Files are over. All you need are URLs

We talk a lot about where the computer is, and where your stuff is. Paul Ford, a co-founder of Aboard and longtime tech blogger, recently built a tool called TinyLittleOffice that puts all the stuff in an unexpected place: the URL. Paul joins the show to explain how the web and the cloud have become powerful development tools, what it means to store a document in its domain, and why tiny, disposable software could make a comeback in the age of AI. Further reading: A YouTuber dissected an iPhone Duo and thinks he found the cause of crackgate Anthropic’s IPO filing lays out a plan to ‘revolutionize every area of human endeavor’ with AI Apple updates the iPad Mini with a larger OLED display Tiny Little Office Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps into Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly, or connect your agents through Atlassian, MCP. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 0:42David Pierce?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of everything after the dot com. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, can you build an app that works inside of a URL? And what does that mean about where the computer is? But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I'm Travis Larchuk, and this is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, October 26, 2026. The iPhone duo is in the wild, and all the internet is talking about is crack gate. Some customers are posting pictures of inner screen damage, apparently caused by a defective hinge. Hard to say how widespread the issue is, but if I were Apple, I'd hope to have two new product announcements lined up this week to take people's minds off of this. In AI news, looks like Anthropic will beat OpenAI to an IPO. It filed its S1 prospectus with the SEC today. Did Anthropic use Claude to fill out the form? We don't know. What we do know is that Anthropic took an $80.7 billion net loss earlier this year,

• 1:41Speaker 02

  and that Anthropic has deals to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with SpaceX, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon over the next decade, which, as you'll recall, is the same timeframe some Anthropic researchers say AI could lead to the end of humanity. So, spend away! From IPO to IP67, Apple put out a new water-resistant iPad mini today. It's also got a bigger 8.5-inch OLED display, it's thinner and lighter, and it's $100 more expensive than the last one. But this is the opening act to Wednesday's main event, the rumored announcement of the long-awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Monday, October 26, 2026.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  We talk a lot on this show about where the computer is, especially in a world of AI. Is the computer your computer? Is the computer in some Amazon server somewhere? Is it a thing that you self-host? Is it this unknowable set of agents and AI systems that just become a black box you pour all of your data into? What is the right answer? How is any of this supposed to work? And in a really important way, where is my stuff? That's a hard question to answer in the year 2026. Paul Ford is the co-founder of a company called Aboard, working on AI software and all kinds of interesting stuff. He's also a blogger and thinker and writer who has been trying to figure out how technology works for just about as long as anybody.

• 3:07David Pierce?

  He recently launched a thing called tinylittleoffice.com, and the whole conceit, as you'll hear, of Tiny Little Office is that you can put an entire document, an entire deck, an entire Excel spreadsheet, in the URL itself. The URL is enormous and long, and contains all of the data that matters. That means it's not on a server, that means Paul can't see it, it's all in the URL. What does that mean about where the computer is? And what does that mean about how we think about the way our data moves around the internet? This made me think a lot of things and feel a lot of feelings about where the computer is going forward, so I figured I'd have Paul on, and we try to talk through it. Here it is. Paul Ford, welcome back to The Vergecast.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Ah, it is so great to see you, my friend. How are you doing?

• 3:50David Pierce?

  I'm good. Sometimes I just have big feelings about software, and then it's like, well, it's time to call Paul and talk about big feelings about software.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  You know, you get, there was a point where somebody asked Joe Pesci, like, do you mind playing the same Italian character over and over again? He's like, I love it! What are you talking about? If that's my brand, I'm gonna take it. I like to think about software. So what's up? What are your big thoughts?

• 4:11David Pierce?

  I want to know about Tiny Little Office. I have a, I have a big galaxy brain theory I'm gonna put in front of you at the end of this, but at the beginning, you, you released this little tiny piece of software that is very simple and doesn't do very much, and it's kind of having a moment, and I just want to talk about it. So tell me a little bit about where Tiny Little Office came from.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Okay. Around six years ago, my business partner, Rich Ziotti, who is still my business partner, even though we're, we started a different company, we sold the last one. I'm here at a company called Aboard, we deliver software, I'm not gonna market it, but like, we, we build things. And so, one of the things I like to do when I'm running a company that builds things is build things instead of just talk about them, right? And so, and five coding, we've talked about it before, it makes it easy. So, you know, a couple months ago, I started to put my, I was like, you know, enough talk, let's start to make stuff. And I, I've put out a couple little things into the world, and Rich, six years ago, had this wacky idea, it was like, let's make a spreadsheet called Tiny Sheet, that you just enter the, a couple numbers.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  It was 10 rows, two or three columns, that was it. And it did just a little bit of math, and, but, here was the thing. It was on the web, you went to tinysheet.com, and you entered your numbers, but then the URL, the actual link, got the data as you typed it in. It never actually saved anything to a server, it just changed the URL. And so you could cut and paste that into Slack or into anything, and everybody could share this little teeny tiny spreadsheet. So, fast forward, that fell off the web, other things happened, and I was like, you know, in the new world, uh, being able to build things, and the browsers being faster and better, and, and just sort of, the web having come a long way, and Claude being so

• 5:56Speaker 03

  good, et cetera, et cetera, I wonder how far you could take that idea? And it turns out, you could kind of put your foot on the gas and take it really far, and build an entire Office suite, including presentation software, and including a word processor, and a spreadsheet, and an outliner, and other stuff too, and it could all kind of still be in the URL and be cut and pasted. So I made it, and I put it out, and people were like, this is really, really weird.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  I mean, it is really weird. Like, tell, okay, just to back up one more second, what is the, what does it mean to put all of the information about something into the URL? I think we think about URLs as addresses, right? They are, they are sort of pointing devices, they tell you to go somewhere. I don't think we think about URLs as stores of data in the way that you're describing, but they are in fact that if you want them to be.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Well, there's a couple funny things. So first of all, right, a URL is just data, it's just a string of characters, right? So, if you have an infinitely long string of characters, you can store anything. Now, it turns out that the web, you know, wasn't designed for infinitely long string of characters. At the same time, it turns out that the modern web and a lot of social media platforms kind of don't care that much. So you can actually treat like a tweet or a Blue Sky post almost like it's a floppy disk, you can just kind of write a whole bunch of data into those things. So in this case, tinylittleoffice.com slash, and then there's a few things that say what kind of application it is, like, is it a, is it the word processor, is it the spreadsheet? And then there's a whole bunch of gobbledygook.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  But the gobbledygook is not, it's just sort of compressed squeezed text, it's not secretly encrypted or anything, it's, it can be, you can actually put a password in, but, but it's just a bunch of data that is what's in the document. And I did a whole bunch of little tricks to keep the documents very simple, like there aren't a lot of fonts, you have to really stick to one or two kinds of formatting, it's actually Markdown underneath, like, it's a really compressed version of Markdown with a couple little extra features to make it more like an Office suite. So there's a little bit of a parlor trick there, but it's all public, it's all documented, which meant that when you give somebody the link, you're actually giving them the whole document. And let's, you know, one thing you can do at links is turn them into QR codes.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  QR codes can be quite long, they can be like a couple thousand characters. So you can actually make a QR code that isn't the link, but is the document. And that, I think, just the, the ridiculous puzzle of that, like, the way that that's different than what people expected, but it also has kind of a funny payoff, because you're like, whoa, I just sent somebody a URL, but that's the whole document. It, it kind of caught on a little bit, it was fun, it's been really fun, there are a lot of people have come to look at it, it's, you know, doing good on product hunt, like, it's, it's having a moment, which, you know, I know you as a, as a creator too know, like, every now and then, you're kind of trundling along, and you're like, do I still have it? Can I still reach people?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  And in this case, it turned out, yes, like, hundreds of thousands of people really wanted to look at this thing and understand what made it tick.

• 9:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, I think there is something to just the shape of it that is really interesting, right? And you, you sort of alluded to this in a, in a blog post you wrote about it, which is that we're used to software being like, big and packaged and, and full of lots of things, and when I install something, it's enormous, and it, it does a lot of things, and I have to subscribe to someone's whole idea about how all of this is supposed to work. And every time I do something in that, it is being stored and saved and tracked in some way. The promise of this, at least the way you describe it, is that it is, it's none of those things. It's tiny, it's disposable, nothing has any idea about the way that it's going. I think, if I understand this correctly, the, the way that browsers and URLs work is

• 9:45David Pierce?

  that everything after the, the pound sign means it's not being stored anywhere, it's just being stored in your browser. It, it's just a whole different way of thinking about what my software is and where it lives, stored in this, like, I, I copied and pasted the URL in, from one of the decks, I think it's the thing explaining Tiny Little Office privacy, into Google Docs, just to see how long it is. It's 3,400 characters, this, this one URL, and it's, it's nonsense, you can't, it's not like a readable document in this URL, but it contains all of the data that you need to run the app with your data in it. And that is just such a different way of thinking about where my information lives

• 10:29David Pierce?

  than any other product I think I've seen before. And there's something novel about it.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  So there's a few things, there's something you just said that's really important for people to understand, which is you put that pound sign in the URL, and by default, the data that goes after the pound sign does not go to the server.

• 10:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  So actually, when you go to Tiny Little Office, it loads a bunch of code from Tiny Little Office, then, in your browser, it looks at that data, doesn't send it to the server. In your browser, it turns it into the document. So your stuff never actually goes anywhere. So if you, if you, just to, the use case, everybody has it in their head, is if you go into incognito mode, so it's not gonna save the links that you visit to, visit or anything like that, and you put in one of these links, or you write a document with Tiny Little Office, and you cut and paste the URL into like, Signal, something nice and encrypted, and the person on the other side opens it up in incognito mode in their browser. It doesn't go anywhere. It just literally kind of doesn't exist.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  You're just sort of passing a secret thing around in an encrypted environment the whole way. And it's fun to make that a little more accessible to people. It's still pretty complicated to think about, but it's at least a little more instinctively confidential. To be clear, if I was nefarious, it's one of the reasons this is open source. If I was nefarious, I could, in the JavaScript, in the, in the code that runs in the browser, I could take that data and then I could still send it to some other server somewhere. Like this isn't like this instant, like magic security thing, but it is. You can see sort of where all the pieces are. You can understand what's going on. And, you know, it's, I did it, my name's on it. So there's a little bit of vouching there too. But that's real. It's just very fun to make something.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  There's two things that I'll just say, there's like two things that really mattered to me. One is like, it can be this way. It can be this light. Why don't we make more things like this? And the reason is because they used to be very expensive to make and you had to figure out, and servers needed to be there. And like, this kind of play was pricey before AI. It's hard to make stuff like this.

• 12:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  It's just not as hard as it used to be. And so you can experiment and fool around and be like, hey, by the way, I made an office suite. Right? That's a bananas thing to say. Like it has a trip planner, you know, it's, it's got an outliner. But sure, why not?

• 12:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, we've been asking the question a lot on this show recently, where does the computer live? And I think part of the reason this fascinates me the way that it does is it, it is a different idea about where everything lives. And in this case, it's not the computer, but it is, it is the stuff, right? Like what, all the important things about this app live in URLs.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  That's right. And in your, in your browser and there, you're yours to do with. Now you can also, there's, it's got a few features, like you can turn on a save mode that saves into the storage on your browser. So like, if you go home and use it, you won't be able to see the stuff that's on your phone, on your laptop, right? Like it's, so there's a lot of little subtle things like that. It also does have a link shortener, but the links are encrypted and the key comes after that pound sign. So your password's actually in the link. You can share it. But the actual stuff that hits the server is completely encrypted. So I amusingly, hundreds of thousands of people are messing around with this thing. I have absolutely no idea what is inside. I don't know what they're doing unless they post it on Blue Sky.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  I do see that there's a lot of usage in many different countries and that's all I know.

• 14:09David Pierce?

  Is that, I'm just trying to think about how different a way of thinking about data and stuff this actually is. Cause on the one hand, it is by definition more private and more ephemeral because it lives in my browser. It lives on my computer. I can't send it to you if I want to. On the other hand, if I just paste a URL into a Blue Sky post, I've now given you everything. And on the one hand, that's such a different way of thinking about this stuff, right? Like the, the traditional thing is even if I sent you a URL, you're not going to have access to my data without a username and password, or if I've explicitly shared something with you. We just have all these structures about where data lives and then how we share it with each other.

• 14:49David Pierce?

  This turns all of it on its head in a way that is, I think, really useful in some ways, but also just so different that if I want to share something with you, I'm actually sharing it in a more open way in some ways than I have been in the past.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  It's exactly that provocation. That's what I'm messing with. That's what I wanted. I, what does it really do when you do something like this? It gets rid of the concept of ownership. You can't own one of these documents. The minute that URL gets into somebody else's hand. So one of the examples I like to use is you could print it as a QR code. The QR code now has the entire document inside of it. Somebody else takes a picture. You can't own it anymore. It's their document, right? It's on, and it's, the tiny little office loads in, it evaluates the string that's in the QR code. And now it's their spreadsheet. It's their presentation. This is not for your day-to-day office work. It's for pasting stuff into chat. It's for ephemeral stuff.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  It's for stuff where you want to have just a very light privacy layer because you're dealing with, I don't know, private stuff where you just don't want stuff saved. You know, the, the other thing here too, is just like, you know, one of the wild things about Google is like where it doesn't care. And where it doesn't care is, yeah, no, but it's like Google Drive sortability. Like when you go into that Google Drive and you're like, I have failed for 10 years. That's what I see when I open Google Drive. Like I'm just, and it's, it's bad, right? And so I'm just like, what was very satisfying was to not leave a mess, to not, to make a little doc and just know that it's gone.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work is scattered. A thread here, a DM there, five different docs related to the same project. And now it's not just your team hunting for context, it's your AI agents too. Jira taps into Atlassian's teamwork graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub and more. And makes it easy to share with the agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through Atlassian MCP. The result? Less token waste, more accuracy and more time moving work forward.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who, and more time actually shipping with Jira. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 17:34David Pierce?

  I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about kind of the advent of AI and vibe coding. It does feel like the reason this kind of software doesn't really exist is that it's, the, the gap between how hard it is to make and how much sort of revenue potential there is in it, has always been quite large, right? Spending a lot of resources to build ultimately pretty small software is a bad trade in a lot of ways, unless it's just a thing you do for the joy of doing it. In this case, you've, you've brought the effort way down. So the idea of using small effort to build small software suddenly makes all of this stuff possible, right? Like it's, it's a, this, this is the kind of thing that I'm sure you're not going to spend two years hand coding just to see what happens.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I spent 10 days and most of those recessions where I was on the train going home. And I think like the last couple of days, I really did kind of do a lot of loops together, but no, but like maybe 20, 30 hours total, right? So like, let's put that in a context. It's not me saying what a good boy I am.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  The, the reality is that you can just, you, if you think hard about the architecture of something and you really structure it. So I did a lot of like little tricks to test it, to make the way that the commands work as elegant as I could, so it could automatically evaluate itself. And then there's another thing that, that's really important to software at some level, like the, what's inside of a web browser today, like, like Chrome or Safari is so good. It's so mature, but it's all architected kind of for big companies. Like most people, including me, have very little direct experience with the encryption tools inside of a browser.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Right? They're absolutely first class. And so I was like, all right, I'm not going to encrypt anything. I'm an idiot. But, but Safari and Chrome and WebKit, they can't, and I trust them. I give them my credit card all day and so does everybody else. I'm like, all right. So I'm talking to it because that's what you do. And I'm like, okay, let's, let's make sure this is safe. And it's like, well, if you want to be really safe, we gotta do the AES 256 post quantum encryption. And I'm like, we do, we have to do that. And it's like, okay, I did it. And I'm like, okay, like I'm learning as I go and I'm getting caught up. But what I also know as a programmer is that if I'm making everything into one big set of characters, I'm going to encrypt only that set of characters.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  So I kind of know where my encryption and my security is. And so suddenly, because the browsers are so good and mature, and because the vibe coding tools are like, I can kind of narrow down the risks in a platform like this. And I can just kind of say with high confidence that when you put a password on one of these things and you encrypt it and save it on the server or, or pass it around, it's pretty encrypted because it comes out of the browser's own, right? And you, you can go look at that code. It's like one JavaScript file. So anybody who wants to beat that up, I would really welcome it. Like, God, if you could find that bug, I would love it.

• 20:42Speaker 03

  And so, so that's a very different world because it turns out that everything is really, really good, but has been really hard to get to because it's for Google. Like it's Chrome is for Google to do video streaming and encryption and transactions. And now it kind of can be for everybody. And I want to throw this at you because I just want to, in your head in particular, it's as good as any other platform. It's got 3D. It's got, you know, networking and audio and so on. There is very little reason for mobile to be the way it is in terms of the app stores in a day, in a, in this era when you can target even a mobile web browser, like.

• 21:24David Pierce?

  I mean, you know, the reason, the reason is money, Paul. I don't know if you've heard of money. Google and Apple have a lot of it and they would really like to keep having more of it.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  It has something to do with capitalism, but I've never been able to like put it all together.

• 21:35David Pierce?

  It's a tricky one. Well, we'll come back to that. But wait, I'm, I'm still, I'm sort of stuck on this idea of what if it's all just in the URL? Because. Google Drive sucks. Zero disagreement with me on the merits of Google Drive. But at least Google Drive, I know where things are, right? And there is this idea that if I make a thing, it's going to sort of live there until it's gone. And maybe that's bad. And maybe we do need things that just live while we're using them and then just sort of fade into the background.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  It's not bad. It's like, you know, it has, most documents probably should live a while in a folder.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  Sure. But what you're arguing is that there is somewhere, somewhere in that group of stuff is the equivalent of like disappearing stories on social media where it's like, this is a thing I want to make, but I actually, I have a lot of reasons I don't want this to live forever or be for everyone. And it lowers the barrier to what we're making. It like, it's that same idea, just put into Office Suite software.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Well, you just got to the joke of it, right? Which is, it's kind of hilarious that the ephemeral thing is a presentation software tool. Like it's, it's just sort of, that's what makes it ridiculous. It goes from, hey, secret vanishing messages or Instagram picture that goes away to, how about a whole lot of bullet points about our Q4 results? And, and that, look, I mean, that's me. Like, I just love that irony. I love how silly it is. At the same time, I like to see how far a joke can go. Like, I think it's just like, it's a joke, but then I'm like, well, let's make it actually secure and let's document it. And like, oh, well, the QR codes are interesting.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  And I gotta tell you too, there were probably 15 other little mini apps. Cause an app in this thing is only like a page of JavaScript that I took out because they were just too confusing and too messy and so on. And so.

• 23:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you also drew the connection in your blog post about this to group chats, right? Where there's like, the internet is big and broad and full of stuff. And yet, most of what we want to do is just hang out in group chats and talk to each other. And I think.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  I mean, what I want to do is make a deck that's like, why David sucks, right? And I share the deck in the chat.

• 23:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  And then you make a counter deck about why Paul is a complete waste. And that's fun for us. Like we were able to do that. That should never live anywhere. It shouldn't exist, except, and then as the chat scrolls away, that is the end of the whole story.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's something powerful about that, I think. And there really is none of that out there right now. Like, software has run from that idea in general for a really, really long time.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  It has, and look, I thought a long, long time about risks with this thing. So for instance, any link pops up with a really big, that's one of the reasons why I killed a lot of apps. Like I had the idea that maybe I could do link in bio with it, but any link, if you're doing something like this, it looks like a document that could come from anywhere. You need to pop up a big alert that says like, hey, you're going to this website. Cause this, this could be attractive for phishing. It doesn't let you upload or deal with images and sort of do a lot of stuff along those lines, partially because they won't fit in the URL. But even if they could, I just don't want it to be that vector. It's a conversation. It is, it's, it's for an idea that you might express in chat.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  And that might be more than a paragraph long and that you kind of want other people to have access to. Because I think that's where we're all spending the most of our time. So it's an Office Suite for people in WhatsApp and Signal, not a new future Office Suite for the web.

• 25:15David Pierce?

  Right. Has it changed the way you think about documents? Like, do you make different documents in tiny little office than you would in Google Drive or Word or whatever? Like, I'm obsessed with this idea forever that the size of the text box changes the things that you make. And I wonder if it feels that way, too.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Well, there's a few things going on. I mean, first of all, and some credit goes to me, but a lot of credit goes to the browser and to the libraries and, and just sort of like where things are right now. It's kind of a nice editing experience. Like that was part of the fun was I realized I could make a outlining and word processing tool, processing tool that was very constrained and limited, and I like constraints. So, so part of it is like, all right, I'll continue to use this, that I need to enjoy using it to write and make things. So it needs to work pretty well and it needs to be reliable and not crash and have good undo. And sort of all those little niceties that you would just expect in a, in an Office Suite.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  And in the back of my head, I have kind of like mid 90s, you know, like Claris works, Microsoft works. They got real stable, they got kind of boring and they kind of came with the computer. That's the vibe I'm going for. So, so there's that. And then it's really fun to just kind of publish to Blue Sky, right? Like, Blue Sky's URL limit is pretty long. It's like, I don't know, it's like 4,096 characters. So a couple of pages of text. So Blue Sky makes a totally appropriate blogging platform if you're in the mood now because of this, right?

• 26:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  And it makes little previews and it does all kinds of nice stuff.

• 26:49David Pierce?

  Is it a blog? I'm just asking annoying, pedantic questions now, but if you're, you're like, is that thing that you're describing a blog? Or is it just a bunch of one-off webpages that you've made?

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Well, it's up to you.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  Maybe it doesn't matter.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  It's just the data that gets displayed as nice text. So it can't really be a proper blog because I can't put images in it or upload MP3s. But I could embed them from, you know, I, what could, what can I do here? I could make the Paul's blog Blue Sky account and I could post a different document every single day. And that could be my blog. And I couldn't do that before. And that's very light. It's a very light coordinating tool for me to share ideas and thoughts with everybody else. And the data only really kind of exists in one place. And if I don't want it out in the world anymore, I just delete those Blue Sky posts and that's the end of it.

• 27:38David Pierce?

  Yeah. So this thing has caught on. A lot of people are clearly interested in it. People are starting to use it. I'm starting to see links to it everywhere. What do you do with this to make it, you know, whatever, bigger and more official, without changing the nature of the thing in the first place? Is there more to do here?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  There is always more to do in terms of making it good.

• 28:03David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Fixing bugs or responding to stuff. No, the answer is you make a better, more high-quality product. You, you do what feels right. You keep it on GitHub. You listen to feedback. You make decisions that are safe for the users and you call it a win and then you get back to running your company. You don't monetize it. There are other things that we have plans to do here at a board. Like my co-founder has this great idea for a different tool that'll come out in a couple of weeks that has similar vibes, but is a little more of a classic utility. That one will probably get people to sign up for the newsletter and we'll make it free.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Other things we'll charge for, but this one by its very nature, you kind of can't wreck it. You have to just leave it as it is. It has to be transparent. It has to be, it can't have any secrets or any hidden agenda. Because the minute you do that, it really is rendered useless and suspicious. Now that said, I do think there's fun stuff to do. Like there is a V2 milestone that I'm already talking about. Someone has submitted a way to make the link shorter. So I think that that's really interesting. There are lots of little bugs and things that could be nicer about the navigation. The, some of the diagram stuff could, could be more efficient. So, so that stuff I think is the right stuff to do.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  There's another element to it, which I have to say, and I hope people would look at it for this. It's actually a very nice baseline library for working into other software. Because it turns out I really wanted like a nice word processing, processing utility for some other internal stuff I'm doing as opposed to just another text box. It's nice to have a spreadsheet you can kind of throw into any tool. So I like, I hope it's got utility, but no, sometimes you've just got to do it for the team. And, and then just hope, hope that people find utility in it. And there's already lots of forks and it's sort of, it's under the MIT license, but essentially it is truly in the public domain.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  I would love to see other people mess with this idea. And, and really create. I would love to see people make other little tiny apps on top of this. It's a, it's a framework for that.

• 30:22David Pierce?

  Is there even further you could go with this idea of encoding data in the URL? Like, at what point does this idea start to break inside of people's browsers?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  It really doesn't because the browsers are so powerful, but you just have to keep the URLs at a certain length. So I'll give you an example, which is images, like a photo is hard, right? You can do it, but it, it works less and less consistently. It's also hard to, the idea of saving a document and sharing it, if it is a little bit longer, you want to encode it is really tricky, right? Like, what format is this? And people get confused and things, one of the nice things about it is it works on a phone. So you can't give people zip files on a phone. That's not good. Like, so it's just sort of, there's a lot of puzzles like that. But no, I think it's up to everybody else, man. I had a good time and I'm going to keep working on this because I really like the idea.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  And I've done other projects that have kind of caught on before. And if other people want to take it forward, I'm going to work with them.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  I like it. I'm excited. I think, again, we talk a lot about where is the computer? And I have to say, in the URL bar, never, ever, ever once occurred to me. But I think it's, I think it's sort of fascinating. All right, Paul.

• 31:34Speaker 03

  All right, all right.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  Thank you for being here. It's good to see you.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Anytime, anytime you need anything.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Anyone who's got their hands in complex work knows that sometimes the biggest challenge is visibility. You could have the best team in the world, but if they can't find the information and context they need, they're working with one hand tied behind their back. That's doubly true when you introduce agents into the workforce. Jira can help. Jira taps into Atlassian's teamwork graph to pull in context from places like Slack, Confluence, GitHub and more. So nothing falls through the cracks. And you can share that context with the agents you already use, like Claude and Cursor. Assign them to work directly in Jira or connect them through Atlassian MCP.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  You've spent a lot of time and energy assembling an amazing team. They should be doing what they do best instead of chasing down threads in a bunch of siloed apps or walking an agent through the basics of a project for the third time. All you need to do is give them the context they need to reach their highest potential. That's what Jira does. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 32:57David Pierce?

  All right, before we get out of here, I have one more thing for you. And it is maybe the most obvious zeitgeisty one more thing we're ever gonna have on this show. But it's You Can See Everything, the new documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes. No matter how much you care about the Elizabeth Holmes story, whether you know everything about it and followed it, we covered it a ton here at The Verge through the whole story, through her trial. Liz Lopato on our team was actually at the trial. We have covered this to death. Or you know nothing at all and have never even heard the name Elizabeth Holmes. Or if you just watched the show, The Dropout, you should watch this documentary. And the reason I bring this up now is not because you should watch this documentary. I'm sure I'm the 8,000th person to tell you to watch this documentary. It's three hours long. It's fascinating. It will it will mess with your brain in ways you are not prepared for.

• 33:43David Pierce?

  The reason I bring this up now is because I really encourage you to see it in a movie theater. It's the sort of thing that you wouldn't think would matter a ton to see in a crowd. It's a documentary about a tech entrepreneur. Like, it's not like you're in a movie and the the jump scare is more fun when there's a lot of other people around being scared. But there's something about this movie. I saw it in a theater at 9:00 PM in Manhattan in an Alamo Drafthouse that is like five stories below ground. And it was such an interesting experience to sit in a room full of people experiencing this thing all at the same time. There are moments that are really funny. There are moments that are really surprising. There are a couple of like, honest to God, like gut punch moments in this documentary. And there was something really special

• 34:27David Pierce?

  about experiencing all of that with other people and going through this mind bending experience with other people in the room that hit for me in a way I did not expect. I went to see it in a theater because I was like, OK, I'm gonna need to talk about this professionally. All my coworkers are gonna ruin this for me if I don't. But I'm really glad I saw it in a communal way, in the way that normally I only feel that about like giant blockbuster-y movies. I intend to go see Dune 3 in a theater because it'll be bigger and cooler and more exciting. I felt the same way about The Odyssey, so I went out of my way to go see that movie in theaters. This is maybe the most interesting and unusual and sort of special movie theater experience I've had in some time. So go find a reason to see this movie with other people. I encourage you to do it.

• 35:10David Pierce?

  Go in knowing as little or as much as possible. I have heard from people who have had every single beat of the movie spoiled for them, and it still didn't lessen the experience of seeing it, especially with other people. Go with somebody you want to then walk long distances and have a conversation with about this movie. I love it. It is one of the best movies about tech or anything I've seen in a very long time. It messed with my head in ways I am still dealing with. I cannot recommend it enough. Go see You Can See Everything, and then tell me what you think about it. I am desperate to get everyone's opinions about this movie because all I wanna do is talk about it. And if you wanna talk about it too, get at me. As ever, the way to get in touch with us here at The Verge is to email us, [email protected], or call the hotline 866-VERGE11.

• 35:55David Pierce?

  I'm also [email protected]. If you specifically wanna send me You Can See Everything opinions, I'm very much looking forward to all of it. And as always, the best thing you can do to support everything we're up to here at The Verge is to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcast ad free, including this one. It gets you all of our exclusive newsletters. It gets you Liz Lopato's excellent review of You Can See Everything. Go check all of it out, theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Darchuk. See you tomorrow. Rockin' on.

• 36:28Speaker 00

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. You may think you already know Jira, but if you take a closer look, I think you'll be surprised. It still has all the features and functionality that has made it one of the most used productivity platforms in the market. But beneath the surface, things have evolved. Jira can now connect all your workplace tools and apps with the Atlassian Teamwork Graph. It maps how your work fits together and gives your whole team a shared context layer so everyone can find what they need without switching tools. Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com.