The Vergecast - We hear pitches on the best vibe-coded apps

Episode Date: October 5, 2026

Welcome to the Bear Lair!* (No, it’s nothing like that other show.) As we continue to explore the world of AI tools and vibe coding, we invited a few enterprising Vergecast fans to share their projects — and we invited The Verge’s Hayden Field to judge them with us. We’ll see what people are working on, and whether any of them will make us fabulously wealthy.*We came up with this name before we became aware that someone else thought of it first... no relation to the APTNtv show Bears' Lair! Further reading: ⁠Google admits not every Android app runs great on Intel Googlebooks⁠ ⁠The Pixel 10A now costs $100 more.⁠ ⁠Samsung raised prices on the Galaxy S26 by $100⁠ ⁠Huawei says RAMageddon has increased its smartphone costs by $200.⁠ ⁠2GB Raspberry Pis are getting pricier.⁠ ⁠Nvidia’s Shield TV Pro just got a $100 price hike⁠ ⁠Star Wars: Galactic Racer is my childhood podracing dream come true⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of dubious investments. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're doing a fun new thing. So we've talked a lot about vibe coding on this show over the last several months. I think it's one of the biggest trends in technology right now. I think it's funny and silly to play with myself as somebody who is frankly a coding novice. I can code you like the heck out of an HTML website, and that's kind of it. But I also think there is something important about the first way in which AI has really found product market fit.

We've talked about it. We've done experiments. But then Travis Larchuk, our producer, had an idea, which is why don't we see who else in the world, which Vergecast viewers, which Virgat's listeners, which of the people in our orbit have been making cool stuff? And who can come to us with the very best idea that we are going to invest all of our fake money in? If you're thinking this sounds a little bit like Shark Tank, let me tell you, you're dead wrong.

This is nothing like Shark Tank. It might be a lot like Shark Tank. Anyway, we have really fun stuff coming up. We spent a bunch of time with a bunch of people. Thank you to everybody who came on. I'm really excited for you to hear this one. And we have some competition coming up. We're going to get right into that.

But first, here's everything else happening on the verge today. I'm Travis Larchuk, and this is 90 seconds on the verge for Monday, October 5th, 2026. You can buy a Google Book. They're on sale. These laptops are the air apparent to the Chromebook, but Chrome OS is out. and Android-based Google Book OS is in. The five different Google Books on sale now are made by five different companies, and none of them are Google.

Starting prices run from $899 to $1299. Dell & H.P's Google Books run on Qualcomm's arm-based Snapdragon processors. Acer, Asus, and Lenovos have X-86 Intel chips, but heads up on those, Google already told Android Authority that not every Android app may run smoothly on Intel chips from the beginning. Speaking of Android, Google quietly bumped up the price of the Pixel 10A by $100. The 10A phone will now run you $599 if you buy it MSRP. Of course, Google is not alone here.

Last week, Samsung and Huawei bumped up some of their phones prices. Raspberry pies are getting more expensive. Not even the 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV Pro streaming box is safe. And finally, the first new Star Wars racing video game in decades comes out tomorrow, and childhood and current me are both very excited. It's called Star Wars Galactic Racer, and it's getting a lot of love from critics. The Verges Jay Peters says it's his childhood pod racing dream come true. You can read more at Theverge.com.

That's 90 seconds on The Verge for Monday, October 5, 2026. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee. Coffee plus B12 to help support immune function and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning.

Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. All right, let's get to vibe coding. The Verges Senior AI reporter Hayden Field is here. Hi, Hayden. Hey. Hayden, do you have any idea what we're in for right now? Can I, should I prepare you for this thing that is coming?

Please prepare me. I mean, all I know is the name and it sounds, it sounds ominous bear lair. Lay it on me. What's going on? Okay, so the show is called bear lair. It has no resemblance to any other show that anyone has ever made or seen on television. It's very important that you know that. This is a unique new concept that we've created.

And basically the idea is you and I in this situation, I suppose, we're the bears. And we each have, I believe it's a billion. dollars in investment capital at our disposal. Let's cash out right now. I invested in no one. Give me the cash. We're going to go. This is a very short episode. A bunch of people are going to come on and they're going to pitch us on the things that they've been building. And we, I think of this is sort of a combination of Shark Tank and the voice where we're going to be sort of in on everybody, but you can be in at whatever level

you'd like to be and we're going to bid against each other. and whoever gets the most investment wins. So we're going to get pitches from people. We're going to decide what we like. We're going to be ruthlessly cruel to all of the ideas that we don't like. And then we're going to get into it. Let's bring in Travis, our producer, and the true hero of Bear Lair. Travis, this is your baby. Walk us through it.

What are we doing? Hello, bears. As David has described, you each have $1 billion to invest in a number of vibe-coded projects that our lovely, brilliant listeners have taken time out of their days to share with you. They are across the world. Literally two continents worth of listeners

are represented here today. And just for record-keeping, a billion dollars is $1,000. Please only bid in increments of $1 million. Please do not just bid $1. Thank you. All right. Let's get this show on the road. So each of our listeners are going to give you a little two-minute elevator pitch. And then we will open things up for Q&A. And then you may bid as much of your fake money as you want. Our first listener joins us from Washington, D.C. This is John. Bears. I am. So hi. Hi, John. Hi. So I have this. I'm going to step back. So this is a skylight, which I don't know if you guys have ever, you're a dad, David.

So this is like a thing that normally hangs on your wall and it's supposed to be able to like, you know, you're planning your kids like, you know, appointments, that kind of thing. And it's basically just an Android tablet without a battery and it plugs into the wall. And my wife bought this and I did not like it very much. I did not think it worked very well. So through the use of AI, I got it working. And obviously, it's not working perfectly well. But if we go here, I can show you, you know, there's a dashboard.

I can actually control the lights in my home. And my favorite little bit is I can actually, like, do a grocery list app. And once I've done it, it actually comes up as a little receipt. And I've made this specifically because I needed, like, you know, I'm at the fridge and I, or my wife usually is at the fridge. She needs to, you know, send something to me to be like, can you know, please pick this up. Rather than having one running grocery list, I like getting them as tickets. And so now I get these telegram messages and they go into tick-tick. But what's really cool about it is

it's actually like completely adaptable because it's all just a web interface on the back. And so I can actually like go into Claude as it were or whatever and say, hey, I want an app that does this. I want an app that tells me where the Metro is. I want an app that shows me, you know, where the Potomac is doing right now. I want an app that sets timers and, you know, plugs into home assistant. So, you know, I want an app that, for instance, like I've plugged my car into home assistant. So I want a tab where I can press a button and it turns on the climate control and tells me how long it will be to go to work.

And if I'm running late, then like, you know, can I get a line bike or something else instead? I think it's really cool that it's like it isn't anything. It's just a blank slate and, you know, through just talking to it and spending a lot of money on tokens, you can get it to do whatever you want. And that's what I really enjoyed about it. I have two questions. This tablet looks enormous. Is it, is it in fact, enormous?

I love the enormous oversized tablet. Yeah, and it actually hangs on your wall. So it's got mounting points on the back and you can actually, so it looks just like a picture and you can upload whatever photo you want and it statically just has a picture frame and you tap it and then it goes to your dashboard. Where do you imagine I'm going to put this in my house? Is this, are we going to stick this next to the fridge on the wall? Is this the idea?

Yeah, I mean, that's literally where I have it. So, I mean, it's actually like the fridge is here and this is behind the fridge. And so, you know, when my wife opens it up and she's like, there is no, there are no grapes in the house and what the hell is going on here. And she can just angrily be like, it actually says, like, who's ordering? You know, so my wife can go and be like, you know, grapes and then type it in. And then I'll get a text being like, where the hell are the grapes? So this already existed, right? And you just vibe coded and have to make it work way better. Is that right? Like the skylighting? Yeah, yeah. Okay. It's just Android. It's just a really old crappy Android tablet. Okay, got it. And then here's my other question. When you do these notes, like your grocery list and stuff, can you access it on a phone also? Or is it only, is all this stuff only accessible through the tablet on the wall? Like, you know, if she adds like grapes to the grocery list on there, is it going to appear? Or can you make it appear like on your phone notes or, you know, whatever as well? Or only accessible on the wall? Well, here's the really cool thing, actually, that I love about this. And I feel David, David might really like this. If I use TicTic and my wife uses Trello, if I add something for her, it goes to Trello. If she adds something for me, it goes to TicTic.

And as if you're familiar with TickTick, it live in Trello. They live in the cloud. It lives absolutely everywhere. And so I get it on my watch. I get it wherever. And because all this does, actually, Ticktick has an really good MCP. So it has an MCP server. There's like a Tick-Tick MCP server.

And so like, you know, on the back end, there's like a Claude server running on a, it's running on a broken, headless MacBook air that I removed the screen from. And so it just pushes that into the cloud. And so I can access it from anywhere. But that's what I thought was really cool about it, actually, is this solved a really specific problem, which is skylight really wants you locked into this app, right, and into this ecosystem that doesn't talk to anything. Whereas this, I, like, literally wiped it.

Like, there's no skylight on this at all anymore. This is just basically just a web page that's running on the server. So it also, what's nice is it doesn't matter how slow this particular tablet is. And in fact, I have an accessory for it, which is an old, like, Kindle Fire, Amazon Fire, 6 inch, but it's like literally 10 years old. And I notice it's got a nice small screen, really high DPI. And this can run a server that then goes onto that. And by kind of turning it into a kiosk, I can actually tap it and hang it on my wall and control like lights and stuff in the house. So, you know, So it's really adaptable. Okay, I'm in on this, and I'll tell you why. For one very specific reason, because my wife and I have been together for 13 years, and I have never been able to convince her to keep a shopping list, ever. I have tried dedicated apps.

I have tried note-taking apps. I have tried a shared Google document. Cannot make the woman keep a shopping list? She's just not interested. Her shopping list is to sort of wander past me and announce the things that we need, and then I have to remember them. this I think gives me a real fighting chance at creating a shared shopping list and so for that reason I'm gonna Hayden I'm gonna start the bidding here at 25 million dollars okay nice I mean we have a billion

so I was gonna go a little higher um okay I I feel like yeah I mean this is exciting to me I think anything that anything where the tech is kind of integrated into your home and I don't use like notion or anything like that, but if I would, if it were on my wall. You know what I mean? So this is something that I think like everyone in the family can kind of use, especially since it's ported over to your personal device and the type of systems you like. So yeah, I'll go up to like 100 million. Hayden, you can have it at 100. I thought I was going to get it cheaper than this. A hundred, 100 is good, but it's steep. You can have it. I should have gone in at less. Oh, well. John, thank you so much. Thank you, John. Hayden is down to a paltry 900.

million dollars worth of personal wealth. All right. Next up is Sarah joining us from Chicago, Illinois. Hi, David. Hi, Hayden. Hi. Welcome. Thank you for being here.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. What do you have for us? So I'm a parent of a two-year-old, and for me, the hardest part of parenting is, like, a cognitive load. It's the million things you have to remember. It's the 200 decisions you make every single day. And for me, where it really hit was 9 p.m.

when I was trying to pack my son's lunch for daycare the next day, trying to remember what my pediatrician told me, what foods my son's been eating that he actually likes, whether or not I've served him something before, and at the end of it, I don't actually know what's in my fridge. So I created this app. It's a combination meal tracker, logger, and it helps me keep track of what's in my pantry

as well as what my son has been eating. So it works like this. I go to the grocery store, and then I come home from the grocery store, and I toggle over to my pantry app. And I tell it what kinds of things I just bought. Today I just bought snap peas and I bought him some apples and some other things, right? And I can import it into my pantry, which keeps track of what's available to me, as well as whether or not my son likes it. When I decide to serve him a meal, I can go to the planner tab, which has all of his meals for the day. I can either do this ahead of time if I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for the week or what more often happens for me is after he's eating the meal, I'm like, oh yeah, this is what he ate today. So I think today at lunch, he had something like grapes, and then, you know, he had some meatballs, I'm pretty sure, right? And I can add those to his lunch. After he's done eating, then when I go back to the main tab, it will ask me how his meal was. And I can tell it how much of that meal that he ate that particular day. So today, I know at breakfast he ate all of his yogurt, he ate all his apples, and he had some oats. I can also make a note if I'm running low on something or if I run out on something,

which is useful for me later. Anytime something is low or out, it goes into a shopping list that I can either look at directly through the app or I can copy and paste into another app. And then for me, the most important thing in terms of trying to keep track of like whether I'm giving him a variety of foods. In the planner section, there's a weekly tab, which lets me look at the entire week and see very quickly, what have I been serving him? Have I been giving him a variety of things?

have I given in chicken nuggets every single day the last week. And so my question for you, Sarah, is can you think of a way that we might be able to connect this even more closely to shopping? Like what I want here is a way to basically track all this stuff and then go to the grocery store and have it sort of immediately pop up a thing that's like, here's all the stuff you definitely need to buy because you're kind of out of it. But also here are some other ideas of food that you might like or that they might like. Like I'm looking for the next turn here is like, yes, David, your son only eats blueberry

waffles. Have you considered strawberry waffles? I don't know. Is there, do you think we can make a grocery store turn here? This is how we make our Instacart money and really take this thing to the next level, Sarah. What do you think? I think that's a fabulous idea. So I'll say, first of all, there's already a shopping tab, which has things broken out

by section. So when you run lower out, I do think the next step would be trying to integrate this with something that can suggest things. And the nice thing is there's a lot of work already been done out there that said, if your kid likes this very basic thing, here's how to slowly graduate them to something that's maybe more adult. So you go from chicken nuggets to a slightly different brand of chicken nuggets to shredded chicken to like a chicken breast with a dill sauce or something on it. So I think we could integrate that in to say, hey, if your kid regularly eats or likes this kind of thing, here's the next step up to get them to move towards what we might call a more adult palate. I like this. I'm also assuming you mostly do this on your phone, that this is like a primarily mobile experience, yeah? It is mostly a mobile experience, although I've set it up so that you can push the data to sort of a central place and then sink it across devices. So actually, when I enter my shopping list for that or when I come home from the grocery store and I enter my foods, I usually

do that on my computer and then sync it to the cloud. That also lets you sync across devices if both parents are responsible for meal prep or grocery shopping or anything like that. Got it. Okay. Okay. Here's my question. Yes. I like I kind of want this for myself, honestly, because I had super burrito, which is my

favorite burrito shop every day for a week last month. And then I was like, I've got to take a bird's eye view of what I'm eating. So anyway, if I were a parent, absolutely I'd be using this. Here is my question. Do you think it's possible to, yeah, incorporate more of a suggestion mode on, okay, let's say you're looking at the weekly view and you realize, oh, okay, you know, we've got a few food groups covered, but, you know, we're really lacking two other ones. Are there, I would love to see like a suggestion mode of, oh, here are two types of things

you could be serving, not even the graduating thing, but just this is what you could be serving, you know, that you may not be thinking up. Or based on what's in your pantry, here are some other things you could be making that would like, you know, hit those other food groups. Do you think that would be easy to do? I think it would be relatively simple. I think it's just a matter of connecting the app with an API key to something like Quad or ChatGBTBT, BT, and then giving it that underlying instruction to say, hey, on this particular window, this is where I want you to generate these kinds of instructions.

I think that would be pretty simple to do. Hayden, you get to bid first on this one. Okay, I'm going to, I learned my lesson here. I'm going to start the bidding at $25 million. I'm going to go to $50 million. I want this one. This one, this will work in my life immediately. I think.

I will not be able to convince my wife to use this. I'm realizing this now as I go. This will be a David-only experience, but I want it anyway. I'm going to go with $60 million because, yeah, I think that, like, one, this is useful for kids, but also, like, I would use this for myself. I'm going to go $75. 80. Shit. These increments are bonkers.

You have a billion dollars. Yeah, but there's a lot left. I'll go $100. I'm either going to bleed you dry or I'm going to $1.000. I'm going to win. If I knew how many were loved, I would be, like, it's scary not knowing. Okay, I'm going to do, honestly, like, 115. Like, I believe in this one, you know?

It's also the cognitive load. Like, this is, if I had kids, I feel like I'd be using this every meal because it's just, I'm keeping charge too many things. All right, Hayden, you can have it. I'm starting to worry. I'm going to end up playing myself on this one, but you can have it. 115 is yours. Sarah, thank you.

Congratulations on your. your newfound millions. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sarah. Enjoy all that money. Bye. So just to recap, recap where we're at, David has so far not acquired any projects. Hayden is down to a mere $785 million, and she has the John's tablet from which you can request groceries and also Sarah's child meal tracker.

Starting to be nervous. I should have been higher on that second one. All right. Coming up next, we have Eddie from New Jersey. Jersey. Hey, how's it going, David? How's it going, Hayden? Welcome. Thank you for being here. Yeah. So I don't really, I guess my, I don't have so much as a front-end app as much as like a backend tool for podcasting, media management, that kind of thing. Something we're interested in. Yeah, so I manage most of the media at my church. And so I have

like the whole archive. And every once in a while I get a question that's like, oh, you remember when the pastor talked about this and I'm like I honestly I think I remember that but that may have been like three or four years ago so I started working on this tool last winter where I could basically summarize and pump all this data into into a Gemini notebook and then have it searched for me and so the tool is pretty crude but I can I can just share my screen here and show you sort of the workflow that I have yeah so this is just a command line interface it's really just a a Python script that I had Gemini vibe code for me. And all you really do is you put all of the M3 files

for whatever you want to art put into this in a folder with this script and you run it. It uses a Gemini API key, so you need to make your own API key. And then it loads a whisper model and transcribes each MP3 files sort of one at a time. So it's going through this sermon called Understanding Above Knowledge, and it'll just go through,

and it kind of keeps you updated that it's not frozen as it goes by. And it takes a little while on my laptop, but on my desktop, it's a little bit faster. And if you're running a GPU, it'll be even faster. But you can load up as many as you want, just let it run overnight. And then what it does,

once it has the transcript, is it'll take small chunks of it and send it to, I just use one of the free models that Cool Cloud offers. And so it chunks it into about 10 different, parts to keep the context window manageable, and then it summarizes each of those sections. So it kind of gets rid of a lot of that transcript and repeated sentences and stuff like that. And at the end, it gives you sort of a little summary for each one.

It just gives you how many times it sent it to the cloud and does some hallucination checks to make sure it's not like totally making stuff up because that was happening earlier. Like, it was worse six months ago when I was doing this, but it seems to be better now. And then what you get out of it is just this, basically this giant markdown file. So this is the sermon database for my church for the year of 2025. And so it's got all roughly 50 sermons in there. And it's just the title, the date, and then the summary. And then I put all of these markdown files into a Gemini notebook.

And this is shared with most of the people at my church. And they can just go in and they can chat with this thing. I hope none of them use it for pastoral advice. but I give like an example prompt here. Like we can just say like, I'm looking for a sermon about how to make important life decisions. And it'll go through and it'll search through all of these four years of sermons that I have in here. And it'll it'll pull out specific ones that you can then go find on our pod bean or on our Apple podcast and stuff. And so I, you know, for this audience, I think for me, what's most relevant is that, you know,

sometimes Neely likes to just like drop these like random Easter eggs. And I've been listening to show for like four or five years and sometimes I still have no idea what he's talking about. So I think it would be really nice to just be like, yeah, what is Nilai talking about? And he's always like the OGs will know. And I'm like, now I can pretend to be an OG, you know? If it makes you feel any better,

I often don't know what he's talking about either. And I've been hosting the show for a long time. There are a lot of deep Vergecast cuts that were like a thing one person said on one episode in 2012. And they're like, you remember. And it's like, no, no one remembers. But now we could remember. If it is, it seems like since it's summarizing each part, it's not like, you know, you can't search transcripts.

So what if it was a quick like Easter egg that someone dropped in? Would that even make it into the summary as in would that show up if you were searching for like, oh, David made an inside joke about like shag rugs, you know, when was that? Do you think that would make it into the summary and be searchable or probably not because it's not like a high level takeaway? Yeah, it really depends. so it probably won't, although it depends on how long they talked about it. So I've tried searching things based on anecdotes because sometimes you tell a story in the middle of a sermon to show a point. And like it will pick up on that stuff even if it's a short story.

But yeah, like one-liners, it might not pick up on that. How do you think about the difference between this and like a granola-style meeting recorder? Like every time we open Google Meet now, it's like, do you want Gemmernet or record? this and send you action items. And I'm always like, no, thank you, Gemini. But this idea of being able to find through an archive of stuff is very useful. Do you think, is there some cross-pollination there? Are we going to have a B-to-B strategy where we just record everybody's meetings? Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I kind of do this manually moving, like, going backwards, but I think moving forward, it would be nice to either have it automated from our YouTube stream or even, like,

when we upload something to, we use Podbean as our RSS host, like if Podbean even just like added this or here, you guys bought it, made it, and sold it to them. And they just added this to their website where you could go to your favorite podcast. And there would just be a search bar right there. You've already figured out the exit for our product. This is amazing. Yeah.

So I'm trying to, my goal is to get this up and running in No Book LM and then see if the website team wants to embed it into the website because we have like a webpage with our podcasts there. And that would be a good spot to have it, but with a big disclaimer to not ask for advice, but just use it to look for past recordings. So I have spent a lot of time looking for a tool that does almost exactly this thing that you just described, which is like as a reporter, I spend a lot of time talking to people about a lot of things.

And I'm constantly like, oh, I was just talking to somebody about this thing. And sometimes that was a week ago and sometimes it was six years. years ago and going through, I have like full text search in a transcription app that I use and that's sort of useful. But just to be like, when was I talking about this thing with this person would be hugely useful? And as somebody who like, I record a lot of things because we're doing interviews all the time. This is sort of exactly useful to me professionally. And thus, I want this very badly. Hayden, Hayden, you can tell me how you feel, but I'm just, I'm going to bid $100 million on this right now. Wow. This needs to exist in my day-to-day workflow starting tomorrow.

Okay, I love that. I mean, I think it's super useful and I would use it, but I think from our conversations lately, David, this is so useful to you that I'm going to let you have it. Like, truly, I was going to do, like, start at like $75 million, but you go for you need this. I legitimately desperately need this. As everyone who works with me can attest, I have a lot of information a lot of places and I can't find anything anywhere. This feels like it will neatly solve a problem for me. I am going to need you to build me a front end though. Because I can't run this whole thing in the terminal or in PowerShell.

It'll just, I will break it in ways that I am not able to solve. So you're going to need to take all of this money that I'm giving you and you're going to have to build me a mobile app. But I think we can make this work. All right. Yeah. That'll work. I love that.

Congratulations on the $100 million. Huge for you. Thank you. Yes. That's great. Thank you, Eddie. We have a few more folks left. So let's go to Simon, who is joining us from the United Kingdom.

Simon, I hope you've come up with something unbelievably weird that no one would have ever thought of. I think I have, actually. Yes. Yeah, I think I'm kind of one of that generation of perhaps older men who kind of feel strangely empowered by vibe coding to make weird shit. And so I've kind of gone all in. I'm going to ask you guys a question and it's and it's and it's kind of relevant to the thing that I've made is

imagine that we all went to a party and then I said, hey, send me the photographs from the party. David, how would you do it? I would, well, the honest answer is I would forget and never do it. Okay, cool. I would be,

I would probably text you a bunch of photos or worst case we're getting a shared album in like Apple photos, which I think is no one's idea of a good time, but is probably what we would resort to. Yeah. Hayden, what about you?

This is like my hell, so I'm really glad you asked. It's something that affects me every couple days. It is my biggest, like, I think about this way too much. Okay, so here's exactly what I would do. I would not create a shared album because the other day I had to spend five hours

troubleshooting a shared album from my bachelor at party, so no. Instead, I would do less than 20, photos per text because if you do more than 20, it creates an iCloud link and the person can't even access it for like six hours. So I would divide the photos into less than 20 increments and send each one to you. And I also like to send people all the photos because maybe they think they like one that I wouldn't send. So yeah, basically it's a horrible situation either way. You're just texting people 19 photos at a time? Yes. I mean, I'm a girl. That's horrible.

If I'm taking a picture of my friend, you better believe I'm taking like 40 pictures, not just one. Oh, boy. Come on. All right. You have a willing audience. Let's hear it. So what you need, what you need is, is this. You need gather in, okay?

And I'm hoping that I'm going to share my screen. There it is. It's sharing. I'm a celebrant. I'm a humanist celebrant, so I conduct funerals for the godless and the feckless. And I've noticed that a lot of families really like to, uh, gather photographs of the deceased after, you know, after somebody's died and they want to get a load of pictures together because they maybe want to do a slideshow or created a memorial book. And as you

have just pointed out, it's a bit of a pain in the ask. I'm going to WhatsApp them to you. I'm going to put them in my eye cloud. I'm going to dropbox them to you. Oh, I'll give you access to my Google pictures. It's all a nightmare, especially when somebody's kind of grieving and they've got a whole load of things that they need to sort out. The last thing you need to do is sort out. So that. So I created Gatherin And I've built it completely with vibe code Using Claude And the back end is

FI base None of which I had any idea before Like I used to build websites with Dreamweaver in the 90s You know, I mean I could do a little bit of front end HTML and that was that was it You know the idea of building a full stack thing Was kind of completely beyond me This was built of an idea

Because there was a need I'm going to open it up here if I go to log in. So this is actually live, right? So there's a couple of, there's a couple of, I kind of created it. And people went, oh, that's a good idea. So, for example, here's, here is one. In fact, let's start a new gathering. So I can make a, let's do one about Jack.

We go, Jack. He was born in 1945 and he died in 2025. bye and he was great. So we'll create a picture of, but we'll do that. I love Jack. Yeah, he's great. It's keeping it simple. I'm keeping it simple. We're going to choose a banner color. We could add a picture of Jack, but we'll skip that for now. We'll leave it live for 60 days because what I don't want this to be is a, is a kind of a repository of photos. I want this to be a place where you gather pictures and then you do something with them. So we create the gathering and then here's Jack. This is what people would share. So you,

you basically just email people a link or you send them a QR code in whatever. You know, you can share it via email via WhatsApp, whatever. And so what people will see is like that. Can you see that? Okay. Yeah, you got it. So people will see that they can add photos. If they're on their phone and they've got this on their desktop, they can just click on the URL and upload it from their device.

So is the idea to make something sort of public? I'm imagining, you know, you have obituary pages which are public. These are designed to be sort of for the people for whom they are shared. Is that right? There's nothing public about it. It is literally a simple way of people gathering in photographs of a deceased person. Now, it was built for the deceased, but subsequently people have said, oh, I could do that for this party.

I went to. Hayden's Bachelor of Right Party. Hayden's Bachelor of the Right Party. I'll build you, I can, I'll just, I'll get Claude Co to run you up a version of a Hayden for your bachelor's party. So, yeah, so that was the idea. And so, yeah, people can just gather the photographs. It's live for 30 days. They can download them.

On the, on the upload bit, there's a little bit of kind of, is this a public photograph or is it a private photograph, i.e., I've got some pictures of, you know, weird uncle John doing some strange things. You might like to see these pictures, but I don't really want them to be made public. So you can mark a picture as being something that you wouldn't want. So it's absolutely got kind of privacy at its center. It's for people who want to collect photos and make it as simple as possible for their mates. Got it. Yeah.

I mean, this is really, I think I could see this being, I can see it being really useful for what you made it for, because I have had to do this for multiple people. Even for a friend's father, for example, I was the photo gather and it was very annoying. It's a nuisance. But of course, I was happy to do it, but it took a very long time. And so what I do want to know is how you download photos from this. Does it allow batch download? And you can save them, for example, to your camera roll.

Yeah, you select them. You select them all and download them as a zip file. Okay. You start the betting, David. 200. This is the easiest business we've found yet. This is the one that pays off all the other investments. The other ones are like great, useful for me.

This is the one we're going to turn into. This one's getting into Y Combinator, like in three months. You know what I mean? I'm going to say $2.15. $2.50. I want this one. Okay, you can have it. Bye.

Amazing. We did it, Simon. We're going to be billionaires. Yeah. I'm already a billionaire, I should say. But now we're both going to be billionaires. That's great news. Thank you so much.

All right. Fantastic. Thank you, Simon. Thanks, Simon. Bye. Bye. That brought you Wanda Vigier. I was an Avenger.

that I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible? Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Streaming October 14th, only on Disney Plus. Our next listener, join the from Illinois. It's Meals. Hey, how's it going? Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to be here. What do you have for us? So I am going to show you a pain frame. This is a basic pain tracking app that I have created to make pain tracking for my own purposes and some of the loved ones in my life pain free. You don't have to hold on to that information anymore. I found that I would end up on like the doctor Google rabbit hole. And over time I found out that like the severe stuff generally isn't the case, but like this kind of chronic pattern I would miss.

And then by the time I got to a doctor's appointment and like five weeks or whenever they scheduled out, I would totally forget like the last, you know, five weeks of what I've been going through. I also found that a lot of the options in the app store had like a lot of pop-ups, a lot of ads, a lot of unnecessary features that I didn't really want to deal with. I just wanted to be able to quickly log my pain and then be able to pull it up for my doctor. One of my other requirements was that it could work on any device because I have different people in my family, iOS, Android, and I also wanted to be able to use it on my e-reader. So I have that. It works on my e-reader as well. All Painframe is is two separate HTML pages, very basic, very paired back. This first page is a landing page where you can have a moment to enter your pain very quickly.

quickly. So it just asked three questions, your pain intensity, how much it's interfering with your activity today, and how much it's interfering with your, interfering with your enjoyment of life. These questions did some research, found that these are some of the main questions doctors are going to look at to be able to actually bridge, like, what's causing your pain to the experience of pain, so no extra fluff, just really get into what the doctors need. I have another tab where I can do a more detailed entry. If I'd like to, if I have more time where I can describe where I'm experiencing the pain, some qualities about the pain, and then I have some details at the bottom where I could add like worsening factors, what's relieving it, you know, any onset or pattern. I can choose to connect a quick entry to a more detailed entry at a later time.

So if I go in and I just do a quick entry, like while I'm kind of going about my day, I can sit and reflect later and add more details to that. I also have another tab that I call the pain frame where I have this like 3D outline anatomical model of a body. It was very funny seeing Claude get to this final design. There were a lot of very funky interpretations of the human body that came before this one. but I have a front option where I can see kind of the front profile of the body, and I have a back option where I can see the back of the body. I have these different stamps up here that feel very like Pixar to me, like, you know, those kids kind of stamping apps that I used to use in grade school,

where I can just put a stamp on where I'm feeling the pain in my body, and I can also click to adjust its location. I could make it bigger, smaller, delete it. And this works with the touchscreen on my e-reader, so that's very useful for me also. Smart. Okay. And then what's the, I do want to know the export and backup,

because I think one of the important things here is how do you get this data out to show somebody, right? Totally. So I have a, you can export it as a CSV at any time. You can also export the pane frames as a JSON file. And then they pull into this separate HTML file that's also very basic where I can load in that CSV data. I can also add that JSON data and that I can see some very simple bar graphs that I could bring to my doctor, as well as kind of like this map of, you know, overlying the locations that I've selected over time.

Okay, yeah, I really like that you can export it and that it's readable by either like a doctor or even like if you were implementing it into like some type of health AI. You could, you know, it's readable by a human or machine, it seems. Which leads to a good question, which is, do you have a big AI doctor play in here? Are you, like, should Claude get all involved in the data you're pulling here? Oh, totally. And that was my intention. A lot of the apps that I would find on the app store, like, involved me adding in my medications that day and my food in that day and my cycle. These are all things I already track in other places, like, you know, with my Apple Watch or other data. So I didn't want to create something that tried to bring this all in. I just wanted to place where I could document and then pull it into those other tools I already have, pull it into Claw, do some extra analysis.

So really just trying to capture that data quickly and pain free. Hayden, you get to go first. What do you want to bid? Okay, yeah. I think I'll start at $50 million. I'll go to $70. Okay, I'll do $90. That sounds fabulous.

Yeah, I think you can have it at 90. This is a good one. I like this. I think there is also the, all of the clod integration stuff you're talking about is going to make people very uncomfortable in some ways and also be very useful in some ways, which is my favorite thing about AI right now. Yep. I think you can choose what you do. And it'll also be really heavily used by like one population. So we love.

Also, Panframe is just a good name. It's just like it's going to work because just because the name works really well. People are going to remember that one. I like this. Thank you, Meals. Thank you so much. Meals, thank you. We have two listeners from Georgia, but one is from the country and one is from the state.

Fabulous. First, from the country of Georgia, please welcome. Ruslan. Hi, everyone. What do you have for us today? So I have an open source project that shows three maps for stock exchanges. Just to explain what a 3MAP is, imagine a giant mosaic where every tile is a company. The bigger the tile, the bigger the company.

And green means the share price is up and red means it's down, you know. So in March 2025, when President Trump announced the U.S. Bitcoin Reserve, people keep asking me to build the same thing for crypto. but the thing is this whole room can contain the fuck I don't give about crypto so instead I build three map for Pokemon cards just in case that Pokemon cards will

become the next strategic reserve you know so the goal was to make every every tile to show the actual card artwork but plotly my go to charting library couldn't do that So I asked Claude to build the stream app using D3, which is another the charting tool. So when I saw this result, I was sold in past.

I used the same approach for my main charts. So this is the Pokemon card marker. Each rectangle is a Pokemon card set. And we can see that the most valuable one is based. set from 1999, which cost about like 15K. If we zoom in, here it is, Chaldezart, worth over 5K, by the way. You can click on it and see like the information,

more information about this card and high resolution scan. I think this is really great. I think I would want you to redesign the front end a little bit, just to, because from the bird's eye view, it's hard to see how cool it is when you zoom into these different markets and the offerings. But, you know, all the data is there, which is awesome. There's so much here. I can't believe it. I also, Ruslan, I should confess while you were talking, I've just been poking around your website. And now I'm looking at the Yu-Gi-O ones, and I'm looking at the one-piece tracker. And I think you have identified an important thing,

which is that if crypto can be worth all of this, if we can do NFTs, then absolutely, yes, there's going to be a gigantic market forever in all of these things. So we're, you and I together are going to corner the market on collectible arbitrage.

This is what we're going to do together. And we're going to get just, just Charzard to the moon. You and me. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to, I'm going to start at 150 here. Again, because this is just the easiest one in the world to make money.

from. I can just see it. We're going to be billionaires. I'm going to go to 175. I go to 200. 210. I'm looking at the Yu-Gi-O one now, and there are so many options. You can't even see any pictures in the rectangles. That's how intense this screen is.

This is amazing. All right, I'm going to go to 225, and that's as high as I can do on this one. Okay. I'm going to let him have it. Yes. Okay. this is wild Ruslan thank you

I'm gonna go learn a lot about Pokemon and then you and I are gonna get you went for the highest amount yet Ruslan so great job this is huge I've gone from having a lot of money to having no money but I feel good about it it's gonna be great

Ruslan thank you so much bye thanks Ruslan all right I have one listener left for you from the great state of Georgia please welcome Spencer Hey there, bears. I have a very simple idea that is very, that I think we could sail off to Garmin. And I think we could all turn out well in the end. So I have a ride calculator that I've built. So I ride my bike a lot. You can see one of my bikes up here on my office wall. But what's really important through my rides is to end on like solid numbers. So like ending on 15 miles.

If it's a longer ride ending on 45, what drives me nuts is if I'm doing a lunch ride, I get back to the church to my parking lot wherever, and I'm at 13.2 miles, I can't stop there. I have to get to 15. Oh, you won't just ride the 0.8. You'll ride another 1.8 to get to 15. Yeah, you know, weekly goals, monthly goals. This is just teaching us a lot about the person we're getting into business with, as you describe this. This is helpful information.

If I go in, I go all in. So, so I keep riding and then I'm doing the mental math. Okay, where do I turn around to get back in the parking lot at the right mileage? And tricky, it's possible, but tricky to do while riding. Also dangerous because you're distracted and are riding around cars. So it was on one of those rides. I was just wondering if five coding could work. So later I got on Jim and I.

I basically rambled the same pitch I'm giving to you guys to Jim and I. And on the first try, it put out a working ride calculator, which was surprising. I did design tweak it a bit until I liked how it looked and then made a progressive web app. I saved to my phone because progressive web apps are where to go. So what we got here, the ride calculator, you've got two text boxes. One is your gold distance. So I'll do 15. current distance say I'm back to my parking lot at 13.45 miles.

Hit calculate turnaround and it says turnaround at 14.22 miles. So it works. I use it multiple times a week and pulling out your phone while you're riding your bike is a little dangerous. So I had Jim and I go and make a custom data field on my Garmin watch, which I record my rides on. So as I'm going, when I get to my place I want to end, I just hit the lap button. And then big numbers turn around at 14.2 miles. And so I get back every time at the right distance where I want to be. And it's perfect.

I love it. I think a lot of people may not know they need it, but I think everybody needs it. Whether you ride bikes or run or walk. You think we're going to sell it to Garmin. I think you're wrong. I think we're going to sell it to everybody. This becomes, we need to give this feature like a really catchy name. Because honestly, if you're like you can land somewhere at the perfect stopping point for your ride, walk, run, whatever.

Do you know how many people are going to experience this like emotional pleasure of I have run exactly the correct number of miles? I think this is a, I don't know, Hayden, maybe this is just the two of us and not you. but I can see how this would cause me great joy in my life to have everything be round numbers like this. My question is, what is different about this than just planning your route ahead of time? So like, let's say on Strava or something, you want to, you know, get to back to your house so you're going to do a loop, but you want to be exactly 15 miles. Why not just plan it out ahead of time? Why, you know, do it during, like, you know, I would think that if you care, this much about an exact number, you would plan out the route of have time and you would already

kind of know it. And you would just like kind of see it on your watch or whatever you were using as you ran the route. No, in theory, that is true. Because I'll plan a ride. I'm going to do a 35 mile ride. I tell my wife that. And then I get out there and I'm feeling good. And I decide I want to go for 45. And so on the fly, I can't. I'm like, okay, I don't know how to adjust my ride to get there just at the right point. So it's more for for that on the on the go. That makes sense. Cool. I want my only product request for you is I want to I want this to be both distance and minutes. I want a version of this that's like I've been going I've been going for 17 minutes. I want to go I want to go for 20. Tell me when to turn around so I'll be back here in 20 minutes.

Perfect. And that way I can just run nice and slow or I can bike nice and slow and I can still get back and I will have nailed it at an exact time. I think we're one catchy product name away from being able to trademark this and sell it to every exercise company that exists on planet Earth. I mean, Hayden,

I think you're going to win just because you have more money than I do here, but I'm in on this one at 100 million easy. Okay, I'm going to go 150. I'm not sure I have, I'm out of funds here. I think you're going to get it for 150. You have like 600.

I think you got it at a steal. No, I just spent all of my money. Oh, right. Okay, blast. Yeah, I'll take it. You guys are going to get rich. That works for me. I love this for both of you.

It's going to be good. Spencer, thank you. Appreciate being here. Thanks, Spencer. And that's it. That's everybody. We did it. Those were shockingly good ideas.

I kept waiting for the person to show up and be like, I have a thing that won't make any sense to anyone except for me, which to me is the true beauty of vibe coding. But all of these were like good, relatable ideas. I love this. Yeah, these were good. This is good stuff. All right.

Travis, do you want to give us the final tallies? Yes, I would love to give you your final tallies. So Hayden ends with $545 million still in her pocket. John's tablete grocery request app went for $100 million. Sarah's Child Meal Tracker, 115. Meals Painframe for 90, and Spencer's bike app went for $150. The thing we learned from this is that we showed. have spent more money. And also, here's what I think. Before you even read my number, Travis,

hold me to this. I'm saying it live here on the podcast. We're going to do this again, but we each start with only the balance we currently have. Yep. Okay, great. Great. So David, you have $400 billion remaining. And you bought Eddie's Sermin Search for 100, Simon's photo sharing app for 250, and Ruslan's Pokemon card market tree map also for 250. There's at least two I should go back and get now. Can I just Bigfoot Hayden's deals? Nope, nope. That's not how Bear Lair works.

We all know how Bear Lair works. I guess we can't spend all of our money or we'd be too leveraged against all of this stuff. This way, you know, Hayden and I can still feed our families. Travis, Hayden, thank you both for being here. Thank you to all of our guests, all of our applicants, all of our, I don't know what they're called, contestants here on Bear Lair. I hope we all get fabulously wealthy. We will do this again. Hayden, good to see you.

See you next time. Always a pleasure. All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Hayden for being my co-bear. Thank you to everybody who came on the show, hung out on the stream yard with us and made their pitches. They were all very impressive, actually. Almost every single one of these was something that I was like actually into.

This was great. We're going to do this again. Get your ideas ready. Hayden and I are going to be more aggressive with our money next time. I'm very much looking forward to it. Thank you, as always, for watching and listening. And if you have thoughts, questions, feedback, if you want to be on the next version of Bear or layer,

if you think we're just completely out of our mind and we should have spent all of our money in different places, I want to hear all about it. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email 866, Virgin11 is the hotline. Get at us. We love hearing from you. And as always, the best thing you can do to support everything that we're up to here at The Verge is to subscribe to Theverge.com slash subscribe.

Gets you all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. gets you absolutely everything we are working on all the time. Theverge.com slash subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchak. We'll see you tomorrow. Rock and roll. You that brought you WandaVision.

I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore. On October 14th, the Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. as possible. Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest.

Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Streaming October 14th, only on Disney Plus.