Building the Future: Our Latest Projects

Welcome back to Installer No. 126, your weekly guide to the most interesting and Verge-worthy things in tech, culture, and beyond. If this is your first time here, hello , I’m currently on the hunt for 10 or 15 Calvin Klein skirts, and you can browse every past edition over at the Installer homepage.

This week’s lineup includes a new gaming controller, a weekend’s worth of great viewing, a couple of intriguing AI projects, and some deep reflections on how we interact with technology. Let’s jump in.

(As always, the heart of Installer is your contributions. What are you watching, reading, playing, listening to, or hunting down at estate sales this week? Send it all to installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone who’d enjoy this, forward it along and tell them to subscribe.)

The Drop

The Steam Controller. Valve has an uncanny ability to give its users exactly what they want. Here, that means a supremely comfortable, wildly customizable $99 controller that can be configured in almost any way you can dream up. Early impressions suggest the joysticks could use a tweak, but overall, Valve has knocked it out of the park.

The Devil Wears Prada 2. Between this and Hokum, we might have a Barbenheimer-style doubleheader on our hands. If you can’t make it to a theater this weekend for what’s being called a solid sequel, at least rewatch the original. It holds up beautifully.

Widow’s Bay. My TV-obsessed friends have been buzzing about this new Apple TV+ series, and early word says it delivers. Balancing humor and horror is a tough act, but Matthew Rhys and the cast make it look easy. Straight onto my watchlist.

Zed. This super-fast code editor has been generating buzz for a while, and it just officially launched. It features some interesting AI integrations, but its real selling point is its ability to work everywhere without ever slowing down. So far, it’s a hit.

Talkie. A fascinating concept: a large language model trained exclusively on pre-1931 text. It offers all the interactivity of modern AI but with zero knowledge of the contemporary world. These “vintage models” are becoming a trend, and they provide a unique way to engage with history.

“I’m done renting my digital life.” A compelling video where Iskren grows frustrated with endless subscriptions and goes all-in on physical media and self-hosting. It’s fascinating, difficult, and surprisingly expensive.

John Oliver on AI chatbots. I’ve been saying this for ages: AI chatbots are not your friends. Oliver delivers the same message in his signature fun and thoughtful style, and it’s a much-needed reality check.

Saros. A brutally challenging game where you fight to stop a corrupt tech company from strip-mining a planet. It hits a little close to home, but it’s a worthy follow-up to Returnal that will satisfy fans of punishing gameplay.

Cursor Camp. A new project from Neal.fun, and it’s wonderfully weird. It’s a bit like Club Penguin in the best possible way. I spent way more time on it than I intended.

Lovable’s mobile app. Many of you in the Installerverse have been using Lovable for vibe-coding. Now there’s a dedicated app for Android and iOS, so you can build mobile apps directly from your phone.

Screen Share

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time , and, honestly, work time , experimenting with Claude Code to build a personal productivity tool. I started with grand ambitions: a full to-do list system from scratch. That fell apart by the third feature. Then a Google Keep-meets-Obsidian hybrid. That also failed. Then I had a breakthrough: what if I let the existing tools handle the heavy lifting and just built a unified user interface I loved?

I call it Daily, because it doesn’t need a fancy name. It’s just for me. The app connects to Google Calendar and Todoist, showing me everything on my plate for the day. Another tab syncs with Raindrop, displaying my bookmarks in reverse chronological order with quick buttons to delete or file them. Seeing it all in one clean, visually pleasing place was the game-changer.

The real magic is the input system: a single window where I can create a task (synced to Todoist), an event (to Google Calendar), or a note (which becomes a text file that Obsidian picks up). After years of trying apps like Drafts and Raycast to build this kind of universal capture, I finally have a system that works exactly how I want it to.

I’m still using all the same apps and paying for most of them. The difference is that now I can see them all at once and interact with them in the same way. It has done wonders for taming the chaos of my daily planning. The cost? Approximately 450,000 hours of copying and pasting error logs into Claude Code. I didn’t so much build this thing as bugfix it into existence. But it works, mostly, and it’s working great for me.

Crowdsourced

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been asking you to share what you’ve been making. Apps, games, albums, crochet projects , anything. This newsletter thrives on your recommendations, so I thought we’d turn this space into a show and tell for the Installerverse.

Thank you to everyone who wrote in! There’s no room to feature everything, so we’ll do this again. Here are some of my favorites so far. (As always, especially in this vibe-coded era, click and try everything with caution.)

• “I’m a lawyer, and I built SCOTUSWatch to automate checking for Supreme Court orders. It sends push notifications to iOS, Windows, and Android apps, with optional AI summaries.” , ScottSigning OffI do my best work while listening to movie soundtracks. I’m not sure why , maybe it makes life in a Google Doc feel more epic. I know I’m not alone. My personal Mount Rushmore of the genre includes Interstellar, The Social Network, Blade Runner 2049, and Tron: Legacy.I finally saw Project Hail Mary the other day, and halfway through, I knew its score would join my rotation. It’s a bit more playful than my usual picks, but it sets the perfect mood. It also led me to Daniel Pemberton’s other scores, including Steve Jobs and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, both of which are excellent. If my writing suddenly becomes more thrilling and dramatic, you’ll know why.See you next week!