Covet

Podcast 2 — In conversation

Speaker A: I have to admit I genuinely covet her workspace setup. Three monitors, a mechanical keyboard, the perfect chair — I sat at it once and never wanted to leave.

Speaker B: Covet with self-aware irony — the confession that acknowledges the desire while slightly laughing at its intensity. Coveting a colleague's setup is one of the most universal experiences in knowledge work. The word covet here is deliberately heightened; you could say I envy or I want, but covet captures the longing more precisely.

Speaker A: It's one of the most coveted positions in the civil service — competitive, well-paid, enormous responsibility. They get several hundred applications every time it comes up.

Speaker B: Coveted as an adjective meaning highly desired — the positive marketing use. A coveted position is desirable and prestigious; the competition for it confirms its value. No moral complexity here; coveted simply means people want it badly enough to compete intensely.

Speaker A: She was clearly coveting the lead role. Every time the director discussed casting, she would position herself just a little closer to the conversation.

Speaker B: Covet as active, strategic desire — the physical positioning toward the object of desire is the tell. Coveting is not passive wishful thinking; it involves orientation toward the desired thing, watching for the opportunity, placing oneself in its path.

Speaker A: People sometimes confuse covet and envy.

Speaker B: Envy is a broader emotional state — feeling displeasure at another person's advantages. Covet is more specifically directed: to covet is to want that specific thing for yourself, not merely to resent the other person having it. You can envy someone's success without wanting their exact life. To covet is to want the specific thing: the house, the car, the job. Covet is target-specific; envy is person-specific.

Speaker A: And covet is different from desire. Desire is neutral — you can desire something you've never seen, or something that doesn't yet exist. Covet specifically implies that someone else has it. The object of coveting is always possessed by another. That possessedness is what gives covet its particular flavour.

Podcast 3 — Prompt engineering

Speaker B: Scenario one — a coveted items wishlist schema.

Create a PostgreSQL schema for a personal wishlist and coveted items tracker app. Tables: users, items, wishlists, wishlist_items, price_alerts. items stores item_id, item_name, category, current_price numeric nullable, item_url text nullable, image_url text nullable, and is_available boolean. wishlist_items stores wishlist_id, item_id, added_date, covet_score integer 1 to 10 (how intensely the user covets this item), notes text, and status enum coveting, saved, purchased, passed. price_alerts stores alert_id, item_id, user_id, target_price, alert_triggered boolean, and triggered_date nullable.

Speaker B: Covet_score 1 to 10 is the desire intensity field that distinguishes mildly wanted items from intensely coveted ones — it allows the app to surface the items the user most covets when making purchasing decisions.

Speaker A: Status progressing from coveting through saved to purchased or passed tells the lifecycle story — when did desire convert to action, and how many coveted items were ultimately passed over?

Speaker B: Next — a product discovery prompt.

Design a product discovery feature for an e-commerce platform that surfaces coveted items. The feature: tracks which products users view repeatedly without purchasing (covet signals), identifies products that users add to wishlists or save for later (explicit covet actions), monitors which products appear most frequently across user wishlists (collectively coveted items), and generates personalised recommendations based on each user's covet history — products similar to the items they covet most. A coveted this week section on the homepage shows the most-coveted items across all users in each category.

Speaker A: Repeated views without purchase as a covet signal is the behavioural inference — the user is drawn back to the item without committing, which is the digital equivalent of the covetous glance.

Speaker B: Right. Now a professional aspirations prompt.

Build a career aspirations tracker for a professional development platform. Users identify coveted roles — positions they aspire to in their field. For each coveted role, the app: shows the skills and experience gaps between the user's current profile and the coveted role's requirements, finds people in the user's network who hold the coveted role (for informational interviews), tracks the user's progress toward closing the gap each quarter, and sends a notification when a job listing for the coveted role appears in their target companies.

Speaker B: Network members who hold the coveted role as a connection list is the warm introduction feature — the person who already occupies a coveted role is the most useful conversation the aspiring candidate can have.

Speaker B: Fourth — a social commerce prompt.

Design a social wishlist feature for a lifestyle brand's mobile app. Users can make their wishlist of coveted items public or shared with friends. The feature: shows friends what items each other covet, allows friends to buy items from each other's covet lists as gifts, notifies a user when someone buys them an item from their covet list, and shows a gift ideas section for upcoming birthdays populated by the recipient's public covet list. Privacy controls let users mark individual coveted items as private even if their list is otherwise public.

Speaker A: Privacy controls on individual items even within a public list is the nuance — a user might want friends to see most of their coveted items but keep certain high-value or personal items private.

Speaker B: Fifth — an awards and prestige tracker prompt.

Build a professional awards and recognition tracker for an industry media platform. The app tracks the most coveted awards in a given industry — for example, in tech: the coveted BAFTA for games, the Webby Award for digital, the IEEE Medal for engineering. For each award: show past winners, describe why the award is coveted in the industry, track which individuals and organisations are nominated this year, and allow industry professionals to follow their coveted award category for updates. A prestige ranking shows which awards are most coveted based on winner career trajectory after receiving the award.

Speaker B: Prestige ranking based on winner career trajectory is the data-driven measure of how coveted an award actually is — an award that reliably predicts significant career advancement is objectively more coveted than one that does not.

Speaker B: Sixth — a full small app.

Build a single-page web app called Covet List — a personal aspirations and desire tracker. Users add items they covet across categories: objects (tech, fashion, books, tools), experiences (travel destinations, events, courses), and achievements (skills, certifications, roles). Each entry has a covet score 1 to 5, a reason field, and a status of coveting, in progress, or achieved. The app shows: items by covet score, a count of coveted items by category, and items recently moved to achieved status as a celebration log. All data in localStorage.

Speaker A: Achievements as a coveted category alongside objects and experiences is the insight that professional aspirations are as much objects of desire as physical items — coveting a skill or certification has the same psychological structure as coveting a product.

Speaker B: That's the lesson — to covet is to want what someone else has. It is the oldest prohibited desire in Western moral tradition and one of the most successfully commercialised impulses in modern marketing. Understanding covet — its target-specificity, its possessedness requirement, its transformation into the aspirational adjective coveted — is understanding one of the most powerful engines of human motivation.

Speaker B: Prompt example: