The Future of Google | EP 126

I think Google realizes that this is a once-in-a-generation chance to reinvent the search experience, and that is going to mean a fundamentally different way of presenting information.

Crypto used to be walled off from the real economy, and it still is in a lot of important ways, but that's beginning to change. The walls are coming down.

I should just start by announcing that The New York Times Company has acquired Roshamtoe for a billion. Move over, Wordle.

Well, Casey, it finally happened to me this week. I was radicalized by Elon Musk.

Radicalized in what way?

Not into shifting my politics. I don't know if you saw, but there was a big story in The New York Times a couple of days ago that included, among its many revelations, a picture of Elon Musk's desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

I have not seen this picture.

I'll show it to you. Do you know what is on this desk? It has a DOGE sign, a “Make America Great Again” hat, what appears to be a big gaming PC, and then, in the middle of the desk—very austere setup here—is a huge, wide, curved computer monitor.

Mhm.

I saw that photo and thought, you know what? I want one of those. Because whatever you think of Elon Musk, he clearly gets a lot done. Maybe if you had a big, curvy monitor like he does, you'd also get a lot done.

Well, yeah. I thought these were basically for gamers. I had never seen one in an actual office where people work. Kevin, you have to come to my office. My monitor has curves and swerves like you wouldn't believe. It is so big and curvy. I love my curvy monitor.

I'm a flat-monitor guy, or I have been. But this week I decided to take the plunge. I went on Facebook Marketplace and got myself a 2-year-old Dell Mega Monitor that is curved. I didn't go for the biggest one, which is like a full 180-degree wraparound, full W.P.I. IMAX experience, but I do now have a very large curved monitor. I have to say, I love it.

How has it changed the way you use your computer?

I'm looking at so many emails. I am looking at—and not responding to—so many emails.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork.

This week, Google is bringing AI to search in a brand-new way. How will it change the internet?

The Times’ David Yaffe-Bellany joins us to discuss the idea of a strategic crypto reserve and why even some crypto supporters think it might be a bad idea.

And finally, we ask you to share your experiments in vibe coding. Today, we're going to find out what you made.

Well, every once in a while we get a preview of a very big change to the internet, and I think we might have gotten one of those this week. Tell me about it.

On Wednesday, Google said that, in addition to expanding AI Overviews to more users and upgrading the underlying model to Gemini 2.0, it is also introducing a brand-new search mode called AI Mode. It seems likely to me that this may be the future of Google.

This is, at a minimum, a much better name than we have seen for any AI feature that Google has released over the past couple of years. AI Mode. It's a mode, it does AI. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Where other companies might have called this X-73-mini, Google just picked a normal name for it, which isn't something that Google does a lot.

That's true.

Right now, they're calling this an early experiment. It is rolling out to paid subscribers to Google One's AI Premium subscription service, and even if you pay, you also have to opt into it through something called Google Labs. That's a feature that Google uses to let you try new things, so it's kind of hidden away.

We asked if we could use it right away, and they said no, so we don't have a direct report for you today. But what we can tell you is that AI Mode is Google's answer to bringing something like ChatGPT directly into search.

So far, Google has been dabbling. It's been sprinkling these little AI Overviews on top of the traditional 10 blue links. I'm sure you've all seen those. But while AI Mode is separate from search right now, if it succeeds, I suspect it will gradually merge into the main Google search results page. That matters more than you might think, Kevin.

Before we get into AI Mode, let's set the scene here.

Google is a big company, the most important search engine in the world. Ninety percent of search queries are run through Google. It is used by billions and billions of people every day and has been an indispensable part of the architecture of the internet for the last several decades.

Then AI, LLMs, and ChatGPT come along, and all of a sudden people—including us—think, “Why am I going to ask Google this question when I could ask an AI chatbot that might give me a better answer without requiring me to click on a bunch of links and navigate through a bunch of ads? I'll just get the answer I want right there in the LLM chat box.”

Exactly. This is what kicks off the process at Google of saying, “Wait a minute. We have this very profitable search engine. We want to keep it profitable and make sure that people aren't using ChatGPT, Perplexity, or some other product instead.”

So Google wants to bring AI into its search product, but that is complicated because, among other reasons, the AI Overviews that you just described got some things famously wrong, including telling people to put rocks on their pizza.

Or was it glue?

It told them to eat rocks and to put glue on their pizza. Two different answers.

Okay, yeah.

They've spent some time retooling this, but they have not backed down on their ultimate belief that people will use AI for search-related tasks. Because some number of people will want to do that, or are already doing that, they need to build it into the core Google search engine.

That's right. This is really a story about Google being caught between two imperatives. On one hand, it has to keep pace with the competition. On the other hand, it can't break its core business, which generated $54 billion last quarter. That is a very tricky balance. How is it going to navigate that?

AI Mode is the best evidence we have yet of how the company is thinking about it. So let's talk about it.

Okay, let's talk about AI Mode. What is it?

AI Mode is a new mode within Google Search where, if you ask a query that might be a little better suited to a chatbot, you can click over and get a slightly more chatbot-like experience.

But it is different from something like the Gemini app, which is Google's straight-up ChatGPT competitor, in a couple of pretty interesting ways. There are very prominent links to websites within AI Mode, in what a user-interface designer would call a carousel—you know, those little horizontally scrolling bars of links.

As you move through the answer to your query in AI Mode, Google is going to say, “Here are some actual websites you could visit to get more of that information.”

You just said this is rolling out to a small subset of paying Google users who have subscribed to this Google One AI plan. Presumably this is something they're interested in building into the Google experience for everyone eventually, right? Or is this going to remain small?

I talked with Google yesterday and tried to get a sense of that. The company was loath to make too many predictions here. This really is an experiment, they told me, and if it goes super badly, they could presumably pull the plug.

But I don't think that is going to happen. I think Google realizes that this is a once-in-a-generation chance to reinvent the search experience, and that is going to mean a fundamentally different way of presenting information. That's what AI Mode is.

I haven't tested AI Mode on Google either. They have not made it available to me. But there are some screenshots floating around, and I think we should describe what this is going to look like for people.

They have a screenshot of someone asking the question, “Explain how déjà vu works and how it relates to memory.”

I have a feeling I've heard that question before. I thought we talked about that on a previous episode.

Okay, we made the same joke. Good for us.

In AI Mode, instead of showing the user a list of links or an AI Overview, it writes them a little essay. It says, “Déjà vu is that strange and fleeting feeling of having experienced something before, even though you know you haven't. It's like your brain is playing tricks, creating a sense of familiarity with a situation that's brand-new.” It continues on, and then at the top, right under the query, there is a little thing that says “4 sites.” You can click to expand it, and it gives you little icons showing which sites it's pulling the information from.

Basically, this is Google's version of what tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity have been doing for a while now, which is replacing the 10 blue links altogether with a more bespoke AI response.

You can see that after each paragraph there is a little icon of a chain link, which sophisticated Googlers like you and I will recognize as a hyperlink to a website from which Google derives this information. Many other people might just think it's a fancy period. You know what I mean?

Those particular user-interface elements are not going out of their way to entice people to click. We talked last year on the show about this idea that Google would do the Googling for you, right? They were very invested in trying to simplify the process of searching for information on the internet using AI and not requiring people to click through any of these blue links.

I imagined at that time that they were trying to make this available to everyone, but it had some obstacles, including some of the mistakes that we talked about. It is also expensive to run a search engine on a large language model this way. These queries require inference from these large models. It is not as cheap, easy, or efficient as just running a regular search engine.

Did you ask them about how they've dealt with some of the cost concerns?

I didn't ask them about that this week, but they have said over the past several months that the costs keep coming down. They're figuring out more and more efficient ways to serve these queries.

For what it's worth, I don't think that the slow rollout of this is primarily a cost issue. I think it's much more related to the fact that when they launched AI Overviews, they got a bunch of egg on their face because they were telling people to eat things that, unlike eggs, cannot be eaten.

Do you feel like this is an acknowledgment from them that they are losing market share to companies like Perplexity, which are offering a more AI-native, search-like experience? Or that large numbers of consumers are already using ChatGPT and other AI tools for things they previously would have Googled?

Absolutely. There was some interesting analysis that came out in January showing that, over the last 3 months of 2024, for the first time since 2015, Google's market share fell below 90%.

Now, 90% market share is still incredible, and Google is just barely below it. But there is increasing evidence that these chatbots are starting to eat into Google's audience. Some analysts have predicted that ChatGPT will have 1% market share in search by the end of this year. Bing, which has been around forever, has something like 4% market share. For ChatGPT to get from 0 to 1% in a little over 2 years is pretty impressive, and it speaks to why Google feels like it needs to do something.

I'm finding that I'm using Google a lot less than I used to. I don't know exactly how much less, but I basically use Google now for what are called navigational queries, where you're just looking for one train schedule or one restaurant menu and you know it's a link that's out there on the web.

I go to Google for that because it's right there in my browser bar, it's very easy, and I can find the link. I do not use Google anymore for things like product recommendations, advice about how to fix an appliance in my house, or something like that. That is the kind of thing I now go to ChatGPT or Claude for.

I imagine that if I'm doing that, there are probably a lot more people out there doing that too.

There really are. I don't know that this statistic speaks exactly to what you said, but last month The Verge published a survey that, among other things, found that 42% of people find that search engines like Google are becoming less useful.

There are a lot of reasons people don't like the ads in Google. Arguably, the quality of websites has probably declined. There's a lot of AI slop out there. But I also think part of it is what you just named: We now have a superior technology for a problem like, “The faucet in my sink broke and I want to fix it.” I bet something like ChatGPT can just tell me how to do that directly.

I read the Google blog post about AI Mode that came out this week, and it's interesting as an artifact of cultural anxiety at Google. They clearly know that they have to do something big around AI. Their competitors are doing it, and it's eating into their market share, but they also seem a little bit scared of it.

There's a paragraph in there that says, “As with any early-stage AI product, we won't always get it right. For example, while we aim for AI responses in search to present information objectively based on what's available on the web, it's possible that some responses may unintentionally appear to take on a persona or reflect a particular opinion.”

What do you make of that?

Look, Google is terrified of politics. To this day, if you ask questions about politics in Gemini, in my experience it is more likely to refuse to answer your request than any other AI chatbot that I pay for.

They got into a lot of hot water last year, which we've talked about on the show, when, for example, Gemini would not appear to depict exclusively white founding fathers when you asked for that. In the wake of that, they got a ton of criticism, and they tried to strip as much politics out of their products as they could.

Now they're about to put another thing out there where people are going to ask it to give them opinions. Depending on what opinions are revealed, those people are going to screenshot them and put them on social media, members of Congress are going to see them, and it's going to trigger a whole cycle.

I understand why they are being cautious about this, but I think it gets a bit silly because, ultimately, people are turning to these things for their opinions. On some level, you want to have a product whose opinions you stand behind.

If you are a paying subscriber and you get access to AI Mode on Google and turn it on through Google Labs, is every query that you type into a Google box going to be answered by AI from then on?

No. You are still going to have to opt into this. Think about how many hoops Google is making you jump through to do this. They're truly in that beta stage where they just want to gather some data and see whether there are any obvious, horrible problems that they can identify and solve before releasing this to the entire user base.

But I can tell you that, as soon as I get access to this thing, it will probably become my default way of using Google for a lot of different kinds of queries, at least for a while. One, I want to see how good the AI responses are. But I'm also so interested in the question of whether I click any of the links that are in this mode.

If I don't, then it does seem to move us closer to a world where the entire economic foundation of the internet is changing.

You brought this up, so let's dive into the issue of how this could affect publishers—people who make things and put them on the internet and rely on Google as a source of traffic. What do we know about how AI Mode is being received by the broader internet? Are people freaking out about this like they did with AI Overviews?

There is a lot of nervousness among publishers in particular. A lot of people write stories about the news, and then people search for those news queries. In the past, they would click on links to go read those stories. Some of those people would see ads and the publisher would make money. Some of those people would buy a subscription and the publisher would make money.

It seems like that is now happening less and less. But the impact is going beyond just publishers. There was this fascinating lawsuit filed last week by a company called Chegg.

Do you know Chegg, the homework-cheating app?

Exactly. If you've been in college anytime in the past 15 years, statistically, you used Chegg to cheat on your homework. It offers a database of more than 100 million answers to test questions and has been charging students about $15 a month to use the thing.

Then along comes Google and its AI Overviews. Using who knows what methods—but I'm going to assume they did some pretty aggressive scraping of Chegg and other websites—Google started putting the answers to all these homework questions directly in the AI Overviews.

All of a sudden, there was no need to visit Chegg. Chegg is now on life support. This was a company riding high during the pandemic. It was valued at $12 billion in 2021, and now its stock is basically a penny stock. It is exploring “strategic alternatives,” which is corporate speak for, “We're going to have to unload this thing in a fire sale.”

In its lawsuit, Chegg said that the traffic rightfully belonged to it and that Google destroyed it with AI Overviews.

You really disrupted us in the homework-cheating business.

I realize, as I'm saying this, that Chegg is not a sympathetic company and no one is going to be sorry to see it go who does not work at Chegg. But I'm telling you, this is a bellwether. Chegg is not going to be the last business to be completely disrupted by AI.

What do we know about how people who use AI tools for search-like tasks actually interact with links? Every AI company that has rolled out something like this—whether it's Perplexity, Bing, or Google—has said, “People are still going to see links. Don't worry, publishers. We're still going to put these little citations on it, or maybe we'll put some links below it. You might get less traffic, but it will be higher-quality traffic, and you'll still make a lot of money from it.”

What do we know about whether they were right?

I think there are basically 2 kinds of queries you can make. One is a query where you just need something that is good enough. You need to satisfy your curiosity about something, and if it's a little bit wrong—5% in either direction—you don't really care because you're just looking for the gist of something. I think that is the vast majority of all queries.

There is a second kind of query, though, which is, “I need the actual information because my health, my money, or my job depends on it.” These are the cases where I think people are actually clicking on the links.

I'm a journalist. I'm constantly Googling for information. I cannot rely on an AI Overview because, if I'm going to put a statistic or historical fact into my newsletter, I need to know what the original source is, and I need to know that I trust the original source.

That means that if the link is going to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or Bloomberg, I'm going to the original website. I'm scanning to that paragraph. I'm seeing it with my own eyes before I'm going to trust that it is real.

I think that's a really good thing that people should do in a lot of cases. But I'm also not naive. That is a minority use case for specialists. The vast majority of people do not need that level of clarity, and they are not clicking those links.

There was a study that came out this week that I found totally fascinating and quite worrying. It was done by a company called TollBit. They're basically an AI licensing company that works as the go-between between publishers and companies making large language models.

They found in their study that the AI search interfaces they looked at—things similar to Google's AI Mode—delivered 91% less click-through traffic than standard Google searches. When they looked at pure AI chatbots, it was even worse. Those generated 96% fewer clicks to links than traditional Google searches.

Kevin, I'm no mathematician, but that's pretty bad.

It's pretty bad. I should say that I have some questions about the methodology here. Basically, TollBit took the amount of traffic to its publisher sites that it could trace from known AI scrapers and divided it by the total number of times those scrapers hit their sites overall.

I talked to Google about this, and Google said this is a really bad way of measuring traffic because Google's crawler is constantly scanning websites. Every time the Google crawler hits a website, that is not an actual Google search. So there's some uncertainty here about what this really means.

At the same time, these numbers are intuitive because you and I both use chatbots a lot, and we know that we're not clicking those links a lot of the time, particularly in cases where we are not using the chatbot to do our jobs.

Yes. Even if these predictions and numbers were way off—say it was only half as bad as TollBit says it is, and these AI search tools only produced about 45% less traffic than the Google searches that preceded them—that would still be a cataclysmic event for much of the media industry.

Totally. Google has said, when I've asked about this, that the AI Overviews—which, again, are not AI Mode but are sort of the walk-up to AI Mode—have led people to search more in general.

Google says that people like AI Overviews, they see them, and they search more. That leads to more searches in the aggregate. But the impact on traffic to individual publishers does not seem to have been positive so far.

I want to play devil's advocate here for a little bit. You and I, and others, have been warning about AI Overviews and AI search products for more than a year. We have been predicting that this would crater traffic to publications and dramatically change the way that billions of people interact with the internet.

I think it's fair to say that, so far, that has not happened—at least not at the scale that you or I thought it might by now. There are some people who might be listening to this and saying, “You guys are panicking over nothing.”

One thing that is true, and that we know, is that people's habits change very slowly. There are still millions of people out there using AOL and Yahoo for their email. Maybe Hotmail, too. These very old, antiquated services still have dedicated users because people are used to going to their browser and typing in the same websites they've been typing in for years.

I think there is a case people could make here that these AI features and AI search engines are going to appeal to power users in the Bay Area who spend all day looking stuff up online, but that they are not an existential threat to the internet or to publishers because most people are so used to going to Google that they're just going to continue to do that, even if a superior option exists.

That is true, which is why, if one day AI Mode is no longer a little hidden feature and is actually the front door to Google Search, that's the ball game. People will not have to change their entire habits in order to have this experience. It will just be the default.

We know the power of defaults. That's why I want to talk about this today. This could be a preview of what Google is in 2, 3, or 5 years, and it is going to be very different from Google today.

How do you search these days? What's your go-to if you have a question? Let's say you're just looking for a good restaurant to go to. Where do you go?

For something where it's “find a local business,” to me that is still an area where Google excels. If I need to find an eye doctor or a restaurant nearby, I'm going to go to Google or Google Maps, something like that.

But there is this whole set of queries now that I am turning to chatbots for. I've talked before on the show about how I have a little keyboard shortcut that I type in and can query an AI directly. That's everything from “How do I...” to random trivia. I'm trying to remember when an album came out or how old a celebrity is.

Crucially, a lot of those are things that Google still does very well. But there is a convenience to just getting a one-sentence answer and not seeing a sprawling web page full of 6 different ads and various other widgets that I don't care about.

It's a mix of things, but chatbot usage when it comes to search is increasing for me. How about you?

I'm using chatbots for at least half of what I would previously have used Google for. I am not a traditional user. I am an early adopter of this stuff. I have a whole bookmark folder of AI tools that I open every morning and start using for browsing, so I'm not conventional in that sense.

But I do find that, for the majority of things I'm looking for, chatbots tend to give me better answers than Google.

Well, there is a lot to say about what is happening in Washington right now. Elon Musk and his DOGE team are fanning out across the federal bureaucracy, slashing and burning wherever they go. But the story that we can really shed some useful light on here is what has been happening with crypto and crypto policy.

We heard some news over the weekend that President Trump was interested in something called a crypto strategic reserve, and we thought, “That sounds just silly enough that it could be a Hard Fork segment.”

Then, just as we were finishing up this episode on Thursday night, news broke that President Trump had signed an executive order establishing a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

The announcement and the executive order attached to it clarified a few important things. One is that this reserve will be filled with Bitcoin already owned by the federal government, seized or forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset-forfeiture proceedings.

Second, the secretaries of the Treasury and Commerce, according to the executive order, will be authorized to develop what they call “budget-neutral strategies” for acquiring more Bitcoin. They say this will not have an additional cost to the American taxpayer.

Third, it established a separate U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, consisting of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets that are not Bitcoin. With respect to this stockpile, the executive order said that the government will not purchase any of these other non-Bitcoin crypto assets, but if it gets some in the case of a criminal or civil proceeding, it will keep and hold them as part of the stockpile.

We should note that the conversation you're about to hear took place before the order was official, when a few more things were still up in the air.

But I think it's fair to say this is a really big deal.

It absolutely is. Those currencies are closely tied to people in Trump's orbit who have investments in those very currencies, so this seems like a classic case of self-dealing among people in and around the president's orbit.

I think there is an element of shedding light on what is happening in Washington right now with regard to crypto policy that is important for us as journalists to do. But I am also growing more worried about what I see as an information and knowledge gap between crypto proponents and anti-crypto skeptics.

Would you say that you have some reservations?

Yes, I have some strategic reservations about this. Back in 2022, I was covering crypto much more attentively than I am now. This was at the height of the last crypto boom. This was your Pudgy Penguins era.

I wrote a very long article arguing that, whatever people thought of crypto, they needed to understand it because this is something that could become strategically important. If, for example, a bunch of pro-crypto partisans and activists were to seize control of some part of the federal government and start making big moves to enrich themselves and the people around them, we would need to understand what was happening.

The response I got to that article was, “Shame on you. Shame on you for taking this stuff seriously, for trying to explain it, for trying to understand it.” The mere act of wanting to know about crypto was coded as being in the pocket of the crypto industry.

We're in a moment where just ignoring it is not going to make crypto go away. We know that now. Now that we see these really wild initiatives being proposed, I think it is time once again to see what we can learn and engage with somebody who can hopefully explain what's going on.

I think it is time for a lot of crypto skeptics—and I would include myself in that group—to give what is happening in Washington more serious attention. These are big moves with big consequences, and they may be hard to untangle even after Donald Trump leaves office.

Today we're bringing in our friend and friend of the pod David Yaffe-Bellany. He's a crypto reporter at The New York Times, and he has been covering all the twists and turns of this latest saga over the crypto strategic reserve. Let's bring him in.

David Yaffe-Bellany, welcome back to Hard Fork.

David Yaffe-Bellany

Thanks so much for having me.

Let's start with some basic questions about this idea of a strategic United States crypto reserve. When did you start to hear about this, and what is the basic idea?

David Yaffe-Bellany

This was an idea that popped up on the campaign trail last year. President Trump started talking about it, and some influential figures in the crypto-Twitter sphere were talking about it a lot. But what it actually meant was pretty obscure then and remains pretty obscure now, because when people say “Bitcoin reserve” or “crypto reserve,” they could really be talking about 10 different sorts of ideas.

I want to understand this idea of a strategic reserve because my basic impression is that this is not a new idea. Governments have long stockpiled assets like gold, oil, or other foreign currencies to give themselves some cushion against economic downturns or inflation, or just to avoid running out of oil during a foreign conflict.

Is this similar to those kinds of strategic reserves? Why do people in crypto think that we need a U.S. crypto reserve? Crypto can't power heavy machinery, it can't feed people, and it isn't useful in the way that some of these other assets are.

David Yaffe-Bellany

I think there are 2 key arguments that people in the crypto world are making. The more reserve-like argument is that, at the moment, the reserve currency of the world is the dollar. The world runs on the dollar, but maybe not so far in the future the world will run on Bitcoin, or on cryptocurrencies more broadly. It would be in the strategic interests of the United States to have a giant stockpile of crypto.

What would it mean, though? Let's say we're living in fantasyland, where the world now runs on Bitcoin. How does it benefit the United States to just own a bunch of Bitcoin? It's money that you could borrow against, or money that you could spend to fund all sorts of projects, foreign or domestic?

David Yaffe-Bellany

You're asking the right question, because it is not totally clear how this would work.

The other argument that people in the crypto world make aligns more with the concept of a sovereign wealth fund, which Trump has also said he wants to create. The idea is that crypto is just a good investment. If we bought a bunch of Bitcoin now, at about $90,000, then 10 years from now, when it's worth $20 trillion, we would be set up for success.

I'm curious how this idea of a strategic crypto reserve fits with some of the other stated goals of the Trump administration, which are to cut costs and reduce the size of government—not to invest a bunch of money in some new class of asset.

The funniest post I saw about this said the following: “Sir, we have saved $12 billion that were spent on condoms for Gaza and transgender comic books in Brazil.” “Excellent. Let's buy some Cardano.”

How are people in the crypto policy world reconciling these 2 views of what the government should be doing?

David Yaffe-Bellany

Some of them just aren't reconciling it. They're embracing the hypocrisy, and it isn't the first time they've done something like that.

But there is also a huge split in the crypto world over whether this should be a Bitcoin-exclusive reserve or a reserve featuring a bunch of different cryptocurrencies. On the campaign trail, at the Bitcoin Nashville conference, Trump said he was going to start a Bitcoin stockpile. All he said was “Bitcoin.”

When he raised this topic again a few days ago on Truth Social, he named all these other tickers for various cryptocurrencies that the people around him have economic interests in and said, “Oh, it's going to involve all of these too.”

A lot of people in the crypto world said, “No. We love Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the most established of these assets. It has the longest-term potential. Don't fill your government coffers with Cardano.”

Here is where it starts to feel truly silly to me. When Trump started talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve, I had actually heard of this before. Am I right, David, that El Salvador also built a Bitcoin strategic reserve?

David Yaffe-Bellany

Yes, and other countries are exploring this too. There are various states where proposed legislation would create Bitcoin reserves. But it tends to be focused on Bitcoin, which, to be clear, is by far the most valuable cryptocurrency and the one with the longest track record.

I had at least heard of the idea before. But then, in the post Trump made on Truth Social on Sunday, he said, “We also want to put Solana, XRP, and Cardano into this strategic reserve.”

David, can you give us a little bit of flavor about what Solana, XRP, and Cardano are?

David Yaffe-Bellany

These are 3 examples of what people in the crypto world call altcoins, which are cryptocurrencies that are a little bit outside the mainstream of Bitcoin.

These aren't random coins that got invented a day ago. XRP is run by a company called Ripple, which has been a huge player in the crypto world for a long time and had this important legal battle with the SEC. Solana is one of the top cryptocurrencies. It is a competitor to Ethereum and the platform on which the Trump and Melania meme coins were built, perhaps not coincidentally.

Cardano was created by a guy who has been a huge player in crypto for a long time and was involved with the early Ethereum movement. These aren't crazy coins, but it is a little bit weird to talk about putting them in a government stockpile.

It's one thing to say these are altcoins that have been around for a while and are in fairly wide distribution. It is another thing to say there is strategic value to the United States in accumulating a huge stockpile of these things.

David Yaffe-Bellany

With a lot of things Trump says, it isn't clear how serious he was because he says things off the cuff. His first tweet named those 3 tickers, and then there was another tweet where he said, “Oh, also Bitcoin and Ethereum will be in it too,” as if it were an afterthought.

The other thing that is not clear at all is the funding. On the campaign trail, he said he would create a Bitcoin stockpile built on Bitcoin that the government already owns, because we have seized a lot of Bitcoin from criminals over the years. Historically, that amounts to billions of dollars. The United States has tried to sell that Bitcoin.

All he said on the campaign trail was, “We're going to draw a box around the Bitcoin we already have and not sell it.” That is very different from saying, “We're going to hit the open market and buy a ton of Solana.”

How would that actually work in practice? I understand that the United States does have Bitcoin seized from people who commit various crimes and is presumably keeping it in some secure wallet somewhere. But to acquire new crypto assets, would the government just go on Coinbase and buy a bunch, then keep it in a vault in the Treasury building? How would we actually go about this as a country?

David Yaffe-Bellany

When you buy a big tranche of cryptocurrency as a huge institution, you're usually doing what is called an over-the-counter trade. You deal directly with another person you're buying it from, and the idea is to limit the impact that a trade like that can have on the open market.

It is not as if the Treasury secretary will log on to his Coinbase account and start hitting the buy button. But how would those purchases be funded? None of this has been fully explained.

Obviously, any government spending raises the possibility of a tax increase or spending some of these perhaps imaginary DOGE savings that we've supposedly been accumulating. So it is all really confusing.

How are people in the crypto community responding to this idea of a strategic crypto reserve?

David Yaffe-Bellany

The response has been fairly negative from a lot of people who you might have expected to be supportive of it. That's because there is a feeling in the crypto world that this might actually be a conflict of interest. It is as if a bunch of people are discovering that conflict of interest is a problem in the Trump political universe.

People are noticing that Brad Garlinghouse, the chief executive of Ripple, spent a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration and was a huge donor to Fairshake, the big crypto PAC. Suddenly, the signature cryptocurrency used by Ripple, XRP, is going to be in the crypto reserve. People have become suspicious of those sorts of behind-the-scenes maneuverings.

There's also a lot of loyalty to Bitcoin in the crypto world and a sense that we should be treating Bitcoin differently from this other stuff. It is not all that different from Mark Zuckerberg spending a lot of time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and then President Trump announcing that we were going to create a strategic Facebook stock reserve consisting of shares of Facebook.

Is the thing that is likely to happen, if and when this strategic crypto reserve is created, that anything in the basket of assets we stockpile as a country will become more valuable simply by virtue of the fact that we are stockpiling it as the United States government?

David Yaffe-Bellany

This stuff became more valuable by virtue of the fact that Trump tweeted about it. The prices of these assets immediately went up, though some of those gains have been pared back since then.

There is a concrete market effect. If someone starts buying a lot of an asset, the price will go up. That will happen. But the symbolic statement of the United States putting its government seal on Cardano would be big for anyone who currently holds Cardano.

I was surprised to see some of the people in the crypto industry come out against this proposal. Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, made a post basically saying that just having Bitcoin in the strategic reserve would probably be the best option. He did not want all these other coins included.

Tyler Winklevoss, one of the biggest Bitcoin investors in the world, also said he doesn't think other cryptocurrencies should be included in the strategic reserve.

There was a really interesting article by Nic Carter, a crypto analyst, trader, and voice on these issues. Was it Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys?

David Yaffe-Bellany

A different Nic Carter. But he is a stalwart defender of crypto, and he wrote an article called “8 Reasons a Strategic Crypto Reserve Is a Bad Idea.” I want to read you a line from it because I think it illustrates where some of these people are coming from.

He writes, “A crypto reserve would transform Bitcoin from an apolitical asset into the plaything of the government, subject to Washington's political cycles. Bitcoiners were never ones to hitch their wagon to the government, and they shouldn't start now.”

It seems like there is essentially this coalition of more libertarian crypto supporters who think, “We don't actually want to be embraced by the federal government in this way,” because that could undermine some of the libertarian ideology of the initial crypto wave.

David Yaffe-Bellany

As you said, Nic was opposed even to the idea of a Bitcoin reserve before this whole notion of a crypto reserve came up, so it has definitely been divisive.

Bitcoin started as this renegade economic movement. Begging the government to buy up a huge stockpile so that the price goes up seems antithetical to a lot of those principles. Most people in the industry don't really care about those principles anymore, but some still do.

Let's talk about this more cynical take that this is all just a self-enrichment scheme by the Trump administration. I know about the Trump meme coins, and we've talked about those. I know that a lot of Trump's supporters and friends are heavily invested in the crypto industry.

What do we actually know about the Trump family's personal interest in crypto beyond this small set of meme coins? I've seen Eric Trump tweeting on and off about crypto and various coins that he's interested in. Do we know much about the Trump family's overall exposure to the crypto markets?

David Yaffe-Bellany

We don't have a window into Eric Trump's personal crypto portfolio. But what we do know is that World Liberty Financial, the crypto business that the Trump family helped start last year and from which it profits directly, has accumulated a huge stash of various cryptocurrencies over the last few months.

It was supposed to launch some sort of crypto application, a DeFi project, that hasn't come to fruition yet. But the firm is sitting on a huge stash of tokens, so there is arguably a financial benefit for the Trump family in seeing those tokens rise in value.

Some of the people President Trump has tapped to lead crypto policy efforts in the federal government have also invested in crypto at various points. David Sacks, one of Trump's advisers, has made some crypto investments over the years. He has said that he divested from them to prevent conflicts of interest, but there are other people in the administration who presumably still have active investments in these categories.

What do people in crypto think of the argument that this is all just a bunch of insiders trying to use the powers of the government to enrich themselves?

David Yaffe-Bellany

People in the crypto world are super cynical and love enriching themselves at all times. But they're also super paranoid and suspicious and constantly convinced that there is some sort of conspiracy to screw them over.

Those 2 instincts have clashed, and you can see the internal battle playing out in a lot of crypto people who like Trump. They ignore the conflict of interest that benefits them when it means SEC suits getting dropped, but they pay attention to it when it means that their favorite crypto didn't make it into the reserve and someone else's did.

That is the conflict playing out in the industry, and it is why there has been some public backlash.

How likely do we think the strategic crypto reserve is to actually happen? Does Congress need to do anything? Can Trump do this on his own by executive action? What are we going to see in the next couple of weeks and months?

David Yaffe-Bellany

A lot of this depends on whether the administration goes the stockpile route or the reserve route. The way crypto people have made this distinction is that a stockpile means we're just keeping the crypto we already have, while a reserve means we're buying more crypto on the market.

I don't think there is anything inherent in those words that means those things, but that is how crypto people talk about it. If the Trump administration goes the stockpile route and just keeps the Bitcoin it already has, that won't require any spending. It just requires a change in policy: Stop trying to sell this stuff.

But if the administration goes the reserve route, the government does not actually own any Cardano, as far as we know, so it would have to buy it to put it in the reserve. If the government goes in that direction, there is a question of how it would fund that. A congressional appropriation is the most obvious route, especially if it is a huge purchase.

Since the summer, people in the crypto world have floated various out-there legal ideas about how Trump could push this through on his own.

A lot of what is getting attention in crypto these days is related to meme coins, strategic reserves, and whatnot. But there is also some quieter crypto activity happening in Washington that could end up being quite important, even if it is flying under people's radars because it is not frankly that interesting.

One of them is this stablecoin bill, which actually looks like it might pass with bipartisan support. Tell us about that.

David Yaffe-Bellany

One of the big priorities of the crypto industry in this administration is to convert all the political goodwill it has into legislation. There are 2 key pieces of legislation that the industry wants to advance.

One is this stablecoin bill, which would essentially create rules for stablecoin companies to operate in the United States. It would not do anything super crazy, but it would create a regulatory framework for stablecoins that would, in some way, put the government seal of approval on this branch of the crypto industry, which is super important.

The industry has been pushing for it. Critics say this could be a gateway drug to the United States allowing other, even more dangerous crypto products to seep into the mainstream economy.

The second priority is a market-structure bill. Basically, that means legislation that would strip power away from the SEC, which has obviously been very hard on crypto, and give it to the CFTC, the much weaker and less aggressive agency.

Those are the 2 big legislative things that crypto people want to do.

I want to bring this back to the information gap that exists in crypto. My experience—and maybe yours too—is that the people who understand crypto the deepest, who can talk about the L2s, the stablecoins, and the DEXs, are mostly invested in crypto in some way.

That is why they have taken the time to understand all the extremely complex parts of the crypto ecosystem. But what worries me is that there is essentially no principled position left.

It seems to me that, in Washington, the people making policy and having debates about policy all come from the same universe of people who are bullish, by and large, about crypto. They may have disagreements about which crypto assets should be included in a strategic reserve or exactly how some regulations would be written, but there does not seem to be anyone left in Washington who knows what they're talking about and can stand up to some of these schemes from the industry.

Do you feel that is an accurate read of the situation?

David Yaffe-Bellany

Partly, this is a function of the changing administration. There were a huge number of people in Washington who knew about crypto and were in positions of power. Gary Gensler himself taught an MIT course on crypto. This was not some naive guy who did not know the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum. He was running the SEC, and now he is out. The crypto people have the run of the town.

I also think there is an element of fatigue here that parallels the broader fatigue over what is going on with Trump. Some of the loudest crypto critics—people like the actor Ben McKenzie, who was super vocal during the last bull run and crypto crash—feel like they made their point.

They were screaming about how dangerous crypto was, then the whole thing crashed, and Sam Bankman-Fried went to prison. They were proved right in a lot of ways, and yet crypto came surging back.

I think a lot of people do not have the energy to fight this fight all over again. Maybe part of that is just the assumption that, when that crash happened, it seemed like the people who were affected were the ones who had decided to take the gamble on crypto, while people who ignored the whole thing were basically fine. Maybe that is why people are prioritizing their energy a little differently.

What is concerning, though, is what you said. If we pass a stablecoin bill in this country and crypto becomes more connected to the main economy, then all of a sudden, if there is another crash, normal people might start to feel the pain.

Absolutely. Crypto used to be walled off from the real economy, and it still is in a lot of important ways, but that is beginning to change. The walls are coming down.

We already have a Bitcoin ETF. We could have an XRP ETF soon, or a Solana ETF. That creates more avenues for people to put their traditional savings into crypto.

If your employer tells you they are going to start paying you in Cardano, look for another job. That is what I'm going to say.

But I will also say that I think there is an element of complexity here that makes it very hard for people who are not spending hours a day trying to keep up with what is going on in crypto to make sense of it all.

It reminds me a little of what happened on Wall Street during the financial crisis, when you suddenly had these assets that no regular people had ever heard of: mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, synthetic bonds. These things were esoteric and hard to understand, but all of a sudden they became quite important.

The people who understood them had been trading them for years and trying to make a bunch of money, but they had not been sharing that information because it was not in their interest to share it. They did not want us to know what was going on.

My fear is that something similar is happening in crypto right now. The people who really understand this stuff are making a killing on it, possibly at the expense of the rest of us.

David Yaffe-Bellany

Yes, and the complexity was a barrier to regular people getting into it for a long time. But with these ETFs coming onto the market, suddenly there is a way for you to buy this from your brokerage account and have it factored into your retirement investments. It just increases the level of exposure.

David, thanks for coming on.

David Yaffe-Bellany

Thanks for having me.

Well, a couple of weeks ago on the show, we talked about AI vibe coding. This is the idea of using AI tools to build apps, websites, and other things for yourself, even if you don't know how to code.

I talked about some of the projects I had been building. I built you a Hot Tub Time Machine for your hot tub, and we asked listeners to tell us what kinds of projects they were vibe coding.

Casey, we got a lot of responses.

We got so many responses. I'm told it was more than 60 in all, and it was so fun to read through them.

Some of the people who wrote in had some amount of technical expertise, and it does seem like the more technical expertise they had, the further they were able to get. But we were also hearing from people who had never coded before and were just trying to see how far they could go with the tools they have today.

In some cases, the answer was pretty far.

I wrote a column about this last week about my vibe-coding experience, and I also got a ton of feedback—emails, comments, and texts—from people who said, “I was pretty skeptical about these tools. Maybe I hadn't used them in a while. But after I read your article or heard your segment, I went out, tried this stuff, and built something.”

I think there is something about having this firsthand encounter with the technology that is persuasive in a way that 2 guys talking about it are not.

For what it's worth, after we had that conversation, I went back to my house, got out my laptop, and attempted to vibe code.

What did you vibe code?

I made a little platformer video game with a frog in a bathrobe jumping around various platforms and collecting coins.

I realize that sounds absurd. The absurd thing was that I was able to make it.

Because you just typed a few words into a box?

It works.

It works?

It works. It is not a very fun video game, but it exists.

That's amazing. Wait, can I play it?

Absolutely.

What's it called?

It's called A Frog in a Bathrobe.

Before we hear about our listeners' vibe-coding experiments, I should check on the status of the Hot Tub Time Machine. How's it doing?

First of all, I have to say thank you. It was very kind of you to spend some time in your busy life creating a program that would attempt to instruct me when to put various chemicals in and do other forms of maintenance on my hot tub.

Hot Tub Time Machine did seem to get a little out of control.

Oh no.

After our episode, it was emailing me basically every day and telling me to do quarterly maintenance after I had owned my hot tub for a week.

Fortunately, the emails have slowed down a bit, but it did introduce some questions into my mind about the reliability of Hot Tub Time Machine.

I'm sorry about that. I have not looked into it because, frankly, I wouldn't even know how to start debugging something like this.

One of the weird things about vibe coding is that you can create something that works, sort of, but if it ever breaks, you have no idea what you're doing. You just have to poke at it and say, “Fix it.”

That is the exact approach I take to home maintenance. If it breaks, I just say, “Why is the ice maker not making ice?” I don't know. I'm vibing in the house all day.

I vibe-assembled an IKEA shelf the other night. Let me tell you: Don't stand underneath it during an earthquake. That is what I'll say about that shelf.

Let's get to our listeners, and let's hope they are doing a little better than we are with their vibe-coding experiments.

Let's do it.

Mike Lacher

Hi, my name is Mike Lacher, and I live in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood.

The app I made is a speed reader for myself and for my dyslexic ADHD friends who can't read without jumbling up letters and words and losing focus altogether. It works by having you paste in text, say from an article, and then displays one word at a time at around 400 words per minute, versus 250 words per minute for normies.

I'm not a coder, but I did run the product team at my last startup, and the experience was very similar to working with a developer. The better I defined the project up front, the better the results. If I started with a loose definition, it could become really laborious, again just like working with a real developer.

Thanks for letting me share. Keep up the great work.

How did you understand what Mike has built?

This is interesting because it is similar to things that have been around for a number of years: speed-reading apps that take blocks of text, whether it is an article, a book, or a long email, and do what is called rapid serial visual presentation, or RSVP.

That means flashing one word at a time on your screen very quickly. Instead of reading left to right, you are getting a fire hose directly at you. You do not have to move your eyes at all. It is just one word after another.

People who swear by these apps say they help them read much faster. I have never been a big user of them, but they could also be helpful for something like dyslexia, where they might help you avoid transposing letters and getting confused that way.

I love this. We hear from listeners sometimes who want us to talk more about accessibility issues and technology. Maybe one reason we do not talk about it more is that platforms generally give accessibility issues short shrift. We do not see huge investments being made in accessibility software.

This feels like a perfect use of vibe coding. You are scratching your own itch. You are building the thing that you cannot trust a company to build for you, and now you have a tool that might be useful to people who have dyslexia and ADHD.

I also think this demonstrates how disruptive vibe coding could be. There are speed-reading apps like the one Mike described on the market that you have to pay for. You could download one of those, and maybe it would be more polished and have a few more features. Or you could make one yourself with whatever subscription vibe-coding product you are using and build your own tool that you can use over and over again for free.

Lauren Bule

My name is Lauren Bule, and I'm a full-time practicing anesthesiologist based in Hanover, New Hampshire.

I started vibe coding with Claude back in November 2024 and created this app called Consult Craft. It uses adaptive AI to simulate anesthesiology case discussions and provide real-time feedback based on case scripts and answers written by me.

I have no coding experience and only a very basic understanding of the command line. It took me about 6 weeks, in my spare time, to make something functional enough that I could send it to my colleagues.

Now it has been about 3 months of adding new features and cases weekly, including a database so I can save transcripts for research. I expected to hear mostly from my residents, who were using it to prepare for their oral-board exams, but I have also gotten a lot of positive feedback from colleagues.

They say things like, “I haven't really done that particular case in a while in the operating room, and this was a nice refresher,” which has been great to hear and really unexpected.

I have to say, this anesthesiologist did not put me to sleep.

No, this perked me right up. Explain what Lauren has built here.

I'm looking at Lauren's app right now. It is very pretty. It is called Consult Craft, and it looks like a case simulator.

You can select something I don't understand, like a transcarotid artery revascularization for carotid stenosis. You can click on that and go into a tutor mode, where it explains the case: a 77-year-old man with a history of hypertension, something else I can't pronounce, and diabetes mellitus presents to the emergency department with an episode of right-sided amaurosis fugax.

Wasn't amaurosis fugax in the first Trump administration?

That was Omarosa.

That's right.

The app asks what you think of the case, and then you can type your response and get some feedback. There is also a voice mode, which is very cool.

I understand why this took Lauren 6 weeks to build. It is not a simple tool, but I can see how it would be quite useful.

I find this inspiring because all of us have some kind of itch in our professional lives where we feel that, if only we had a tool like this, our lives would be so much easier.

Until now, if you couldn't write software, you probably couldn't do much about that, certainly not in the digital realm. But Lauren figured out, “I'm going to apply myself, spend 6 weeks, and build something that now benefits not just me but all of my colleagues.”

This is a great example of the potential of vibe coding.

It also illustrates something I found when I wrote about vibe coding. I had built software products that I thought were only useful for me, like a tool to help me decide what to pack for my kids' lunch.

I mentioned in my story that I had built this, and I started hearing from people asking, “Can I get access to this tool?” It turns out that if you build something just for yourself, there are probably at least a few other people in the world who could benefit from it too.

So true. Let's hear from our next listener.

Matt

Hey, Kevin and Casey. This is Matt. I'm a graphic designer. I live in Los Angeles, and I've been vibe coding for about 6 months.

I created a project called Flavor Finder with Claude. It combines the dataset from The Flavor Bible, which is an excellent cooking reference, with the user interface of a color-palette generator.

You can go one by one and build the palette as you go, or you can just press “Generate,” and it will create a 5-ingredient flavor pairing where all the ingredients pair well together. You can lock ingredients, substitute them, and move them around. It has been a fun way to discover new things in the kitchen.

Another exercise I do with a lot of the LLMs is something I call Roshamtoe. It is a combination of the 2 worst games of all time: tic-tac-toe and rock-paper-scissors.

I just say, “Create a little playable web app for me combining these 2 games. They're so bad. Make something fun.” Unfortunately, it has struggled to create anything very entertaining, but it is an interesting way to observe how an LLM is thinking.

I should start by announcing that The New York Times Company has acquired Roshamtoe for $1 billion. Move over, Wordle.

Here is Flavor Finder. You see some ingredients that might work well together: watercress, pineapple, pork, shallot, and olive oil. You can have it generate different combinations that fit the taste profile you are looking for.

I am not a good enough home cook to take advantage of something like this, but I know a lot of people probably are. I might try this.

I think you should. The next step beyond vibe coding is vibe cooking, and I would like to challenge him to a game of Roshamtoe.

All right. The next one comes to us from listener Zach.

Zach

Hi, Kevin and Casey. My name is Zach. I'm a photographer in New York City. Like Kevin, I was once a young nerd who bounced off coding in exchange for photography, Flash, Dreamweaver, and all that.

Lately, I've been using a combination of ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek to help me write little custom shell or Python scripts that handle some mundane photo tasks.

For example, I had a recent job where I had almost 1,000 images that needed to be renamed based on the subject, moved into subfolders based on that name, and exported from layered Photoshop files into JPEGs and TIFFs at different file sizes. It was a whole mess.

AI helped me write a script to automate this organization process. It even tried to make a Photoshop script to help with the export, but it was pretty bad at that language.

Of course, with all the debugging, it probably took twice as long as it would have taken to do it manually. But it was a lot more fun, and now I have this cool script that I can tweak in the future.

Thanks.

I feel like a question we never quite answer enough is: What do we actually want AI for?

To me, one answer is that most people's lives are filled with unimaginable drudgery—things that take so long, are so tedious, and require zero creativity or any of their human skills. Zach found himself in exactly this situation. He had 1,000 photos to manipulate, and it was going to take forever.

Could he vibe code a solution that took twice as long as simply doing it himself? I think that is inspiring.

It is, but I also think he is being a little facetious about this because it seems like it is a process he does frequently. This tool will help him save time in the future.

There is some setup cost to building the tool for yourself, but if it is something you plan to do over and over again, it may actually make sense to build a tool rather than doing it manually every time.

Absolutely. To me, the kind of nonsense I want to deal with is wrangling with the computer rather than doing the tedious task myself. I'm happier trying to create a tool that hopefully has multiple uses than I am saying, “It will be faster if I just manually rename 1,000 photos.”

The part of Zach's response that resonates with me so much is the joy of it. I got a lot of blowback when I published my column. People said, “Does any of this stuff actually work? Does it actually save you time? How hard is it to decide what to put in your kids' lunchbox yourself, you lazy jerk?”

I understand that. For me, the point of vibe coding is not pure efficiency. It is also discovery and exploration. I find it very fun to watch the code fly past as the computer goes to work building something for me.

To make a point that is sometimes underappreciated: It is fun to learn, and it is fun to make things. These tools help people learn to make things, and that is cool.

Thanks, Zach. Let's hear from our last vibe-coding listener of the day. This one is more of a request.

Ashley

Hi, Kevin and Casey. My name is Ashley. I'm from Southern California, and I'm a working mom with 4 kids: a 9-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a 2-year-old.

My vibe-code idea is that I need an app that goes through all of the social things I'm supposed to read, capture, and do something with across my kids' social calendars. That means email, WhatsApp, Instagram chat, text messages, Evites for birthdays, and even Facebook Messenger. I don't know if that's still a thing.

I just need something that says, “Summarize, plan, give me a to-do list, and put it on a shared calendar.” I guess that sounds like something a wife would be able to do, but I'm not that interested in that. So if you could just vibe me a bit of a wife, that would be awesome.

I love the show.

Thank you, Ashley. I don't know if I've ever been so delighted on the show as I was listening to Ashley's children stampede through her house in the background while she recorded this request, which I think is a great request.

Four kids as a working mom. I'm tired just thinking about it. God bless you, Ashley.

This one is a challenge. First, the idea is great. I want this too, and I don't even have 4 kids.

The challenge is that Ashley wants many disparate services to interact with each other, and right now those services mostly do not have ways of interacting. But, Casey, as a more seasoned vibe coder, do you see an approach that could work?

I think we can do this. I don't think it is going to be very straightforward because, as you said, it requires the interoperability of a number of different apps that do not natively work all that well together.

But Ashley, I think we can get this done for you. It is my pledge that we will do our best, because I honestly need this too. I've only got 1 kid, but I'm telling you, the toddler's birthday-party circuit is out of control. It never stops.

Kids are always having birthdays. Some people say no gifts, and some say gifts. Some parties are at parks, and some are at zoos. You have to keep track of all of it. My God, how does anyone do this?

How does anyone do it? And can it be vibe coded?

For my own sake and for yours, Ashley, I'm going to try to vibe code this app for you.

Keep us posted, and you're going to report back to us?

I will.

It makes sense if the narrative arc of this show is an AI trying to get you to leave your wife, followed by you mastering AI to vibe code a wife. That feels like a great sort of season finale for Hard Fork.

I agree.

Thanks again to everyone who emailed us. All of the emails delighted us. We feel like you really like trying new things and showing us what you are trying, and it inspires us. Thank you.