In early July 2026, David Pierce assigned two colleagues to use an AI "vibe coding" tool to build a website solving a real problem, with results revealed on The Vergecast in August. The three participants experienced enormous variance: Pierce built his site with Claude Code and is "unreasonably proud" of it; Jake Kastrenakes switched to OpenAI's Codex and described the month as "horrible"; Hayden Field, with no paid accounts, burned through free-tier Claude in seconds, was blocked from Codex by its paywall, and ended up in a nine-hour Gemini conversation that produced a real, published portfolio website at zero cost. Kastrenakes's project was a claim-and-distribution site for his CSA subscription, with AI-generated copy and separate admin credentials. Pierce called its aesthetic "the first-ever prototype of Amazon.com." Kastrenakes said Codex "doesn't know what it can do," hitting access barriers and declaring projects finished, forcing him to start new threads to continue—producing seven separate chat threads across seven or eight days. He adopted a stopping rule: work until the tool quits, then decide if the result is good enough. Pierce noted the irony that this is exactly the workflow of sophisticated agent-orchestration practice. The experiment showed entire applications scaffold in minutes while a single button shape requires nine hours of negotiation, and tool selection matters more than user skill.