New Vibe Coding Podcast – Adrian Humphrey

Hey everyone, it’s Cosmo. Adrian Humphrey won first place, a sweet $100K, at the world's largest hackathon. He built Tailored Labs, an AI video editor that promises to take creators from zero to 80% of a finished edit, using Bolt and Gemini 2.5 Pro for video analysis.

We dive into his debugging strategies for vibe coding tools, the technical challenges of working with cutting-edge video AI models, and his transition from senior engineer at Intuit to full-time founder. Adrian also shares lessons from his previous "too early" startup idea from 2018 and discusses the real bottlenecks facing vibe coders today. Listen here and subscribe to the podcast here.

Magic Beans of the Week

DeepSeek V3.1 Ships with Think/Non-Think Toggle

Details

• One model, two modes: flip "DeepThink" to switch between reasoning and fast execution

• API split: deepseek-chat (non-thinking), deepseek-reasoner (thinking mode)

• Better agent skills: improved tool use, multi-step tasks, gains on SWE-Bench and Terminal-Bench

• Anthropic API format supported, 128K context for both modes

• Open-source weights on Hugging Face, new pricing starts September 5th

Bottom Line

Pick your poison: quick answers or deep reasoning. DeepSeek cracked the code on when to think slow vs. think fast.

Google's Gemini Code Assist Gets Agent Mode for Everyone

Details

• Agent Mode now live in VS Code and IntelliJ for complex multi-file tasks

• Shows detailed plan before making changes—approve, edit, or deny each step

• Auto-approve mode for hands-off operation, with rollback options

• Gemini CLI hit 70K+ GitHub stars, launches GitHub Actions integration (beta)

• New features: stop responses mid-stream, inline diffs, thinking tokens in IntelliJ

Bottom Line

Google just made AI coding feel less like autocomplete and more like pair programming with a plan.

Cognition Raises $500M at $9.8B Valuation

Details

• Founders Fund led the massive round, more than doubling valuation from earlier this year

• Comes after acquiring Windsurf, the AI coding assistant that competes with Cursor

• Devin serves enterprise customers like Bilt, Gumroad, Ramp, and Linktree

• Direct competition with Microsoft's Copilot and other AI programming platforms

• Positions them as the premium autonomous software development player

Bottom Line

This is fuel for "delegate the boring bits" coding at scale. Expect faster Devin upgrades as they race to productize autonomous development.

Lovable Offers Students 50% Off Pro

Details

• Global student discount on Lovable Pro—verify with school email or student ID

• Students using it for rapid prototyping, AI study guides, and launching businesses from dorms

• Planning "Back-to-School Hackathons" at universities

Bottom Line

Smart play: today's broke college kids become tomorrow's paying enterprise customers.

Former Twitter CEO Launches Deep Research API Startup

Details

• Parag Agrawal officially launched Parallel Web Systems in Palo Alto with $30M from Khosla Ventures, Index Ventures, and First Round Capital

• Deep Research API handles millions of research tasks daily—document discovery, code debugging, workflow automation

• Eight specialized research engines for long-form synthesis, cross-disciplinary analysis, and knowledge retrieval

• Claims to outperform GPT-5 on web research benchmarks

• Targets developers building autonomous agents and decision support systems for market intelligence, legal analysis, and scientific research

Bottom Line

Agrawal's betting that real-time web research beats static training data. If the performance claims hold up, this could reshape how AI agents gather intelligence.

Thank you for reading. Till next week! 😊

Best,
Cosmo