*Yo, other noSQLs, your tech is a wreck like an oil spill. You call that web scale? More like toy scale. Your memmap file is a database fail, and your user's going to set sail for the one they can trust. Because if you're serious, then you must be running Couchbase*.

Wow...

Wow.

That turned out to be true.

It turned out to be true. \[laughs\] It's nice when you put together a wrap and it turns out to be true as well. It's like a bonus.

Right?! Yeah, I feel like it's been literally 15 years though, since that moment. Almost 15 years, right?

15 years of focusing on the same thing in a lot of ways... And what we're doing with Vibes is an outgrowth of that.

What is that focus, if you could just put a name on it? What are you focusing on?

Programming is way too hard. It shouldn't be a thing -- like, if you're me, code is never the hard part. And I want it to be that way for everybody.

And how were you doing that 15 years ago with CouchDB and Couchbase?

Well, my role over there was the CouchApp side of the project, which was to make CouchDB into this serverless application runtime you could just drop some JavaScript into and go.

Did you get that done?

It was - it kind of still is - responsible for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't have had infrastructure to support them being able to do things like rural healthcare, or fun apps for their club. A lot of the same things that we're seeing people do with Vibes DIY.

So for our listener catching up, Chris was first on the show episode 54, back in 2011. CouchDB, which I assume is still extant... You'll have to forgive me, Chris; I'm not out there using it, but... It was a massively popular open source database, businesses formed around it... Damien Katz was the original creator, or was it a group of people? I mean, there's a lot of people on the Wikipedia page, but help us understand the culture there.

Damian's the guy who CouchDB came to in a dream, essentially. He had been working at Lotus Notes and getting frustrated with the fact that it had to pause the world to do its synchronization... So he invented the data structure that allows the streaming synchronization with fairness.

And how'd you get involved?

I started using it to spider the web. This was like early, early on, and I had to teach myself Erlang essentially so I could drop a debug log function in there for myself. Next thing I know, I'm through the whole stack, and never looked back.

Nice. So what'd you do, reach out to Damian say "Hey, I'd love to help out", or "Let's start a business", how'd that whole thing come together?

All good things start on IRC.

\[laughs\] That's a great answer.

We were hanging out on IRC... I think it was \[unintelligible 00:06:12.00\] who came out to Portland for OSCON, like we were talking about... We were already buddies from online. And then after that, Damian invited the Brain Trust out to his place in Asheville, North Carolina, where I said "Hey, let's start a company." So my role in that, besides not being scared of the code, was not being scared of the lawyers.

Tell the story of that company from there. Tell the story. As long or as short as you want it to be.

So there's a lot that went on, but the thing that really sticks with me is the fact that we kind of accidentally incubated Node.js. We had people like Isaac Schlueter and Ryan Dahl hanging around the office, mostly because of Mikeal Rogers, rest in peace... And it was that crowd that was just informally writing Npm at the desk next to me... So really fun to be in the presence of greatness for so long, and to be able to incubate things like PouchDB etc, kind of taking JavaScript to the next level.

My first exposure to CouchDB was via - now we're name-dropping - a Geoffrey Grosenbach PeepCode on CouchDB. And he made it look so cool. I was just a fledgling Ruby on Rails developer, of course, dipping my toes into the JavaScript ecosystem, and kind of exploring databases at the time, and like wondering... Because Rails made it so easy to kind of switch your database adapter, but nobody's really doing that... But I was interested in the different databases, and CouchDB was so radically different than what I'd been using. And yeah, Geoffrey's voice, which is epic to this day...

Legend.

Yeah, a legend. It made CouchDB look like this is where the cool people are coding... And it turns out it was true; I mean, from your story, it's like - yeah, a lot of very talented people are involved in the project.

\[00:08:10.03\] You have to remember 2008-2009, that was the very beginning of the API revolution. The idea that you could put your database behind a REST API. Almost nothing was even JSON yet. So we were all frustrated with XML, we were all writing kind of monolithic servers... And by the time that project kind of matured, even as early as 2011, at least the early adopters were already doing microservices. So really, that was a big sea change right then.

Mm-hm. Was it good business, too? I mean, you started a business around it. Was the business good? Was it hard? How'd that go?

It was good and hard, and in some ways, we brought like a cultural cachet that allowed us to, as we discussed on episode 54, merge with Membase, who had a whole bunch of really smart people who understood the market and how to drive a startup to success. So Steve and me, who I learned revenue from over there, is now on the board of Vibes DIY, and helping me do the right things here. It took a while, but they IPO'ed. They IPO'ed about five years after I left...

Nice.

...and I'm always watching it real close.

So what's your journey from leaving there to Vibes, Vibes.DIY, which is your current thing?

Well, I bounced around a little bit, checking out other database technologies, worked on FaunaDB, which I still maintain; it has some of the strongest integrity that you can get. Then I went to McKinsey and Company... Kind of a fun story there. Like, you wouldn't think that -- my whole family was like "Really?" But Jason Smith is another legend. He's till there, but he brought me in, and his claim to fame is - well, for Couch, he hosted Npm. So Npm used to have a one man host, and it was him. And yes. So... Great to have him show me what the real world is like. And what I learned about the real world is you don't get infrastructure, right? Us here in the Silicon Valley culture, where we can boot a virtual machine, or request an S3 bucket and get it - like, that's just an unbelievable luxury. What I learned from this constrained environment of "The client doesn't know what cloud you're going to use until it's too late" is I need to build a database technology that can run anywhere to allow permissionless innovation. So that's the gem of what became Vibes DIY. I built a deep tech thing, along with Mikeal Rogers' team at Protocol Labs, who did a whole bunch of research on immutable data structures with content addressing. I joined that team for a little while, and saw the potential of it, and built an embedded database that runs in the browser, with end-to-end encryption for multi-user synchronization. And that's what powers Vibes DIY. The database is called Fireproof. Basically, everything I'll talk about today is open source, but if you want to get into Fireproof, there's plenty about it. The thing that it does uniquely is give every operation cryptographic data provenance. It's almost like a mini blockchain in the browser, super-lightweight; no network dependency, just runs right there... But it means that when you do a replication, you know what you've got. There's not questions about what kind of data you're sitting on.

Let's dive into that. When you say cryptographic data provenance, what do you mean exactly?

So it goes back to Rich Hickey Clojure and the immutable data structures that they were pioneering around the same time we were doing Couch. And what you see in those data structures - as soon as you have an invariant that you're working with immutable backing storage, you have to do everything different, everything new. With Fireproof and the IPLD data structures that it uses, that constraint is enforced because the only pointers you're allowed to use are hashes of content. And so everything is addressed by its own hash. \[00:12:27.27\] That means you can only talk about stuff that's already been written. And that means that every time you're doing these B-tree like updates, you're either going to churn data in a real heavy way, with lots of kind of write amplification that's unnecessary, or you're going to solve these hard, hard problems that the research team over there, people like Alan Shaw and \[unintelligible 00:12:51.17\] worked on, where you have trees that have really interesting properties... So what you need, which is a lot of work to get, is something that is a search tree, like a B-tree, but regardless of if you put all those records in, in one order, or a random order, you still get the same root hash at the end, so your snapshots have stable identifiers. And that means your replication doesn't have to be mechanically the same everywhere. It means you can replicate essentially in an optimized, efficient way, but still end up at the same endpoint.

So... Fireproof? Firestore? What's it called?

Fireproof.

Fireproof - is this your implementation of these concepts, or...?

It's my essentially making it so easy to use. We talk about technology, especially databases, and one of the phrases people like to say is "a footgun", right? A footgun is when if you don't do everything exactly right, it blows up on you. And the requirement I had for this technology is no footguns. It's literally designed for the code school dropout.

Okay. So you can't actually shoot yourself in the foot.

Right. And that turned out to be the right place to be, because --

Because we've got a lot of people vibe coding.

Well, even more than that, I'd say with LLMs and GPTs and all that, we have an infinite supply of code school dropouts.

Oh, true. Yeah, exactly. They are infinitely supplied... Depending on how much money you have, right? There's another one there; assuming you can afford those tokens. So you're working on Fireproof, you're building this, making it simple for people to build things with it. And then where does Vibes DIY come into the story then?

So we were going to market with Fireproof after the technology got mature, and there's use cases like black box recorder for self-driving car. Things that are very serious, that are served well by this content-addressed immutable data structure. But there's not very many people who need that, and they don't care how easy it is. That's a different set of problems for them. When we started to see in our Discord people coming in and saying "I haven't programmed in 15 years, but I built this drum machine along with ChatGPT and your API, and it worked right out of the box", we realized we've got vibe coders. And so I brought in an old friend of mine, this guy Marcus Estes, who I've known for like 20 years, and he's just a hustler. He makes it happen. He understands where the opportunity is and how to go after it. I've been looking at this vibe coding stuff, thinking "That's fun. That's cute." He realized "No, let's just do this", and we didn't look back. So it's been so much fun. The big difference, the real difference that matters is my kids, who were so sick of hearing me talk about Merkle CRDTs and all this stuff, now they're grabbing my phone out of my hand.

You're cool again. "Dad's cool again", you know?

They just want to make apps. They're like "Dad, can I make an app?"

"Dad, can I make another Merkle tree?" You know, no one ever says that.

\[laughs\] Right...?

\[00:16:12.03\] What kind of apps are being built with this thing, or can be?

Well, I was really inspired -- I was trying to see essentially what's the lowest common denominator that we can address... And the answer to that is I was using ChatGPT Canvas and Claude artifacts and thinking about how for like a normie, somebody who doesn't already know their way around the next JS stack, or deeply understand React and all the tool chain there, those are the best kind of interface and set of metaphors. If you look at those closely, they don't even say Deploy. They say Publish. And so that's the take we've done with Vibes DIY, is when I'm designing a feature, if it's going to require introducing a new concept, don't. Just make it simpler. And we had this tremendous validation... We just got back from Render ATL. It's a tech conference in Atlanta, where we had a deep line at the booth, crowded up with people who had kind of maybe never even heard of vibe coding, or if they had, they hadn't tried it yet... Or if they had tried it, they thought the existing tools were too complicated... And when we said "Hey, if you make an app, we'll install it on this sticker for you", they would spend the 90 seconds it takes to make an app.

Wow... What's on the sticker? Is it like a QR code, or an install kind of thing, or launch it?

The way we install it in here is with the near field communications chip.

Okay...

I actually learned about that at like a Burning Man event, where someone was doing manicures with NFC chips in them.

Really?

Yeah, which is super-hot. Like, "Here's my number."

Right. You can just embed a little bit of information on that chip and then carry it around in your fingernail.

Yeah.

That sounds very Burning Man.

Yeah. You learn a lot. You never know where you're going to learn a lot.

"Here's your next big idea."

Right?

Wow. So if I take the sticker home, how can I use it? Like, I've got this information embedded in it... What do I do?

You just kind of get it close enough to your phone, and you get one of these little -- and now you can open the URL.

Okay. So it's similar to a QR code, except for not for the camera, but actually the NFC chip in the phone. Makes sense. That's interesting.

Right. And for us, it's really this ownership metaphor. Like, code is all in there, over there... Especially if you're not a coder. Like "What am I making? Where is it?" But if I put it in your hand when you walk away from the booth, then you're going to come back with your friend the next day.

Does that give them access to the code they just created, or vibed? Or does that just give them access to the application they just vibed?

Well, for us, really our --

How do they continue development, how do they keep going?

You're totally right. So most of these people made it on their phone they walked up to the booth with, because it's a mobile-first experience. But if you didn't, if you made it on my phone, or if you made it on the booth laptop, then you still get the sticker, you can still scan it into your phone... And anyone who goes to a vibe can hit the Remix button in the corner and get into the code, or get into the chat and say -- the default remix we have preloaded in our form is "Make it pink." But really, just whatever you want to do to change it. There's a great story, and we had a lot of fun... I was walking back from lunch in Atlanta, and I said to my phone, I said "I want to take pictures and have you turn all the faces in the pictures into Georgia peaches." And it worked on the first try; sometimes you get lucky... And people thought that was hilarious. So we were showing it off, and then we were sharing a booth with Netlify. They're great friends of ours... And one of the Netlify leaders, Sean, brought his kid.. And so she saw what we were doing, and she said "I want to be a cat." \[laughs\]

\[00:20:23.08\] Remix it. Remix that sucker.

So basically, a four-year-old turned a peach app into the cat app, and that was a hit... And then we saw what was going on there and we made this -- we made a caricature app I've got on my laptop here. Here's me as a podcaster.

Nice...

And it was also a big hit. People at the conference just all day long building stuff.

It's just fun. This is the stuff I'm talking about, Adam. Just --

Total vibes, man. This is the internet, man.

For joy. It's for the joy of it.

It totally is for the joy.

It is.

And so many people --

This is like Geocities for the modern era.

Seriously.

Yeah. It's like a writable Geocities, right? View sources back, baby.

\[laughs\] Yeah. I'm reminded of the old cloud to butt extension. You guys remember that one? Every time the word cloud was on a website, this Chrome extension would replace it with the word butt. I'm not saying this is an idea for a remix, Chris, I'm just saying I'm reminded of it.

You know, if I wouldn't get distracted, we'd just build it right now. \[laughter\] **Break**: \[00:21:26.00\]

So is the platform the web then? Or how are they -- how are these things running?

That's the way I think about it. I wanted to build the experience I had early on in the black and white Mac days, with HyperCard... But I realized that when I look around people trying to build similar ambitions, often there's a "do it our way completely or don't" kind of feel. I call that like "They make you wear the socks." With us, the point is there's already so much platform that's done. So we just build React apps, and we're essentially taking the web runtime, which is what a browser can do, and making it as easy to express yourself there, maybe easier than making a TikTok. So if making an app is easier than making a TikTok, now what? And that's the question Vibes DIY is out to answer.

I love it. I think Adam and I were just talking about this new possibility, specifically in light of Apple allowing local models on phones, and Xcode, and things are getting localized there, where it's like you could build and deploy your own iPhone app. It's just a one off, just for you; nobody else even has to have it. And there are still platform limitations there with regard to distribution, side loading, and there's lots of stuff. But with the web, it's like "Nah. Just URL, publish that sucker." And that's really awesome.

Yup.

So just to nerd out again on the sticker, is the embedded information in the sticker just a URL to where the thing actually runs? Or is there code in there? Or how does that work?

It's just the URL.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

So once you have the URL, we make -- actually, our service layer is so simple. If you look at a lot of the existing vibe coding tools, they're built for professionals, and they're going to mimic a professional output with a full Next.js app. The only thing that the model - which is just a commodity model; we have a switcher. It's actually a great way for AI-interested devs to try out all the different models and get their personalities down. But when you ask Vibes to make something for you, it's only writing app.jsx, and that's it. So our focus is on being fun, done, and alive with AI. \[00:26:07.16\] This last bit means that the apps that you make, get the same API key that we use in your browser to write the code. And you press the Demo data button, and it fills out your to do list with whatever is plausible. Or it makes an app -- I built this because it takes 90 seconds to make an app, it takes longer to figure out how to use an app. So instead, I just mashed the demo data button, and it shows me what the app would look like if you'd spent some time in it.

So let's say I mash out a 90-second thing, and it's rad, and we're having fun... Can I then expand/extend/build that sucker out, or I have to remix and start something else?

That's where one of our core values comes in, is that it has to be real. So the 500 lines of JSX that it's going to write is React code -- it's as good as Claude 4 is going to make it, which means it's not that bad. And the standard library we bring to the table with it means that all these apps are fully functional just in the browser, but then they can be remote synced via the cloud to other users for collaboration. And that means copy that -- there's a Copy button; you get your 500 lines of code in your clipboard, and you go drop it into anywhere. Maybe into a \[unintelligible 00:27:21.00\] template, or maybe into another vibe coding tool, and say "Hey, expand this." Maybe you turn it into 10 pages, maybe you take 10 vibes and put them into one app... But the sky's the limit. It's really fully malleable software that pros can take and run with, as well as beginners can just use.

Adam, what do you think of all these sayings he has? He's got like rhyming words, he's got like stickers...

He's a poet, man.

This guy's bringing it.

I'm over here, trying to vibe over here... I think it might be a Safari issue.

\[laughs\] I thought you might be. That's why I pulled you back in. I can tell when Adam's like testing something out...

I was vibing over here, and I think I might have hit an issue with Safari, potentially... Because the thing it made me is on a black screen, and so I'm having an issue.

Well, that's not Safari, that's Claude. I would say you rolled the dice, and...

You got snake eyes.

Oh, dang. So it made nothing.

One in 20 times Claude is like "Oh, I know what you want... You want a black canvas that's like 20 times bigger than your screen." It just does that -- we have work to do, but...

Yeah, I think that's about it. It's kind of like forever scrolling.

Well, close the tab, and open a new tab and try again, you know?

I can share with you my -- it was just intense, man. This is an intense process. I saw it write a bunch of code, I could see all the code, but there's no application to be viewed.

So basically copy that prompt you did and just make a new one. That's what we learned from vibe coding. Don't go iterate on something unless you're already stoked about it.

Right.

Yeah.

It's just cheaper to throw it all away and start fresh, right?

Yeah, right? I mean, when it's just spoken word, it's like "Let's try again and just tweak a little bit", you know? That's kind of cool, though.

That's kind of what I do. Remember with Google searches -- remember when you used to google things? Some people will put in a search and then they'll read the results, and if there's not the right answer, they'll go to like page two, page three, page four... You know, like an infidel. I just research, right? Like "Oh, my search wasn't good enough." I just research... Now I have the same thing with these LLMs. I just copy a prompt into like four of them, and I'm like "Let's see who's got the best answer", or the fastest, or whatever. Or I can like mentally munge them into one answer and like pull things from each one... And that's kind of the new research, is this like "Nah, I'm not going to tweak this prompt. I'm just going to try it on more things and see what happens." So yeah, close tab, open new tab, paste prompt and start vibing again.

Yeah, we're considering seriously doing that for you. We may as well just vibe three of them in parallel and let you pick the best... Although every bit of complexity we add is going to take the simplest user and turn them away.

\[00:29:57.14\] And cost. I mean, that's what Sora does, which is Open AI's video tool. You can pick how many different iterations that you want, and it will make two or four or six. And obviously, you have to have the tokens, and stuff... But especially with creative tools, where it's like "I would like to see four different things", it's just like "Yeah, we'll just crank out four", versus you having to say "Try again, try again, try again."

The fun part is looking at how much better Claude 4 is than even 3.7. Or if I switch it over to Codex Mini, then I'll get like an app that works great, but isn't showboating at all. Like, GPT models make these lean apps, with no extra stuff... And Claude 4 is going to have your backgrounds, transparency with blur, and \[unintelligible 00:30:41.20\] It's fun to see the personality in there.

I think Claude 4 - and I don't have any personal reason to say this in terms of like we're not making money by promoting Anthropic... But Claude 4 is just I think good enough now that it's sold me on the entire thing... Whereas up until now I've been very skeptical, because of the results have been so bad. I'm not sure if you guys saw Simon Willison's "The last 12 months of LLM progress as outlined by pelicans riding on bicycles." Did you guys see that post?

Oh, yeah...

Because he's such a nerd for every new model that comes out that he tells them all to do the exact same thing, which is to write a code that produces an SVG drawing of a pelican riding on a bicycle. And he documents that, of course, because he documents everything. And he's just showed the progress; he was like "Here's this model, here's that model", all the way down through the last year, and how far they've come and which ones do better. He scores them, and stuff like that. But the progress has been amazing. And Claude 4 - I think we're at a point now where it's like above my threshold of sucking, to where it's like "Let's do it." Like, I want to use them now. I'm not sure what happened between 3.7 and 4.0, but something happened.

That black screen that you ran into, Adam - the other one that I'm just still trying to teach Claude to never do again... For some reason, it loves to give you buttons with white text on white background.

Dark patterns. The opposite of dark patterns. Light patterns. Did you get better results this time, Adam, or are you still spinnin'?

It's still working on it. It's a little slow, for some reason. It's taking its time.

It's bleeding edge.

How many lines of code does it want to do?

At this point it's trying again... So I got two black screens in a row, so I wasn't sure...

What are you trying to build?

Okay, so I told this thing "I want to golf with friends. Help me create a tee time and invite folks to it." So "Hey, Jerod, I'm going to golf this Saturday, at this time. You're invited to my tee time." And you can join, kind of thing. So that's -- oh, it finally did something. It's got a golf tee time organizer, I can create a new tee time, I can invite people to it, it seems... It looks like more iteration. It's got some additional features that could be added, which I think is kind of cool... But all in all, quite colorful. It's vibrant. It's got a cool vibe. It's vibing. This is vibing, man.

This is vibing, man.

Right?

So do you guys have a system prompter? I'm not sure if you have some sort of scaffolding in there, that when we write our prompts and put it into vibes, it does more than just that, right?

The whole thing's open source, so you can go on GitHub on the Vibes DIY org and get into the repo prompts.ts and see what we actually do. But it's fairly simple... I mean, as I was mentioning earlier, I was one of the coauthors on the O'Reilly ChatGPT shortcuts book, and what I learned from that - and the experience continues to pan out... If you talk to the LLM like a person, less technical, more just what you want, you get better answers. So this golf thing is the thing you want to do. There's this great YouTube - we can find it for the show notes - there's two types of vibe coders. And there's the one guy who's all frustrated, with his 4,000-line LLMs text and his feature specification, PRD... And the other guy who's just like "Make GTA. Make GTA six." \[laughter\]

\[00:34:13.10\] And he's having a \[unintelligible 00:34:15.27\] you know?

Here's my golf tracker... \[laughter\]

Oh, nice. Did you do that one just now, as Adam was doing one, or is that --

Yeah, after I heard what he was doing... And I think my prompt was just --

Let's see your prompt. What is it again? Show it to me?

I said "golf with friends."

That's all you said?

Yup.

Oh, my gosh... Okay, so how do you share that with me, so I can see it, or play with it, or remix and revibe?

Pass the address into the chat. We have a chat here.

Right?

That's how it works?

So again, we don't deploy. You press the purple button, the big button, and now you publish it, and... I was getting into this a minute ago, I guess I distracted myself... So when it publishes, all it does is take, like, let's say the 475 lines of JSX and put it in a CloudFlare KV associated with the subdomain name. When you go hit that subdomain, we have a static HTML that's essentially the runtime, that's got all the packages in there... And it loads any additional packages via esm.sh. And now you have your app right there... It costs us almost nothing to host, almost nothing to serve, unless that app goes and does some AI calls, in which case that goes against your token quota. So it makes it super-easy for people to write apps that are alive with AI, whether that's... Our benchmark, compared to Simon Willison - he's got the penguins on bicycles; what we have is, for instance, I'll just tell you something in English, and you'll give me a structured to do list that reflects back what I need to do to accomplish that. So I'm always running that when we do an upgrade, or move to a new model... This morning I said "Take my kid to summer camp", and it gave me everything: sunscreen, lunch, all that.

Alright, I just loaded up Adam's golf tee time organizer app.

Is it working?

I mean, it rendered... I don't know if it's actually working. I think it has a white button with white text, as Chris knew it would...

Something's going wrong here, because I can't get it to load for me.

But I can create a new tee time...

Oh, sweet.

Oh, I see some. Sunnyvale Golf & Club. I can join that round.

Yeah. Pop your name in there. Boom.

Okay, I'm joining that round... My name is Jerod, thank you very much... And Confirmed. Jordan Phillips is going, and Jerod is going. So... Where is it storing that information, Chris? Where does the data that I enter in go?

So all of that stuff goes into Fireproof, which has got that Merkle CRDT. And that means that it just goes in your browser local storage. The way Fireproof works is every database operation is a diff, like in Git. It is end-to-end encrypted and then written to - we use IndexedDB in the browser, because it's real fast with Uint8Arrays... But then asynchronously can be replicated via S3 bucket and WebSocket. So that part works in Fireproof. We're rolling it out in Vibes right now. That means today all Vibes are single player. That's why it's best for these kind of viral AI experiences. But tomorrow, all Vibes have essentially the security model of a Google Doc. So I don't want an end user to have to understand Postgres Row Level Security, or having to do like where clauses to keep from writing bugs... Instead, if you're in the app, you're in the app. Maybe you have write access or read access, but it's as simple as a Google Doc for the sharing. And that means as soon as we activate that feature, then Adam, you could invite Jerod to your app via email, and now y'all are both in there, setting up what are you going to bring for lunch to the course.

It's all on the web platform.

\[00:37:58.00\] Yeah, yeah. None of the people who don't know what code is, who've never deployed anything - they can't depend on any setup. I like to say, if you don't know what an API is, then I'm certainly not going to ask you to do an API key.

So this thing went Render ATL viral last week, because they already had a fun time making caricatures of themselves... But when's it going to go TikTok viral, or youth viral? Like, it seems like this is set up specifically for 13 to 15 year olds to find out about it. Just like the six, seven thing. I'm not sure if you guys are aware of six, seven, but they're huge on six, seven. And all of a sudden it's like, this thing's screaming.

Well, I'm pretty sure that my key into that market is you guys. \[laughter\] But really, what we aim to be -- there's a lot of people who use more serious tools for vibe coding, and I'm not going to give a senior developer more control, more options, more details than other incumbents. But what I will do is be exactly the right thing that they're going to turn around and show their friends when they want their less technical friends to start getting into writing code.

Gotcha.

So if you've got a buddy who has a dream, or keeps bugging you to build something for them, say "Hey, vibe it up and I'll take it from there."

Right. Well, it's very much a GeoCities then, in that sense. Or maybe Glitch. Of course, Glitch recently changed the way Glitch works, but... Similar vibes then, right? Glitch was very much the thing where it's like get people started, learn on it.

How does versioning work in that multiplayer world?

So if you look inside the chat that you've been having, you can refine it. You could say "Oh, I didn't mean regular golf. I have these interesting rules of golf I want to bring to the game." Claude will go rewrite the code for that, and now you have a slightly different version of the app. That could be within a single chat session, in which case we're not remixing yet. We're just iterating. But if you go look in that chat, you can click on the older versions of the code and it brings them up instead. Whichever one is on your screen is the one that gets published when you click Publish. So publish an old version if the new one wasn't as good... But once it's published and you go to that URL... You know, when you scan the sticker and you go to the URL, then you're going to have a Remix button in the corner of the screen. And when you hit that, you've essentially forked. Now, no insult to all of the people out there who are kind of like me in this regard, but... I've been forking forever, and what we say to ourselves to make sure we stay on target at Vibes DIY is we say "Forks are for dorks."

\[laughs\] These guy's got a saying for everything. So because you don't like forks, or because you do? I mean, it depends on if you think a dork is a good thing or a bad thing.

That's right.

Well, when it's time to get the dorks involved and do the forking. But when you just want to try something and remix, then you don't need all that conceptual baggage.

Gotcha.

Just hit the Remix button and go.

So this is akin to the publish button versus the deploy, right? It's like, remix it, don't fork it, because you're not a dork. You're a normie, as you said earlier.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, your audience, and it's not us. It's not us... \[laughs\] Because I'm looking for the fork button over here. I'm like "Excuse me, sir... I would like to fork this."

Totally. Well, it is us though, because when you go deep on something, it's got that Merkle CRDT, it's made out of standard React components, it's got all the TypeScript annotations you could hope for... And it's ready to go big, if that's what you want to do with it.

But I imagine sitting on Cloudflare, with an HTML file and some KV backends; big in terms of features and commerce and production big, business big, but not big in terms of scale. I imagine one of these could scale pretty easily in terms of that TikTok viral moment, couldn't it?

It costs pennies on the dollar compared to anything that requires a VM or any kind of complex state or CPU. When I think of Kubernetes containers, all that, I only want one if I basically want to rent some live RAM.

Right.

\[00:42:13.05\] And you don't need that. All the live RAM lives in the user agent at the edge.

Right. So Cloudflare is pretty cool... I mean, just - no further comment. I wonder if you could maybe expand on that. Like, you guys are doing cool stuff because of what Cloudflare is helping you to do, right? It seems like a very interesting platform in that way.

Our stack is, I guess, native to that way of thinking about things... So not just the publish flow that goes into a KV, but also the fireproof synchronization is powered by Cloudflare workers, which is a great way to rent some RAM on the cheap if all you need is a list of your currently connected clients. So these -- essentially, the flow is that tiny encrypted diff, you write it locally, push it up via our API, which you don't have to know about, but it ends up as another record in an R2 bucket... And then an update to the pointer that corresponds to your database. So everyone who's listening to that pointer pulls down the latest. And because it's a CRDT, the merges are resilient. I was thinking about recovery mechanisms. Say like you lost the pointer, and all you had was the files... It's a valid exercise to just load them all and merge them, and you'll get the same result as if you'd started from the end one.

Why RAM? Why does it need to be in RAM?

I mean, it doesn't. We can do it with the S3 bucket only.

It's cool, right? Because it's cool.

It's a little faster to keep it on \[unintelligible 00:43:43.19\] And what I mean by in RAM is --

Is it necessary, though? Or is it just because it's cool?

It's just because it's faster. So we need essentially a directory, a link to -- okay, let's get technical. The real reason we need any of that is because it's multi-writer safe. And so if you just had like a SQLite and you were trying to do this kind of architecture - which people do, where they put the SQLite segments into an S3 bucket, and then they load them in the browser and query them... That's all good until you need to start writing. And now you're doing some kind of bespoke, you know, take the write-ahead log, and put it in there, and manage kind of conflicts against it and everything... It's not for the faint of heart. Instead, what we do, because of this Merkle CRDT, the merges are handled for you. So the only thing we need to add to the recipe to make it multi-writer safe is it could be that pointer that points to the most recent file, the diff from which you've got to start to reconstruct - well, it can point to more than one file. So if you're under concurrent load, people can all -- you have 50 people all write on top of the same starting state, without having coordinated each other yet... And now we just have a pointer that's 50-wide. The next read pulls those in, merges and writes back up the single pointer. So that's what we do the performance thing for.

So in your mind or in your heart, is Fireproof the thing, and Vibes DIY is a thing to demonstrate the thing? Or is Vibes DIY the thing that Fireproof let you build?

I feel like I'm in the Millennium Falcon and I just like mashed the gas, you know?

\[laughs\]

So it's a little bit of both, but it's it's super-aligned. Fireproof is for the kind of people who like to fork stuff, and Vibes is for the kind of people who --

And Vibes is for remixers.

...don't want to be bothered with all that. It's just done.

Okay. Do you think you're gonna have to pick a certain point, or like focus, or do you have infinite bandwidth to just like mash that Millennial Falcon - what's it called? Warp speed? No, they don't call it warp speed. What do they call it in Star Wars? I'm blanking.

The hyperdrive?

Yeah, the hyperdrive. Go to hyper speed.

So we are focused 100% on Vibes.

Okay.

\[00:46:04.08\] And in a lot of ways, it's because Fireproof is basically done. I mean, it never is the case with a database, but it's not like it needs new features. It's just about hardening it, and continuing to release it. So in that world now, Vibes gets cool new features. A fun new feature we get to add - this is lightweight stuff. Like I said, I don't want people to have to know what an API is, much less an API key. So... Bake that YouTube API key in there. It's not in there yet, but this allows you to say "Hey, I want to turn my playlist into a YouTube screen", and it just works already. Same thing for Spotify, or any other of these kind of mass market media APIs. There's no reason that you as a Vibe coder should have to know about any of that to use it.

Have we talked about money yet?

No.

How do you make money?

No.

Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about it.

Does it matter at this point? Or is it just for the vibes?

It matters that we don't get it wrong... And then the more we think about it, the more excited we get. So if you look at what it would take to build something with a vibe coding tool and a database backend - those are both kind of like maybe just to get started; table stakes, $25 a month, $25 a month - that's $50 a month right there. We do an all-in-one bundle at $5 a month. And that's because all we need is that R2 bucket. It's not costing us a whole Kubernetes container to keep your Postgres instance running. It makes pennies on the dollar for us. And then the real cost becomes those tokens, that either your app consumes when it's generating cool caricature images, or parsing your to-do list, as well as the tokens that you use when you write an app. $5 a month gets you started. If you want to go over that, there's a meter which is competitively priced. And then where we see this going in the long run is almost like this YouTube-style model, where, say -- first, think about a corporate case. Think about some big marketing agency that builds like "See our product in your house. Replace the Statue of Liberty with our product", whatever it is. "Take a photo, put us in there." You get 100,000 views on that from your email list... You're probably writing us a check for $20,000 or something on the tokens it consumes. But if you're some kid who figures out a cool way to scan your house and turn it into a video game level, you don't have that kind of money. But your app costs just as much to run, and it goes just as viral. So in that world, there's a little bit of a freemium. Somebody comes along, uses the app - they can generate a simple level or a couple of images. But then they're going to get through their set of free vibes tokens... If they like what they're experiencing, then now they're subscribing for $5 a month. So we're not just selling it to developers, we're selling it to people who want to make cool caricatures of themselves in their dream job, or whatever it is that these end user apps do. So now if you're that kid who made a cool video game and you don't have any money, but you get us 50,000 signups, then my goal is to write you a check, like YouTube.

Does that "Turn your house into a video game" level thing exist? Because I want that.

No, somebody's got to make it. I mean, why wouldn't it exist?

That's such a good idea.

Right? Gaussian splat is cheap now, running on the phone.

How would you do that though? Would you just walk around your house just like taking a video, and uploading it?

I don't know.

We like to say that the best we can hope to do -- you know, we're kind of grizzled, old vets of the industry. The best we can do is invent the electric guitar. It's up for the kids to invent rock and roll.

That's like the best non-answer ever, right? He's like "You guys figure it out."

Alright...

Yeah.

\[00:49:51.13\] I mean, we've got roadmap features that expand. So everything I've talked about is really just the browser runtime. It can do a lot. It's underutilized, especially for people who really haven't pushed it to its limits yet. But roadmap features is something we learned from the CouchDB ecosystem. Essentially, Fireproof is the CouchDB model running in the browser. And one of the things that you see a lot of -- the way Npm was powered, all those packages stored in CouchDB, and then when someone uploads a new one or makes a change to some metadata or whatever, there's just an event reactor subscribed to the database feed that can then go do some heavy lift, or send an email, or update some analytics package somewhere. Same thing, just -- if you wanted to today, you could stand up a CloudFlare worker that subscribes to that golf database. And when somebody puts in a new tee time, you could get a push notification. Our roadmap brings that to the masses by making it so there's just a backend.js that we also let the model write.

Yeah. See, I wouldn't have even thought about that, I guess... It'd be helpful i there's a guide. "Here's the next step you can take." They mention different features that can come, but not what you mentioned there, which is like push notifications. That'd be kind of cool.

Right. And there's no end to that kind of stuff. And we really -- essentially, if I think about the job you're hiring that backend.js to do, it's the stuff that's essentially hiding API secrets. You can't just publish the way that you send your emails, your Postmark key to the world. You can't put it in the browser, but you could put it on the backend, and then the backend's job is just to forward those messages.

What happens when it's successful? What is a year, two years from now -- like, how does this change things? What is vibes.diy a year and a half from now?

Well, now that it's easier to make an app than a TikTok, we picture people swiping right on the good apps, and long-pressing to launch it, and having essentially their phone blow up in their hand when their app gets popular. So the same thing you see with an Insta, or a TikTok or a YouTube, where it's really about the excitement you get from coding. That's what I saw in Atlanta. When I was first starting coding, the coolest thing in the world was just to change one line in your HTML and then hit Refresh and there it is. So educating people how that feels, and then letting them share that with their friends... I think what we see is that coding becomes something that is cool.

How do you deal with the potential of scams, or just like security issues in that unfettered world where it's like "Yeah, check out my vibe app", and it's cool, but like what happens when it's a scam?

There's thankfully a whole bunch of prior art. Essentially, for us dev tool builders it's a little bit of alien land, but if you've done social media before, it's that playbook. So we've done some of the basic things already... For instance, there's no way to publish to a fire hose. It's not like just everything's all showing up. We moderate the stuff that goes out on the homepage. That doesn't mean you can't share something. So if you start building honey pots, then now we have a different moderation challenge. It's not new, it's just new to do it with HTML instead of video, or images.

Yeah. I just wonder... It's one of those things where you don't want to have to deal with it, but you do... And it's early, because trust will be everything to get to the TikTok stage of sharing, and virality, or whatever... It's going to be something you can trust, or has to be. And if you can't trust it, then it's like -- it's a today problem, basically. Like, at launch.

\[00:53:49.26\] Yeah. So if you look at the history of using Mechanical Turk to moderate profile images, and having to do two of three thumbs down, and all that - so much cheaper, so much easier to do that with a model now. Just let Claude tell you whether it's not any good, you know?

There you go.

And then on top of that, we aren't going to run into these problems to -- it's sort of blunted. We don't give you the ability to go into the editor and type. It wouldn't be hard for us to, but we figure that that's the point you should copy and paste it somewhere else. And Claude's not going to write something out of the box that's going to be extremely concerning. We just use the Open AI image gen. It makes our job easier. Eventually, we'll want to value-engineer all that stuff, but that comes with scale.

Solve it with more AI. That's interesting. Right...? All problems get easier with AI...

Well, AI makes new problems faster, then it makes the other ones easier, but hopefully we've isolated ourselves from that with this one file app JSX thing. And don't underestimate the power of the single-origin policy. The web browser kind of already worked out a lot of this stuff.

So if this thing takes off - I mean, now's the time to get in there and really be the vibe DIYer in chief, right? The people that were early on YouTube, the people that were early to TikTok, they had a much better time... Is there actual virality built into it? Can I build an audience? Can I distribute? Is there a distribution channel? I know y'all are just getting started, so the network effects probably aren't there yet, but are the tools to build an audience for my apps in the product?

So if we're talking 90 seconds from prompt to app, on the cases where it works, probably another 90 seconds to be like "Is this app any good?" and then hit Publish. And now it's on a URL, so we go wherever URLs go. But the built-in features around like a newsfeed, and a For You page, and all that... These are the things I'm super-excited to build. We're growing the team right now. People who want to do that should probably talk to me about it, but it's definitely... It's a kind of interesting green field, because so much of the design language is already worked out. It's not like we have to decide what an algorithmic feed even is. It's more just about making it for -- basically, we're bringing a new media object to the world.

Right.

And the same thing you do with a video, you do with this. And we even have plans -- for instance, the same Jason Smith I mentioned earlier, he used to host Npm. I talked to him about it yesterday and he said "Hey, I've been working on some video gen stuff. I think you could --" Lik, we have this demo data button that fills the app up with data for you... You could also do a video tour button. You just click one button and it takes your face, lip syncs, puts it on TikTok, "Here's my app."

Right. That's cool. So what kind of engineers or people are you looking for?

Really right now if you go use Vibes, you're totally allowed to roast it, because I am a React developer, I guess, but I'm also a CEO... And it's like 75% CEO code right now. So we've got --

C-level code. \[laughter\] I like that.

So if you're just like absolutely cracked, and the person hire is -- you know, when somebody is kind of like new enough to a stack where they're like dangerously enthusiastic about getting everything right... If you're senior enough, you're going to see my flubs and be frustrated, but at the right part of your skills curve, you're going to just like chew up fixing that stuff, and get it into best practices.

Every level of CEO code is like an opportunity for the right person, you know?

Yup.

I just got like WordPress vibes, in a way. Like, in a positive way. When I was looking at this golf friends thing I got built out here, it's like Kubrick. Like K2 was to WordPress. Very -- every app has a certain style, kind of thing to it. I kind of feel like it's a good thing.

Is there a shared -- is that on purpose, Chris? Is there a shared design aesthetic, or something?

\[00:57:59.07\] Well, we made the choice to differentiate ourselves from everybody else. We're not using Shadcn... And that's not because it's not great. We just want to be different. We want to be more lightweight. We want to have a little bit more variance and let Claude or whoever express themselves a little more in there. So the way we prompt the design language is -- actually, my co-founder Marcus I mentioned earlier just did a bunch of research, like art history type research around like, you know, "We don't want synth wave. That's played out" etc. We've found -- there was a design school in Italy in the eighties that came up with a style they called Memphis. And so we tell it to make Memphis... So we described Memphis a little bit, and it does a pretty good job of that. That's all user editable. So if you go into the settings page right now, you can just type in your own style prompt. You could switch it to synth wave. You can switch it to synth wave and DeepSeek. And then if you run it on DeepSeek now, you probably have to generate the app 10 times before you get a working one, but... \[laughter\]

Certainly a good playground for testing out these models, and comparing them to each other. Probably better than my copy-paste prompt into like four thing is actually making -- probably better than Simon Willison's pelicans on bikes, is like make the same app against all these different models.

That's cool. I see the style prompt now. It's pretty cool, you can just like swap that out, make it whatever you want. That's so cool.

It's your own.

Yeah.

Right. Or if you really want to go deep, just hit up our GitHub, fork the whole thing - you know who you are - and fix up my React.

Yeah, I was gonna ask you that... Like, how much of this can you run? How much of this is just completely "if I had enough gumption, I could get it running on my own Cloudflare account"?

So... Kind of yes. What we have set up is even for - if you're going in via the GitHub, it deploys to our end point, and it uses our login system... And that means that you could have projects -- basically, we want you to be able to be a Vibes DIY user, go run a fork, maybe your fork is like internal for your work or something, but not have to do the whole heavy lift of the full stack. The fork will just run against our backend. If you want to get even heavier than that - yeah, now you can start to code up the backend... But that's a senior engineer task.

How do you keep up with your underlying technologies in terms of what you're generating, or what you're telling Claude to use? Because those things are also moving targets.

I have more work to do there. There's models that aren't represented yet. I would love to get \[unintelligible 01:00:27.09\] personally when I'm in Windsurf... And so, there's some things we can do to keep up. We essentially need like a cultural ambassador to LLM land to keep us up.

What about to Next.js land? Is that a fast enough moving target? I guess you're always generating a new one, so it doesn't matter so much.

Right. And we're just doing that one file. I chose to do app.jsx instead of app.tsx, mostly because it's one less thing the model can hallucinate wrong. Now, if you wanted it to be TSX, I'm pretty sure Windsurf can fix that for you in a single pass.

Sure. But why? I guess by then you copy-pasted it, so it's yours anyways, right? Do what you want.

Exactly. Yeah, the JSX is all about the simplicity, and then the -- it really allows anybody to get in there, edit these apps, and bring them to any backend. When you do eject, it runs through those same APIs. Again, you can move them over. I don't know if there'd be a good reason, but there's a world in which, especially when we spin up the user pays mode for like image gen AI usage by the app, you might just pull our Npm modules directly into whatever environment and use those, because that lets you ship apps without having to worry about the cost of the LLM.

Say that again. I don't think I tracked it.

\[01:01:52.12\] So built into these Npm modules that's part of our standard library is that when you run out of your free tokens, it pops up the login window. And after you log in and you get another batch of free tokens, you run out of those, it asks for your credit card. If all you care about is going viral and the thing that's holding you back is that going viral is going to cost you $50,000 in ChatGPT fees when people start using your prompts in production - well, do it on Vibes or do it with the Vibes Npm modules and you'll get the same benefit that we'll handle it for you. And if you get enough usage, then you can be looking at creator payouts.

Yeah, that actually scales really well. I guess that's what you're referring back to the YouTube model, where basically as an app creator, I'm bringing you token use by way of people using my app, and you being Vibes DIY is making money off of every one of those people who decides to put down some cash in order to use the app some more. And so you're now talking payouts to me for bringing you guys additional customers. That's an interesting model.

A real kind of eye on the prize... You know, Couch did well, but I also learned firsthand what it's like to get whooped by MongoDB. \[laughter\]

How did that feel?

At the time, I wrote that rap about other NoSQLs, right? You could tell how it felt. But now I appreciate what they did; they understood that the real answer to taking the market is to be on the ground floor when people are writing apps without permission in the enterprise. And so we're probably a decent choice for say you're running a veterinarian clinic, and your customer management system doesn't keep track of what the dog's favorite treats are... Vibe up a treat tracker... And on down the line the cryptographic causal consistency that's enforced by Fireproof means that you could use this for regulated supply chain. Maybe your cannabis dispensary needs to keep track of some stuff, because someone with a badge is going to come knocking... And Vibes has got the underlying infrastructure to make that safe. So after we make coding cool, we have a lot of bandwidth to go and make this system scale for serious use cases.

Do you think your brand scales that way?

We'll find out, but I kind of think so.

Here's a sub-brand: Serious Vibes.

Totally. Yeah, we talk about gray mode... \[laughs\]

Gray mode? There you go. Yeah.

There's a lot we can do there. There's a whole --

It's cool stuff.

...like, if you wanted to fork the core thing and make it work with, say, not React... Like, I've got nothing against Vue. I've got nothing against Solid.js. All these things are excellent technologies. We chose React because it's the one that's going to give you the deepest training set. But being able to take the wrapper and deploy a Vue app or a React app to our Cloudflare endpoint - it's not going to change things. From an infrastructure standpoint, it's ready to go.

Alright, dorks, get out there and fork away... For the normal people, get out there and remix somebody else's golf tee time tracker...

Hm.

Adams has already published it.

And improve my vibes. My vibes were not so viby.

Get your friends into coding. Get some -- make an image generator that no one would have expected, and make it go viral on your Facebook.

I've got a phrase for you. Ready for this?

I love phrases.

Vibe with friends.

Vibe with friends. That's right.

There you go.

\[01:05:54.24\] And that's coming -- I mean, that's just an easy on switch... Some of the folks we've been talking to are most excited about that this chat interface where you're talking to the LLM and it's writing a code for you - that's multi-user. As soon as we flip on the same sharing mechanism that allows Adam to invite Jerod to the golf app, you can also invite Jerod to be the coder on the golf app, and y'all can be in the chat together.

Now you really are vibing with friends.

There you go.

Awesome, Chris. Anything else that you expected us to ask you that we haven't asked you, or that you can't wait to tell us about before we let you go?

Y'all did a great job. I just can't wait to see what you vibe up.

I'm going to vibe some stuff. I'm going to get my kids vibing... This is going to be fun. Vibes.diy, if we haven't said it enough times on the pod. That's your URL.

Vibes.diy.

There you go. Tell your friends. Get your kids, get your nieces and nephews - if you're of age similar to ours - out there and do it yourself. I mean, I'm going to throw a few things at this. I think the image gen, like the caricature stuff - do you have a gallery of where... Because sometimes one idea just strikes. You've gotta have something to start with and you're like "Oh, I can just change that", like the remix thing. Do you have a gallery out there?

We moderate the stuff that shows up on the homepage. So we essentially have a carousel. Every time you hit refresh on the homepage, you'll get some new choices.

Gotcha.

There's some ones that illustrate how you do real things. If you have in your mind, as many of us dorks have, a mental list of APIs that have cores and don't require an API key, I've got for instance a vibe on there that is using Algolia's hacker news search to just bring you the vibe code news. So go remix that. Any API that's got that kind of access control - super-easy to use. And then, as I said, with this backend support coming soon, you'll be able to drop your own API keys in.

And what's the best way to get in touch with the creators of this, yourself, your team, your community? Is there ways that you can say "Hey, I'd love support for this, that, or the other thing" and you guys don't have it yet? Feedback, or a Discord, or a Zulip, or anything.

It's in the Discord, and the Discord is linked from our About page.

Alright. Go forth and vibe code with friends... Especially once that multiplayer feature gets toggled on. Let us know, Chris, when that's out there, because we'll definitely give it another shot, and probably another shout-out, as Adam and I could vibe code together. I could be changing his design as he's trying to add features. That'd be fun.

I'm looking forward to the day when your guests are on here with things they made in Vibes DIY.

That'll be amazing. That will be full circle, won't it?

That's what I'm trying to talk about. That's cool stuff. That's the way it's got to be done. I can't wait! I'm vibing. I'm vibing.

Thanks, Adam. Thanks, Jerod. Super-excited to be here. And yeah, remember, everything we do is open source, so you're invited.