The future of code is exciting and terrifying

Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of vibe coding from your phone. I'm your friend David Pierce, and my power is out. So it's Monday, March 16th, as I'm recording this. And I live in the Washington, DC area where we are supposedly in a few hours from now getting some like giant generational storms and potentially even including a bunch of tornadoes. But the really fun thing is that the power is out several hours before it's even supposed to start raining. So it's just going to be one of those days. We're doing super great. But this means that if you are watching this on YouTube, you get to see what my home office slash basement slash studio setup looks like when there's no lights and no fancy camera. And it's just me talking into my MacBook because The Vergecast goes on. Anyway, on this show, most of what we're going to do today is one conversation that I had recently with Paul Ford. Paul Ford, you might know, he's been writing about technology for a very long time. He also runs an AI technology company called Aboard. Paul has been thinking about technology longer than most. He writes a blog called Ftrain that's been around for forever. He's also written for Wired and Bloomberg. If you remember that big Bloomberg Businessweek issue called What Is Code, that was like 40,000 words of just what is code. That was Paul. He's just a smart person to talk to about technology and is one of the people I have leaned on over the years to just try and think through where we are and what's going on. So where we are right now and what's going on right now is we are in a moment of huge change for how we interact with technology and with AI in particular. Paul wrote a great piece for the New York Times Opinion a while ago. I'll link it in the show notes. Kind of reckoning with how he feels about that, both as somebody who loves technology but employs other people to work on technology and is trying to think through what it means for his business. We had a fascinating conversation. I have been reckoning with a lot of the same stuff from a very different perspective. I had a great time talking to Paul about how he's thinking about and how he's using all of these tools and how we're supposed to think about all of this stuff going forward. We also have a Vergecast hotline question about what's going on with smartphones and the stuff you can and can't get in the United States. Dom Preston, who is just at Mobile World Congress looking at all of the cool phones, is going to help us answer that. All of that is coming up in just a sec. When we come back from the break, we're just going to get right into my interview with Paul Ford. But first, I am going to go once again call the power company and beg them to fix this before the storms come and it inevitably all falls apart again. Wish me luck. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back. It's the global beauty leader, defining the future of beauty through science and technology. 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It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongodb.com slash build. Paul Ford, welcome to The Vergecast. Oh my goodness, David. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I have been wanting to do this with you for a very long time. And most of the reason we haven't is because I am horrifically bad at email. So I'm very happy this finally happened. I mean, this is not you being nice. We've actually been working on this for like a year. No, it's like a literal fact. That is actually what happened. Yeah. But it's because you're busy. You've got family stuff, you know. I'm also very bad at email. But thanks to AI, I am increasingly getting better at email. But we can come back to that. But our timing turned out to actually be very good because you just wrote this big piece of the New York Times Opinion section about vibe coding in which you would say, I would say, had pretty complicated feelings. And I want to get into those complicated feelings. But on balance, you wrote this piece basically being like, Claude code and this idea of being anyone being able to write code is cool on balance. Is that a fair description of where you land? I mean, I would never be a person who could identify something as cool. Like, it's not. It wouldn't give me that. What I, what I was going, I mean, that is a fair assessment, first of all. Like if your read of it is far more charitable than many people who read the, the op-ed. So this is what I want to talk about because there was, we've, we experience this all the time, right? Like we, we cover AI from a lot of different angles every day, all the time. And I am consistently amazed by the like trench tribal warfare that appears every single time we talk about AI. But you, you experienced this in, I think a particularly all at once acute way over the last couple of days. Tell me what this reaction has been like. Well, okay. So I knew I was going to be in the paper and not just the paper, like op-ed New York Times. This is where people go to scream. And like, so, you know, they asked, they, I was, I was literally kind of walking down the street and they, they asked. And I was like, oh God. You know, I really didn't want to do it for all the reasons you're describing. Like it's complicated. I would say also, I'm a business owner, which of course most people see that and they're like, oh, he's going to talk his business. But if you read the piece, I really don't, I actually don't necessarily want to be in any way front and center in this story because it's so toxic and the people on every side are either in denial or have these weird utopian visions. But I'll be very, very frank and people can believe this or not. I felt an ethical responsibility to describe what I see as the biggest signal change to come to technology in a really long time and what it's doing to the industry that I'm associated with and that I care deeply about, which is code and sort of the tech and software development industry. Here is what I know. And here's what I tried to describe in the piece. Whereas five years ago, doing a really complicated, let's say XML transformation and keeping the recursive nature of the data structure. And I'm just sort of like jargoning for a minute, but like sort of like doing things where I could, that are really complicated about traversing a data tree and putting that into like a CMS and blah, blah, blah, was really, really hard. And so I wanted to do it for a personal project. I started and I couldn't complete it. And with Claude code, I could complete it in about a month. Like it wasn't instant. It was a really hard problem. It required a lot of, like I had to do all sorts of stuff that I hadn't done in a long time, but it was done and I was able to put it on the web and I'm doing things with it. So it's sort of like that wasn't there five years ago, even though I really wanted it to be. And that's such a big deal given how much of our industry is, not industry, our world is code-driven that again, I kind of felt an obligation just to say it out loud as simply as I could. Yeah. Well, and I am curious about forget even five years ago. I mean, six months ago, I think you, like many people, seems to feel differently. I mean, you've been working on AI stuff for a long time. You, I think, are a person with pretty established bona fides in this space. Like you also wrote 470,000 words called What is Code in Bloomberg that like that, you know, I read two thirds of like I assume everybody else did. Yeah. And I... You missed the centerfold. Look, I read Business Week for the pictures, just like everybody else. We all do. But you also seem to think that there is something happening kind of right here and right now, not just in the sweep of AI history, but like right now. I have a funny sort of counter interpretation to a lot of people. And it's because I've been watching it so closely. Claude code, I've been using it almost since it came out. And before that, I was using a tool called Aider that's a lot like Claude code, but used ChatGPT. And we've been building at my company. We've been building up from these technologies and using them and sort of trying to create in some ways more stable versions of what they do. Right? So very, very close to it. So what happened in November of last year was suddenly Claude code could solve a lot more problems than it could before. And that was two things. One is they released a new version of Opus, their very smartest, A lot of the people I work with today are people who also grew up without a lot of means. And we saw this industry as such a gift, right? Like it really brought us in. And I was frankly a fat, nerdy 20-something, but I just loved document markup and I could make a life out of that, okay? I can't guarantee that path. And I've really spent a lot of my time over the last 20 years telling people that this was a good thing. And I feel like I have to kind of own up to that. And I guess what it is is sort of... I wrote about this, Wired, at one point, I wrote a piece about GLP-1s because I was very early on Manjaro. I have type 2 diabetes. And it was such a drastic change after years of trying to diet to suddenly have any kind of control over that part of my body. I'd rapidly lost 70 pounds. And I was like, my reaction wasn't like, oh boy, good for me. My reaction was, after all those years of being fat, the culture is not ready for the change that is being thrust upon us. And I will say in the intervening couple of years, I've been proved right. Like we were not socially ready for what Ozempic and Manjaro were going to do for us. Our leadership didn't guide us. Our health system is fractured even more so because of it, etc. And so I feel when I get that feeling in the pit of my stomach that I have to raise the alarm. So I am raising an alarm. Here is this wonderful opportunity because my entire life people have said, God, I hate Salesforce. Or if I could just afford to do this one thing. Or every time you nerds do something, you disappear and I can't get it done. And I'm like, that I think is amazing. But at the same time, all those little structural rules. There's a bunch of big websites that like there's one old school web form. I'm just kind of getting trashed on right now. And part of me, it's like when I see the parts where they're saying mean things about me personally, I know you've had this experience because your back gets up a little bit. You're like, oof. And you want to defend yourself. And you kind of can't because you write for the paper. I mean, I'm telling you, but you live this every day. You live this more than I do. But at the same time, if you take a step back, and I mean, this doesn't mean that I don't think those people, they should shut up about me. I just want to say that. Shut the hell up for one fricking minute. You just read the piece and realize, regardless, okay, you hate me. One person was like, I've had bad vibes about him for years. So anyway, that's where I am right now. But let me take a step back. And if we're going to be real here, I really should have empathy for them. I'm in the paper. I have a good job. I'm doing okay. And I'm telling people, hey, this is really interesting and exciting. But a lot of people are hearing that and they're going, I am existentially at risk. There is somebody out there with a special needs kid who is counting on their tech job that somebody like me told them 15 years ago was the safest possible bet. And they went and got a certificate in like AWS management. And now people are telling them, like, why would I ever do that? I'll just deploy by telling Claude. You know, and it's sort of like that is an enormous insult. I was not excited to be the person who would be delivering that insult. But what are you going to do? Because the fricking AI companies won't do it. And the government won't do it. And the sort of angry blue sky left won't acknowledge that anything's real. And the less wrong rationalists think that we should worship the God robot. And so, you know, maybe as a narcissistic act, as an egotistical dad with some concern for society, I threw my head in. Yeah. So what feels different to you about this than other, you know, supposed or actual computing revolutions? We've been through a million different ideas about what it was going to be to be a person in tech. Right. And I think there's been a lot of upheaval. And I think you've lived through a bunch of these. Right. I've heard a bunch of people compare this. Oh, God, yes, have I, David. Yes. So what, what is it just a matter of speed and scale that feels different? Or is there something like qualitatively different right now to you? You know, okay. One of the interesting things, Linus Torvalds, who created Linux, he was like, wow, this is kind of interesting. He's a big nerd. But he's like, nothing will compare to what happened when we first created compilers. Compilers set up because before that, it was literally like you were flipping switches and punching things into a paper tape and making, you know, you had to know exactly how a computer worked. And interesting example, all of those were people's jobs. That's right. And compilers show up and suddenly you could use something like COBOL or, or, you know, Fortran or Algol, and you could transform things that looked a lot like language and that had structure to them would be turned into computer use. And that increased the number of people who could program and do things with a computer. Like maybe like many orders of magnitude, like six or seven orders of magnitude, like just millions of times more people are involved with programming in tech than could be without compilers. And so, and everything got cheaper and lots of other stuff, Moore's law, whatever. But so I think there, so that's one hypothesis. Hypothesis one is more and more people can get involved. More and more people can make the computer do what they think in their head. And that might even bring more and more people in. Hypothesis two is why would we need these many, many millions of well-paid specialists, many of whom are quite expensive if we can do that and the computer can do it. And there is an extraordinary amount of evidence. And then there's sort of hypothesis three, which is we should nuke all the AI companies from orbit. And I'm leaving that one out. That's kind of up to society. Like society might decide to do that, but that's, I'm not going to do that. But like, so is it one or two? I mean, I literally, what do you think? Like, I don't know. I mean, it seems to me that the answer is the, the cop-out answer, which is probably both, right? Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. That is the brave stance. You poke at this in your piece. And I think, so I've been thinking about this along two lines. Right. And I think the one line is what, what everybody is calling the SaaSpocalypse, right? The idea that there was this paper that just came out with this sort of futuristic scenario that tanked the stock market. And one of the things they say is basically like, what if instead of paying a lot of money for enterprise software, somebody at your company can just spin up a competitor in a few days. I think that is somewhere between nonsense and the far future. I don't, I don't think there's any world in which that's a real thing that you're going to be able to do with cloud code anytime soon. On the flip side, I think the idea that people are going to suddenly be able to solve their own problems with software rather than just having to find the thing that exists, that is the closest is a meaningful change to the software business, right? Like what I've been doing on cloud code is I've spent a long time switching between to-do list apps and productivity suites. And I have, I realized like a year ago, I'm shocked. I'm incredibly surprised to hear this. Oh my God. I know. It's weird that this is the thing I'm interested in. This is brave of you, brave of you. I don't talk about this very often. No, never, never heard of it. But I realized about a year ago, I actually know exactly what I want. And so I started calling around being like, why won't you give me what I want? And they were like, well, because what you want isn't what everybody wants. And then cloud code for me, it was this light bulb moment of like, oh, I can just do it now. What a journalist moment. Like you're just kind of like, I'm going to turn the, you're all going to do this for me. And they're like, shut up, David. And you're like, no, I, it was literally, I was like, what I want seems so simple and straightforward. I don't understand why every to-do list app doesn't ship a web clipper because a web clipper seems like such a like blindingly obvious feature for all of them to have. And a bunch of them like showed me telemetry that was like, actually nobody wants our web clipper and almost nobody used it when we had it. So we cut it. I was like, oh, okay. So I'm the only one who wants this. But what this gives me now is the ability in theory, with, with enough time and enough sort of accumulated knowledge to just build the thing that I want. And that means I'm not stuck paying for the one that got the closest to my needs, but never actually met them. It means I am not in somebody else's ecosystem that has a lot of ramifications. It means I can build my own solutions, which is very cool. And also bad for all the companies who now don't get my business. And that sorting out where that one side On the internet. Like a maniac. I don't know if you know this, Paul. It's been a minute since you were a blogger, but we don't do that anymore. No. We all make TikToks. All of our stuff got ingested by AI companies that are putting us all out of business. Nobody goes to websites anymore. What are you doing? Okay, so I used to have a website. I have a website. It's called Ftrain.com because the... You will not give yourself enough credit for this, but you are like an OG blogger in a way that other OG bloggers understood. Jason Kotke, when you started blogging, was like, oh my God, Paul Ford is blogging again. Yeah. No, it's a little like a ghost has returned. If we're going to characterize me, I was always very interested in the web as an exploratory medium. I also worked in AI around 2000. Like I was kind of waiting for some of these things to happen. I didn't know they would be LMs. And in fact, actually, I wrote an article. Wired gave me the cover in 2019, and I made a very bold prediction that we were kind of done and it was just going to be a bunch of crypto and the tech industry had had its day. So I'm often wrong about stuff, just to put it out there. I think crypto made a lot of people bearish on the tech industry for a while there. I'll tell you why. It's because when you use the computer to multiply things and make them cheaper, that feels very computer to me. But when you use the computer to make things expensive, which is what crypto does, it makes processor cycles into money, that feels really regressive. Like I'm like, that's not computer. I don't like that. Whereas LLMs, even though they burn the world and they're raising the sea level, they really can make a lot of things for a lot of people. Like you got a billion people using them. So it's real computer, even if people hate it. And so anyway, I got to tell you, man, I'm running a business. The world's changing. The world sucks right now. I'm on Blue Sky, but those aren't my friends. They'll throw me out the window. And I'm middle-aged, and I got into synths. And then I was like, I wonder if I could get my site back up as a personal archive because I've done all this stuff and I'm going to be a thought leader and be on podcasts. It's kind of embarrassing that it hasn't been updated for 15 years. We should just trued up. And I was like, well, yeah, I always wanted a real CMS, but I had that weird data structure. And then it built one. And then I organized all my stuff. And I imported all my old tweets. I have 70,000 nodes of content on that site. If you click the little head on the top right, it all expands in a giant hierarchy. And I'm like, man, I always wanted this. And then, because of everything I did, I was like, I got to be able to edit. I got to be able to trued up, fix some old typos. And then I went, wait a minute. I have a text box. And the problem with me is you give me a text box, and it's just like, I don't have any sense of self-control. And suddenly I had a box to type into in the web, and it just felt real good. It felt real good to not really have to be defensive all the time. You know this from writing. You have to acknowledge 5 million readers who are going to be angry before you can get to your first paragraph, right? It's like, it's not easy to be in public in the way that used to be. And look, I used to get death threats because of my blog in the 90s. Humans are humans. Nothing's going to change. But the sense of like, I would really like a space of my own, even though it's weird that I'm kind of corporate now in doing this. And even though I'm a writer out in the world and can write other places, I really missed this. I missed having a domain where I could explore an idea almost lazily, where I could be sloppy, where I could have 10 paragraphs instead of 2, and really actually kind of put my own thinking first instead of the reader's. And I also love when other people do that. I really do. I like the unfiltered, messy parts of thinking. I like zines and I like ephemeral thought and odd one-offs. And I was like, wait a minute. I can have that. And I can have it easily and cheaply. And I can run it safely on a website that I control. I can log into a Linux box and I can enjoy this. And then I found that I really did. And I launched it. And I organized all my stuff. And I can search for old tweets. And it feels really good. It just feels good. Do you feel like you're blogging onto a different internet than you were when you stopped doing it the last time? Oh my God, yes. First of all, everything is bots. You're like, oh, if I'd seen these numbers, I would have had a panic attack 20 years ago. It's like, you know, like hundreds of thousands of entities are looking at the site, and none of them are human. And it swarms about. Like, I had to get Claude to diagnose probably what Claude is doing in the back. But, like, I really had to figure it out because I needed to... The server kept coming down because I didn't have a really good and just a great caching strategy around recursive queries and big images. So, you know, like I had to tighten stuff up. I have all this domain knowledge, and it's fun to kind of wake it up. So parts of my brain that I haven't used in 20 years are suddenly perking up. I'm not a manager anymore. I'm building. But yeah, no, I mean, the web is... We all know what it is. It's kind of a toxic stew of bots. People are pretty cruel to each other, and we've all retreated to group texts and weird slacks. And I'm going to throw my hat back in the ring for a while until it feels really bad, and then I'll stop. I love that. So, all right, I'm going to let you go, but what's your current or next Claude Code project? One of the things that really resonated about your Times piece was this idea that I think you said, I collect tales of software woe. And it's the sort of thing that I've heard from actually a couple of different AI-based software founders who are like, what I want to do is build tools that let people build the kind of tools that are too small and too pointless for anybody else to make. So give me a list of those things for you that you're working on, your software woe that you're trying to fix yourself. First of all, God knows my blog would fit into that category. Sure, that's a good one. I built a synth. It's on GitHub. It's called AnySynth. And it's a little digital audio workstation because I wanted to. And it compiles to WebAssembly so that it actually kind of is running its own little C code in the browser. I'm working on a long-term project that I've neglected for a long time, extracting time-based data out of Wikipedia and aligning it with Archive.org Wikipedia so that I can see big timelines of history with all the art objects and all the music that people made. That one's cool. It's going to be called OnScroll.com. It's there now. It's just broken. It's fun to work in public. Like, I mean, you can just kind of, I'm on a server just doing this and like nobody cares. That's another difference with the old web. Like, no one's ever going to see anything until you literally scream it at them 7,000 times. Like, everyone is tired. Yeah, the idea of somebody just like stumbling on your website is such a completely impossible thing now. It's literally, there's an enormous infrastructure to make sure it never ever happens, right? Like, it's just never going to happen. I am very conscious of the fact that I am creating systems to feed LLMs at this point, right? Like, my blog is now a tasty morsel. And that's where the swarm came from. And so, I have a, I helped a friend who wanted to convert a really ugly government database into something more tractable of higher education. It's got the worst name ever. It's called IPEDS, I-P-E-D-S, and I gave that a nice interface and brought it into a proper database. I've got, and so, but you asked for next. I think next will be the timeline project. And then also, I built a tool. There's one I've registered a domain, which I haven't done in a while, but I'm taking piano lessons because, you know, midlife crisis. And I realized that a good name for a piano practice management app would be to-do list, L-I-S-T-T. Nice. So, I got, yeah, I know. But you know, my spouse just looks at me. She's just like, are we doing this again? Like, we put to, it's been a long time. Are we really back here? We're so back, Paul. We're so, so back. So, I don't know. I mean, part of me, especially if I didn't have to talk about it in public, it's just a honeymoon, right? Like, it's everything I love about computers. I'm also going to throw this at you because I think you'll, I'm curious what you think. This was the promise. This was Xerox PARC. You're going to, like, you're going to I've heard of most of these phones because I live in America. I've never heard of Honor before. I think I'd heard of Techno like that week for the first time. And now I'm out here wondering, like, am I missing out on a better phone by living in the US? I don't even necessarily know if there are mainstream features in other countries that don't like exist in the US. Is there mainly more global competition like at the low end or like for foldables or for niche stuff? But the top sellers around the world are generally similar to features on the top sellers in the US. Like, my iPhone is great. Even if iMessage was brought to Android, I would still probably pick an iPhone at least today. And I'm not a huge foldable person. So, am I just missing out on gimmicks? Like 240-watt charging and 200x digital zoom? Or are there mainstream features that we're missing out on stateside? I don't even know. Thanks. Okay, I think this is the perfect framing for this question. Because we've talked about all the stuff that is available in other countries that's not available in the US, right? Like, do you want a phone that has features not available to you in the United States? Are there lots of those abroad? Of course, yes. The answer is tons of yes. But I think the question is, like, if you are a person in the United States in particular, are you missing something? Is there something important and valuable and meaningfully better in some way that you are missing out on by virtue of being in the United States? And I want to sort of roll up to that question. But you've seen a lot of weird phones. You've seen a lot of these things with new features and brands that only exist in... In some cases, like only in China. And in some cases, everywhere but the United States. What have you seen in this weird phone season that strikes you as sort of a particularly interesting new idea about smartphones? A lot of it has been on the concept stuff, right? The really interesting stuff is stuff that isn't even actually in products. We've got the caller mentioned Techno, who were at MWC. And they had this modular phone, but they had just a slightly different take on modular phones to what we've seen before that felt very clever. But it's still not a real product. This is still just them saying, we found a better way of imagining what a modular phone might be, but we still can't build it at any meaningful scale and sell it, right? I think the stuff I've seen from, certainly from the last few weeks, and in general from the last six months, year or so, in terms of the non-US phone market, the biggest things are actually in a way boring, but it's big, boring, practical things that are nice to have. Like better cameras and bigger batteries is honestly where a lot of it lies right now. Sure. Talk me through better cameras, because when I think about some of the phones we see, there are a lot of bizarre cameras, right? You've covered ones where the camera comes with a whole professional camera rig. Or camera comes with, you know, huge lens attachments. Is that the kind of stuff you're talking about? Or is there other camera work happening? There is definitely other camera work happening. So that stuff is fun. I really enjoy playing with these phones that are building on big gimmicky accessories that push the limits of what you can shoot with a phone and build more of that idea that what if the phone was kind of a camera body and you could slap more stuff on top and make it a semi-professional shooting device. But that's not what most people want. The caller mentioned, am I just missing out on gimmicks? Yeah, like kind of stuff is maybe gimmicky and you probably aren't going to spend an extra few hundred bucks on this kind of add-on telephoto lens that looks really kind of goofy when it's attached to your phone. Even if you buy it, you're not going to use it every day. I think the bigger thing is, particularly looking at the high end, looking at the flagship space and looking at the ultra models. So you've got this funny thing in the US where there's only one real ultra phone and it's Samsung's phone. And they do an ultra every year and they kind of introduced this banding, this like above a flagship price category in terms of bigger phones with better cameras, better zoom and things like that. The funny thing now is that when you look at the rest of the market, Samsung's ultras don't feel very ultra. Samsung's ultras feel like everyone else's regular flagships. And you've got then this space where you've got Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Honor, Huawei, who are throwing out what they're calling ultra phones, which are a step more expensive than Samsung's generally. They're in the kind of, some of them are starting around the same places as Samsung's ultra, but some of them are pushing $2,000 for kind of, you know, as you up storage and get add-ons and special things like that. But really they're just going all in on cameras and Samsung hasn't really touched his cameras in a meaningful way, even in the ultra. The ultra this time got some slight aperture tweaks, but it's fundamentally the same system. We're seeing really big main camera sensors, sometimes in megapixel count, 200 megapixels are becoming very standard in these phones, but really it's more about actual sensor size. One-inch type sensors are very common, or sensors getting close to that size. There is no one in the US selling a phone with an image sensor that big. And these basically are just meaning you're getting one of the side effects of the bigger sensor is a lot more depth to images. You get this real camera feel where that kind of portrait mode thing of trying to get blurry backgrounds that has to be done digitally. And, you know, various algorithms make that happening just kind of happens naturally. It's a funny thing that, that leap even, I remember this moment in like low-end digital cameras when we went from the like 1 over 2.8, the sort of standard digital camera CMOS sensor to the one-inch sensor. It's like the, the leap in it feeling like a camera, like you said, is so enormous that there's all kinds of new stuff that becomes available just in that one physical sensor size leap. And like, I don't pretend to be a camera expert, but I have been trained over the years that the single best way to make a camera bigger is to make the sensor bigger. Like forget everything else, make the sensor bigger and you make the camera bigger. And, and a one-inch sensor is actually, at least in my experience, a real sort of inflection point in the kinds of photos you can take. So that, that's a really interesting kind of big deal. And, and so what we're seeing now is I think you're right that that's a big inflection point. And part of the reason it feels that way is that the manufacturers have all said, cool, this is as big as we need to go. And I don't think Samsung and Sony are really making larger image sensors than that yet for phones. And the manufacturers, I don't think are pushing them to because everyone's like, this is great. Our main camera sensors are big enough. These are wonderful. Now the race is, can we make the ultra wide sensor bigger as well? Can we make the telephoto sensors bigger as well? You know, how many of these big sensors can we fit in a phone? No, one's putting in more than one, one-inch type sensor yet. I was going to say three one-inch sensors. It's like, there's literally only so much physical room. Someone's going to try it. They're working on it. You know, they are pushing the limits of what they can do with it. I mean, so we saw this, you know, with stuff like, I haven't actually tried this one, but Huawei had a phone last year called the Pura 80 Ultra. And the fun thing that that did was it wanted to have two telephotos, but to save space on having two telephotos, it just has moving lenses that share one sensor. So it has two different telephoto lenses that move in and out from above the one larger sensor, which allows them to fit in a bigger telephoto sensor than they could have if they were just doing two different telephotos genuinely. This is kind of the same reason Xiaomi took to this continuous zoom. So it's Xiaomi 17 Ultra where it's kind of getting the same thing of having two telephotos. It's just one lens with real zoom. But again, part of the point of that is instead of fitting in two telephoto sensors, we just have to do one. That means we can get a better one. And it's teeing them up to keep making them bigger and better down the line as they go. And this is really the race we're seeing right now. And I think telephoto in particular, I wrote a piece for our newsletter, The Step Back about this just before MWC, so maybe a month or so ago, about how the telephoto camera really outside of the US just feels like a place where everything is happening on smartphones. And just go back to this, you know, the question we have was asking if they were just missing out on gimmicky 200 times zoom. I said, the answer is no. Like, we are still seeing people pushing things. Like nothing the other week announced 140 times zoom for its 4A Pro. I tried it at the launch event. It was terrible. It's blurry. It's, there's AI filling the gaps. It doesn't look good. You're not going to get anything useful out of that. But what matters here is that three to five times range, maybe up to 10 times. Suddenly you're getting really, really, really good photos. And you're getting photos that are as good as maybe better than a lot of the Grabs you personally, emotionally. You're like, this is a dumb feature. No phone needs it, but I love it with my whole heart and I want it really bad. What, what has captured your heart in the last few weeks and months? Okay, this is something we're seeing a few of the, the Chinese OEMs work on at the moment. I think particularly Oppo and Honor are the two brands really pushing this. And they are taking, picking up where Google kind of like has done its like, oh, we can figure out like a kind of awkward backend way to make AirDrop work. And they're like, all right, hold my beer because like the Honor Magic V6 has come out and been like, okay, it supports all the features of AirPods. So you'll get that like quick pairing. You can see the AirPods in the OS, all of this stuff. It supports Find My for AirPods, not any other Find My, but it will support just the Find My for your AirPods, nothing else. You can do notification syncing with Apple devices. You can do file sharing with Apple devices. So they've got all this access behind Apple's walled garden somehow through just kind of accessing the backend stuff that Apple like has not quite been able to lock down in, in, in the way that we all thought it was. And they've all figured out and every announcement, there's some new bit that they've chipped away and they're like, oh, now we've added this, and now you can do this. But my favorite bit of it all is you can just do direct screen sharing of some of these. So on, if you get an OPPO or an Honor foldable, you can screen share and remote control your Mac to the phone. So you can then turn your foldable phone into a tiny little foldable MacBook and have the full MacOS on this minuscule screen that you're trying to like use the bottom part of the foldable phone as the trackpad. And it's an awful experience. I used it, you know, tried it for a view and thought this sucks. You could, I could see it in like an absolute pinch. Like I really desperately need to, you know, do this one thing on my Mac and I can remote into it. You would never do it for anything more than that because it's the worst experience in the world. But I love that I can make my foldable phone into this tiny little MacBook. And I especially love that because there is no world in which Apple lets you do that with the iPhone fold whenever it appears. No. Even though it should. Apple, listen. Yeah, okay, Dom, first of all, A, lead with that next time. That's the answer here. Listen, buy this weird Chinese phone and you can use your Mac on your phone. Hell yeah. Also, that, like, this whole, we're going to have to do some more digging into all of this QuickShare, AirDrop stuff because there is a weird falling of the walled garden thing here that Apple is either unable to stop or just not choosing not to fight against that I find utterly fascinating. And it feels like all of these different companies are poking in all of these different directions. And if they can just get far enough, they start to make really interesting inroads among Apple users in a way that I think could end up being really, really important. Well, the funny one is Honor has really actively publicly started pitching, at least in China, its Magic V6 foldable, which has all these kind of Apple integrated features. They're not saying, like, ditch your iPhone, buy this. They're saying, you've probably got an iPhone from work. Like, buy this as your personal phone because you're already an Apple. This way, this can be your second phone. It connects to your iPhone. It connects to your MacBook. It connects to your iPad. They're like, we know you're an Apple user, and we know you're not going to fully give up the iPhone, but like, have this foldable as well, and it will do all this other stuff. And that's a niche they're targeting in a very affluent niche, right? But there's people in that space that they might be able to win over. That's really interesting. All right, Dom, thank you, as always. I promise you can be done talking about MWC now. That's a lie. I don't promise that. But at least for now. Thanks for another few days. Thank you. Thank you, as always. All right, that's it for the show. As you can see, I am back. The power is not. We soldier on. Thank you to Paul and Dom for being here on the show with me. Thank you to you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have questions or feelings or you want to talk about vibe coding, I think the conversation I had with Paul has left me thinking about a lot of stuff, and I'm curious to hear how you react to it, too. As always, call the hotline, 866-Verge11. Send us an email, vergecast@theverge.com. We love hearing from you. This show is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced today by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kieffer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday. Lord willing, I will have power. And Nilay and I will be back to talk about the AirPods Max, which just dropped, a bunch of other news, all the AI stuff, and everything else going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll. 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