This week, The Andrews met up in Baltimore for the Hacks/Hackers Journalism x AI Summit, which was a blast. (Even before the Mario Kart tournament got underway.)

For one, we got to see some good friends and hear them say smart stuff, like Patrick Swanson and his session on synthetic audience panels.

But it was also the first time we’ve seen a huge group of talented journalists grapple with the implications of AI together in one space — and boy, was it energizing.

At the national level, it can feel like media organizations only have one of two paths: either reaching licensing deals with companies like OpenAI (The Atlantic, Axel Springer) or suing them for copyright infringement (The New York Times).

But in Baltimore, we heard a lot of ideas for a third or fourth path (MCP micro-transactions! Chat client integrations!)… and of course, we’ve got some ideas of our own.

Thanks to Hacks/Hackers for organizing the conference. And BIG thanks to The Real News Network, our Baltimore hosts, for being amazing and gracious and literally opening up a restaurant next door so we could record this video.

Mentioned in the video:

* Hacks/Hackers

* Verso

* Synthetic audience panel research

* Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

* The Art of Audience Engagement: LLM-Based Thin-Slicing of Scientific Talks

* The Real News Network

* Model Context Protocol

* The Atlantic adding two print issues to its yearly cycle

We all love praise. It feels good! But if a friend gives it to you over and over again, it becomes disingenuous, then irritating. If that friend is a chatbot, it can even become dangerous.

That’s what happened with ChatGPT in the last week. The model got too eager to please—so much so that even Sam Altman admitted it had become “too sycophant-y and annoying.” OpenAI rolled back recent changes to the model (and did an admirable job communicating the changes).

On this episode, we talk through the design challenges of building a single conversational interface that can satisfy all use cases—and why we want to see more transparency in prompt engineering, not less.

Also, a birthday surprise??

Mentioned in this video:

* OpenAI: Sycophancy in GPT-4o: What happened and what we’re doing about it

* Pete Koomen: AI Horseless Carriages

* CNN: Why computer voices are mostly female

This week we pit products against each other in a rapid-fire game of “This or That.” The rules are simple: two products enter, one product leaves. We set a strict timer and make our cases with maximum conviction—and minimum prep.

The matchups:

* Apple Maps vs. Google Maps

Both have niceties and flaws. But only one buzzes McGill’s watch.

* ChatGPT vs. Claude

We both pay for both. So who wins? It comes down to coding, candor, and the creeping inevitability of AI lock-in.

* Nintendo Switch vs. Valve Steam Deck

“It just works” versus raw power and an extensive game library.

* Jira vs. Notion

We unleash some product manager trauma. Then dream of a world where AI manages backlogs for us.

Got a matchup you want us to debate next time? Drop a comment or email us at [email protected].

What if anyone could build full-stack software just by describing an app in a few sentences? That’s vibe coding, and it’s pretty exciting to fraudulent software engineers like us.

In this episode:

* Our vibe coding tools and workflows

* The long arc of abstraction in programming

* Why this moment feels a lot like the iPhone and photography

* Also: Is prompt engineering a real job?

We also answer a listener’s question about the flawed-but-adorable Playdate, talk about the greatest product innovations of the last 5 years, and debate why AR/VR hasn’t caught fire (spoiler: it’s sweaty).

Plus, an idea: Should we do a live vibe next week? Comment and tell us what we should make for a special live edition of the show!

We eagerly awaited news of the Switch 2—and were a little bit disappointed by the reveal. Is it hard for mature product categories to surprise us anymore? (See also: smartphones.)

On the agenda:

* Nintendo’s strategic focus (and the similarities to Apple)

* Will the Joy-Con mouse be good or weird?

* Has Nintendo figured out the Internet yet?

Plus, all this Nintendo talk gets us nostalgic for the Mario Kart 64 days.

Earlier this week, OpenAI unlocked a slew of new image generation features — and we sincerely (and excitedly, and fearfully) believe it’s a game-changer.

On the agenda:

* How object constancy makes image generation more useful by an order of magnitude;

* A demo of how to create a beloved character and use it in a million different circumstances;

* What we think this ~means~ for creators and people who value craftsmanship.

How do two friends launch a video newsletter in 2025? Does the world need another one of those? What should it be about? And where should it live?

Oh wait, hi! You probably don’t know us. We’re The Andrews. That’s Andrew Phelps. That’s Andrew McGill. We build stuff.

Both of us are former journalists who dove into product at media companies and spent years making cool things for places like The New York Times, The Atlantic and POLITICO. Now, we invent and build new products for clients — and our own dang selves.

OK, so yeah, last week we did a thing. We soft-launched “Product Fridays,” a weekly discussion between best friends about building digital products.

And by soft-launched, we recorded a few minutes and posted it on LinkedIn. Now it’s real. Whoops!

We liked doing it, and enough people liked watching it, so we’re going to do this again. (And maybe again after that.)

In today’s episode, we talk through what this thing should be.

* What platform it should live on?

* What rules it should follow?

* How many digressions we should allow Andrew Phelps per episode?

tl;dr: We think there are plenty of “how to effectively manage your product organization” podcasts out there, and this isn’t that. We see this as “working out loud” — a rolling debate where we offer provocations, refine our thinking, and hopefully deliver some wisdom and entertainment.

Take a listen. Comment? Is that a thing on Substack? We’d love your feedback.

Mentioned in this episode:

*

What if more products were not made to be popular, but loved? We are trying something fun: talking about products and product-making every week and recording it. We call it Product Fridays. This week we talked about opinionated products we like, plus some that we've worked on. (Originally posted as a pilot on LinkedIn.)

Mentioned in this episode:

* Zoom* You Need a Budget* NYTimes for Apple Watch (discontinued)