AI Summary
5 min readFrom Dad-Hacked Tablets to Pokémon Treemaps: The Vergecast's "Bear Lair" Pitch Session
David Pierce opened the episode with a confession: he's a coding novice who can "code you like the heck out of an HTML website and that's kind of it." But like many people in 2025, he has discovered vibe coding — using AI tools like Claude to build functional software by describing what you want in plain English, not by writing code yourself. The Vergecast has been tracking this trend for months, calling it "the first way in which AI has really found product market fit." To see what vibe coding actually looks like in the wild, Pierce and senior AI reporter Hayden Field turned their podcast into a Shark Tank-style competition called "Bear Lair," each armed with $1 billion in fake investment capital to spend on apps built by listeners.
The Wall-Mounted Tablet That Refuses to Be a Walled Garden
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What you'll learn
- 1 (04:03) **Bear Lair: The Pitch Show Begins** - David and Hayden introduce the "Bear Lair" competition where they each have $1 billion in fake money to invest in vibe-coded projects from listeners.
- 2 (06:31) **Pitch 1: John's Smart Skylight Dashboard** - From Washington DC, John shows how he repurposed a Skylight family calendar tablet into a customizable smart home hub using AI.
- 3 (13:10) **Pitch 2: Sarah's Child Meal Tracker** - A Chicago parent built an app to reduce the cognitive load of tracking a toddler's meals, pantry inventory, and food preferences.
- 4 (20:29) **Pitch 3: Eddie's Sermon Search Engine** - From New Jersey, Eddie built a backend tool that transcribes, summarizes, and indexes years of church sermons into a searchable NotebookLM database.
- 5 (28:27) **Pitch 4: Simon's GatherIn Photo Sharing App** - From the UK, Simon created a dead-simple photo collection tool designed for grieving families gathering photos of a deceased loved one.
- 6 (36:21) **Pitch 5: Meals' PainFrame Tracker** - From Illinois, Meals built a minimal, ad-free pain tracking app that works on any device including e-readers.
- 7 (42:22) **Pitch 6: Ruslan's Pokemon Card Tree Map** - From the country of Georgia, Ruslan created a treemap visualization for Pokemon card values, inspired by stock market treemaps.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Welcome to the Bear Lair!* (No, it’s nothing like that other show.) As we continue to explore the world of AI tools and vibe coding, we invited a few enterprising Vergecast fans to share their projects — and we invited The Verge’s Hayden Field to judge them with us. We’ll see what people are working on, and whether any of them will make us fabulously wealthy.
*We came up with this name before we became aware that someone else thought of it first... no relation to the APTNtv show Bears' Lair!
Further reading:
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