Former Council of Economic Advisers Chair Jason Furman says the full Econvitals system has more than 500,000 lines of code, a figure economist Brad DeLong cited in discussing AI’s possible effect on economic analysis.
Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2013 to 2017, says he has not examined the code and recalled that “it was all vibe coded.” Econvitals describes the project as a work in progress. Furman says it began as a personal dashboard and later expanded to serve friends before he opened it to the public.
The free service focuses mainly on the U.S. economy, with some international coverage. Its tools include features for following Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) speeches and the fiscal outlook. Econvitals says some of its measures—including estimates for underlying inflation, unit labor costs, gross domestic product and personal consumption expenditures—are constructed by the site rather than published as agency statistics.
Econvitals says Claude, an artificial intelligence model from Anthropic, generates subscription briefings that are published without human review. The site lists Furman’s occasional posts separately: He writes them, and AI tools copyedit the text and check its facts.
In an Oct. 27 essay, DeLong pointed to the project while arguing that AI may reduce the effort needed to assemble economic figures and summaries. He said that could make deciding which information deserves attention more important.
Former CEA Chair Jared Bernstein offered a view drawn from his own experience. In his newsletter, he wrote, “CEA work, at least in my experience, is highly bespoke,” and described explaining data flow and other matters to busy officials.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) is scheduled to release September Personal Income and Outlays and its advance estimate for third-quarter GDP on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 8:30 a.m. ET (12:30 UTC).
