written about Obsidian? And I can find all the mentions of Obsidian in every edition of Installer ever. It has shown up 18 different times in Installer in the whatever 136 issues I have fed into this thing.

39:43David Pierce:I can also go in and be like, OK, what movies have I mentioned? And this is just a reverse chronological list of every movie I've mentioned in Installer. And the key thing here is all of this is automatic. Right. So like I didn't tell it that Cape Fear was a movie that I mentioned. I didn't tell it that the Odyssey is a movie. it went in and actually pulled against publicly available information on the web to figure out what each of these things is link it to the right place so like this when I click it it links out to the TMDB gives you more information all of this is automatic and it took forever really because it had to go basically issue by issue thing by thing go find the right stuff and Jake you've edited installer many So you know that what I link is not often the exact title of the thing.

40:37David Pierce:It took, I don't know, a week of running out of tokens over and over and over and over and over again. Every single time I used like millions of tokens building this thing. But it eventually built me a categorizable, organizable, searchable archive of 5 ,997 links that I have featured in Installer. I don't know what I'm going to do with this. This is just running. There's basically there's a huge JavaScript file on my computer that is all the data. And there's an index file that is what you're looking at right now. Would this do anything for anybody if I published it? I have no idea. This is cool.

41:12No, I think this rules. I feel like, I mean, yes, this feels like a very cool piece of installer. If you can figure out some way to bundle this in. And I would love to know. I know you try to always do new things, but some stuff recurs, right? You'll cover something when there is a big update to it. Or there's the crowdsource section, which it looks like is also getting included here, where people will be like, I just discovered this and got into it. So it would be really interesting to see what stuff gets mentioned the most. This could be a good, like, anniversary thing right now. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

41:49David Pierce:Yeah. So, like, Widow's Bay, good example. A thing that has come up a bunch, appeared four times in the newsletter this year. And I just can find it there. I also have a button for random pick that just takes you to a thing. Something that has come up in the newsletter at some various time. This is so cool. I can't believe this. It's really fun. And it is like I'm shocked at how useful it is. I'm also struck, and I'm sure both of you have had this experience, of to take this from this sort of reasonably functional, reasonably useful thing that I've built into something that would make sense to someone that is not me, much less to like potentially lots of strangers feels like such an unbelievably daunting task to me that I don't even know where to start.

42:37Right. That's where it gets so tedious. And it's like, it's okay if it's a little broken for you. Like, you know the quirks and you're fine at handling them. Right. I saw you just like had to, I've encountered this too, where like the apostrophe is slightly different. And so you didn't get Widow's Bay on the first one because it used the different Unicode thing. And it's like, technically, you have to fix that. You don't feel like fixing that. Like, it's just time. It's mental bandwidth. But yeah, I understand. But it's so close and so cool and perfectly functional for your needs. And I can totally imagine how this would come up as your writing installer each week being like, when was the last time I mentioned this?

43:13Or have I done this too much?

43:14David Pierce:Right. And so this is the thing. And I suspect this is kind of the takeaway for all three of us having done this now both for our own projects and for the purposes of this experiment, which is, I am increasingly compelled by how good these tools are for building little things for myself. And I think the idea that this is going to make everyone into a successful developer of products for other people, wrong. Like the gap between this thing that I made for myself and like good published user facing business product is so vast that I can't even comprehend how to get from here to there. That's like, yeah, I have a lot of friends that are software engineers and they've all told me like they kind of get mad when people are like, oh, everyone's a software engineer now.

44:04Everyone can do it because it takes so much skill and knowledge to transform something from, yeah, a tool just for you to something for other people, whether it's like clean code, security, like things not breaking when you scale them up. There's so many things. It's just like unfathomable. So I think you're right. It's like this is perfect for like sharing among small groups. But when you're like, you know, scaling it up for a product for a ton of people to use, it's just completely different. This is like the same thing with the art side of AI too, right? It's like I absolutely can make a song now.

44:39I can type whatever I want to know and a song will come out. My ability to turn it into something that makes sense for the world is completely different. And I think like I as I was building my own to do list app, I it was very clear, like this is a thing that only makes sense to me. And I don't even know how to get into the mindset of making this make sense to people at large. And that is a completely separate skill, like beyond the basics of just like writing clean code.

45:10David Pierce:Yeah, I completely agree. And yeah, it makes you realize that actually building the prototype of your app is just one very teeny tiny step of building a great, useful piece of software. And I'm like, I was thinking about this. Like if I ship this to other people, like I sent it to my mom and my mom had some bug reports, basically. She's like, here's a couple of things that don't work. I was like, I don't know what to do with these. I'm going to tell Claude all the things that other people are discovering are broken and see if you can fix them. And I don't know that that's a good path forward for mainstream software.

45:44Seems bad. I mean, if your mom could text her own Claude Code instance, like maybe? I don't know.

45:51David Pierce:Yeah, my mom is going to hit up her open claw on Telegram and see what's going on. All right. Thank you both for doing this. This has been a delightful project. Thanks. Yeah, this is fun. All right. That's it for the show. Thanks to Jake and Hayden for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, feedback, if you have a name for this segment, I still can't do better than homework in my head and that is not a good name. Thank you to everybody who reached out with advice about how to keep these things secure and how to not create incredible cybersecurity disasters with our vibe coding projects.

46:23David Pierce:I wanna hear all of your thoughts and feelings about what we've done, what we could do better, and most importantly, what challenge I should give to the next people. This game is not over, my friends. I wanna hear all about it. Send us an email, vergecastatheverge.com, call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. And as a reminder, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're doing here is to subscribe to The Verge. Theverge.com slash subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you all of our coverage of AI and vibe coding and everything else.

46:53David Pierce:Theverge.com slash subscribe. It's also how someday Jake and Hayden will be able to pay the$20 a month for their vibe coding tools. What a world we would like to live in. You know what I mean? Theverge.com slash subscribe. Thanks in advance. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll.