Pencils down: We share our vibe-coded websites

Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of codex. I'm your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, we are revisiting our vibe coding challenge. About a month ago, I gave two of my colleagues a challenge to go off and develop a website to solve a problem that they had in their real life. This is just a way for us to experiment with some of the vibe coding tools, push things along, try new things, and see what we, admittedly regular people when it comes to this stuff, might be able to make in a vibe coding world. It's been a month. I'm very excited to check-in. I also, if I'm being completely honest, am unreasonably proud of the things that I've made, and I'm very excited to show them off and brag about them. It's gonna be very fun. We're gonna get to that in just a second. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is ninety seconds on The Verge for Monday, 08/10/2026. Mark Zuckerberg just published a huge 6,500 word manifesto on how he sees the future of AI. Most of what's in there is not surprising. He loves America. He thinks agents will make everything amazing for everyone. You You know the drill. He said he's in favor of more government oversight of AI models, but doesn't think it's worth trying to keep foreign models out of The US altogether. Thought that was interesting. Every AI CEO seems to love a manifesto right now. And I only bring this one up because it's from a CEO whose products are part of so many people's lives every day. And actually because there's one line in here I quite like. He says that invention, not automation, will be the greatest contribution of superintelligence. Come into that. Meanwhile, big news in App Store world. The first non Google Android App Store is now available in the Play Store. It's called Aptoid, and it's a game store. Android has always supported these third party app stores, but they came either preloaded like the Amazon App Store on Fire tablets, or you had to side load them. But after years of legal fighting with Epic, which is the company that makes Fortnite, Google is now required to let those app stores into the Play Store itself. This is a big change to the whole app economy. And by the way, there's a very similar fight playing out as we speak with Apple and iOS. Finally, Verge contributor Georgina Torbit has a story about a company called Reflect Orbital, which recently won FCC approval to launch a mirror satellite, which is what you think it is, designed to reflect sunlight onto Earth twenty four hours a day, either for actual light or to generate solar power. Right now, it's one satellite, but reflect wants it to be 50,000. Meanwhile, astronomers are worried about light pollution. They're worried about scientific observation, even about what …