Morpheus, Take The Red Pill?

Morpheus, Take The Red Pill?

Is Morpheus really the gold standard in performance health data? I’m a Product Guy, focused on longevity as much as I am tech products. I love gadgets, especially ones that promise to optimize healthspan. So, when I heard Dr. Peter Attia on his podcast The Drive, gushing about the Morpheus heart rate monitor and the claims to provide personalized recovery data to guide my workouts, I had to give it a try. Could this be the key to unlocking peak performance, or is it just another piece of tech destined to gather dust in my drawer?

Let’s dive in! 

But first, what is HRV and why should you care?  💓

In the quest for a long and healthy life, a key indicator of our well-being lies not in the steady, metronomic beat of our heart, but in its subtle variations. This is the essence of Heart Rate Variability (HRV), a measure of the naturally occurring fluctuations in time between consecutive heartbeats. A higher HRV is a sign of a healthy, adaptable nervous system and is increasingly recognized as a powerful predictor of both current health and long-term vitality. Our heart rate is under the constant influence of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which regulates essential bodily functions. The ANS has two main branches:

• The Sympathetic Nervous System (the "fight-or-flight" response): This branch prepares the body for action, increasing heart rate and blood pressure in response to stress.

• The Parasympathetic Nervous System (the "rest-and-digest" response): This branch promotes relaxation and recovery, slowing the heart rate and aiding in digestion and repair.

HRV reflects the delicate balance between these two systems. A high HRV indicates that your parasympathetic nervous system (“rest & digest”) is active and effectively modulates your heart rate, demonstrating your body's ability to adapt to stressors. Conversely, a consistently low HRV suggests that your sympathetic nervous system is dominant, a state that, if prolonged, can contribute to a range of health issues.  TLDR, high HRV means your body is able to rest and repair, and this is a good thing. 

Hopefully this gives enough context for why you should worry about HRV, but don’t worry too much, that could trigger a stress response and that will lower your HRV. 😜.  

THE GOOD

Morpheus isn't just a heart rate monitor; it's a fitness performance system. It pairs a chest strap, the M7, with an app to give you a daily "recovery score." This score, based on your heart rate variability (HRV), sleep, and activity levels, tells you how ready your body is for strain. The app then adjusts your heart rate training zones for the day. A high recovery score means you're good to go hard, while a low score suggests a lighter day. For me, the very concept of listening to your body and having a metric to actually gauge my effort for the day, was a paradigm shift. I’ve always been “all gas, no breaks” for workouts regardless of pain and recovery levels and, duh, this has led to some overuse injuries. As a former collegiate rower, I had two speeds: fast and bodybag. Which is fine when competing in a sport where success depends on your ability to override the mind and body telling you to stop - but not the most sustainable philosophy. Morpheus has done a great job on conveying how to train smarter, which is not always harder. 

• Actionable Data: The daily recovery score and adjusted heart rate zones are incredibly useful. It takes the guesswork out of training, telling you when to push and when to back off.

• Medical-Grade Accuracy: The M7 chest strap uses an ECG sensor, providing industry-leading precision. In a world of often-unreliable wrist-based trackers, this is a breath of fresh air.

• Battery Life: With up to 200 hours on a single charge, the M7 is always ready to go when you are. No more scrambling to find a charger right before a workout.

Morpheus Heart Rate Zones

Integration: Morpheus pulls data from other health apps like Apple Health, Garmin, and Fitbit, creating a more holistic view of your recovery.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR IMPROVEMENT

While there's a lot to love, Morpheus isn't perfect. The app, for instance, is so basic. And not in a “less is more” clean design way. While it shows your heart rate and time in each zone, it lacks more granular data like pace and distance. I also have to wonder if Morpheus is using all the data it collects. Some users have reported that sleep and step count data don't seem to factor into the recovery score, which, if true, is a big miss.

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• Poor Handling Of Disconnected Mode: Trying to open the mobile app when your chest strap is not within bluetooth range is a frustrating experience. At times it will spin endlessly as I give up and bail. 

• Poor Locked Screen Mode: Morpheus works best when it’s opened, during a workout - this is fine when you’re on a treadmill or stationary bike. Outside workouts, running and cycling, are a different experience. For me, most bike rides, when my phone is stowed away in a pocket, Morpheus flakes. It misses part of my workout or just dies altogether. 

• Watch Pairing Miss: Apps like Future Fitness pair beautifully with their Apple Watch app and give key data displays during workouts. I mean even Starbucks has an Apple Watch app and Morpheus is maybe the only fitness app without one. It would be nice to, IDK, actually see my heart rate and target zone during an outdoor workout.

• More Digestible Insights: Morpheus onboarding includes a comprehensive explanation of HRV and how to use it to optimize performance and health. It’s a beautifully written, ~20 page tutorial that I suspect almost no one reads. After onboarding you are on your own to make sense of the data.

Despite these shortcomings, I still use Morpheus, but in time, my usage has been limited to indoor workouts.

FUTURE

Morpheus has a solid foundation, but there's plenty of room to grow. I'd love to see a more robust app with more detailed workout data and long-term HRV tracking. And please build an Apple Watch App - come on! This is tablesteaks for any fitness tech company. 

It’s 2025, so no roadmap is complete without a healthy dose of AI magic ✨For Morpheus, AI insights make a lot of sense. Imagine if the app could not only tell you how recovered you are today but also predict your recovery trends over time. And give deeper insights on your performance and health. That would be a game-changer.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So, is the Morpheus heart rate monitor worth it? If you're serious about your training and recovery, and you're looking for a tool to provide actionable data, then yes. It's a powerful device that can help you train smarter and avoid overtraining. However, if you're a casual gym-goer or someone who wants a simple, all-in-one fitness tracker, Morpheus might be overkill. You can do just fine tracking your zone 2 range with Apple Watch or Whoop. Morpheus is a tool for the dedicated, the data-driven, and the ones who are always looking for that extra edge, in performance and healthspan. If that’s you, go for it, free your mind and go down the rabbit hole of peak performance monitoring.

Windsurf, Feeling The Vibe?

Is Windsurf ready for a 100 million coders?

Or do they need a lower tide to get more Vibe Coding users into the water? With 28.7 million engineers worldwide and 45 million projected by 2030 how will Windsurf bridge the gap to reach 100 million? Without a 3x surge in coders, Windsurf needs a user experience that’s consumer-grade and ready for the coding uninitiated. Otherwise, they’ll either have a limited total available market of users, coders, for creating useful software. Or limited usefulness - think vitamin vs painkiller - and never get past toy apps and low level functions. So is Windsurf consumer-grade and ready for the great majority or is it still a beloved tool of the early adopters? And why is Windsurf a $3 Billion acquisition target of OpenAI? Let’s dig in!  

But first, what the heck is Vibe Coding anyway? Vibe Coding is a term that’s like 10 weeks old and refers to a new approach to building software applications where AI agents, primarily large language models (LLMs), are used to generate code based on natural language instructions. It’s like having an AI software engineer buddy to help you plan and implement your projects. However, Vibe Coding doesn’t mean you never have to touch the code, instead you guide your AI engineer by reviewing its output and iterating - and in my experience there’s a lot of iterating. For Vibe Coding, I recommend a warm cup of calming tea.  🫖 ☕️  

Some of the most popular Vibe Coding platforms are Cursor, Github Copilot, Replit, and Windsurf, which I used for my pet project - more on that to come. Stay with me here. The specifics of each vary but think of them as an extension of a source code editor - which is just an efficiency tool that developers use to write, edit, and manage their code. But instead these platforms plug in foundational LLMs like ChatGPT/Claud/Gemini (AI “brains”) to go way beyond helping engineers fix their code. It’s as if the AI agent said “dude, enough with these corrections already.. just move over, I’ll write this code for you!”

MY TEST APP

Before we get into my first experience with Windsurf, a slight detour to explain what I’m building. Before Pokemon Go and even Google Ingress, I had an idea to turn Google Maps into a video game board. As a co-founder, I even pitched it (named Xumfly) to someone at Google over lunch at their MTV campus, but never got anywhere. I wonder if that idea ever took off? Spoiler alert! It’s a $3.5 billion idea. So when staring at the blank Windsurf prompt only one thing came to mind… Xumfly 2.0! 

The concept: Xumfly is a geolocation based trivia game for players to explore a city while honing their local knowledge. The goal is to become the leader based on completion time and points. Building this should be a piece of cake! 🍰

Here’s how it started, for my review I was taking on the role of someone who has never shipped production code. I selected Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Thinking) and typed a simple prompt:

“Please build a geolocation mobile trivia game using Google Maps. The game is played on the San Francisco, CA city map. Use map pins to identify points of interest.”

My Windsurf AI engineer started off strong, replying back with a clean plan that included game concept & mechanics, technical architecture, key features, and a clear multi-phase implementation plan. Alright let’s go! Windsurf started generating code, shared its thought process, and asked me for my approval to proceed - as if I had any idea what it was doing, sure let’s roll!

And then “we” repeated this about ten more times: spool out code, share thought process, ask for my approval. Until it just stopped…crickets. I let it have a moment while I had dinner, returned, and still nothing. I asked for a status update and this is when it started to go off the rails. TLDR, it replied back that I needed to install a bunch of software: Xcode, Node JS, NPM, React, Expo, and then Expo Go - enough already this is too much detail - anyway I signed up for these services just trusting my AI engineer knew what it was doing. I mindlessly followed the instructions and nothing was working and my AI engineer was getting tied around its axle so I hit the “reset button” starting over with a much simpler version of my game and web only. Guess what? It worked!, woohoo! Vibe coding lesson one, start simple and if you can start with a web app.

Here’s how it’s going, admittedly my game is still a proof of concept (POC) - one city, limited points of interest, and no geolocation - OK it’s kinda lame, but it’s a start. And some things are off, like there are collectables which are tokens awarded for completing each level, but no place to store them.

My POC version demonstrates the basic gameplay mechanics of the original Xumfly concept while being immediately playable - albeit super basic.

THE GOOD 

While my experience playing the role of a code newbie wasn’t exactly flawless, there’s a lot to get excited about! For one, it didn’t take long to feel comfortable vibing with my Windsurf AI engineer. I was engaged and enjoyed the polite conversation, it was useful and instructive. For reference, in 2008, the first working prototype of Xumly cost my partner and I $20,000, so I’m already seeing value. Here’s my top 5 good vibes. 

1. It Just Works, I’ve not written real from scratch code in years and on my first attempt - building an arguably complex test subject - it worked! I made something.

2. Contextually Aware, with a simple prompt and nothing more, Windsurf crafted a solid plan and thought through a rich set of game mechanics and features - from the start. And through our conversation honed this understanding to where it could make meaningful recommendations on features and functionality. It felt absurdly close to conversations I’ve had with engineers over the years.    

3. Clear Communication, my Windsurf AI engineer clearly explained every step of the planning, building, and testing process. And did so before, during, and after each step. It went as far to give status updates and ask if I wanted more detailed explanations. 

4. It’s Fast, I mean, it’s super fast. Each response was nearly instant and each iteration of code generation took seconds. The thing it did was not always optimal, but it did the thing quickly.  

5. Polite Patience, my Windsurf AI engineer was always polite and positive. It never got frustrated from all of my questions and when I asked it to scrap the code it had been working on for a few sessions and start again, it replied “great idea!” Not only was it not frustrated, but it gave off an energized vibe and even when things were going sideways, its calm positivity was contagious - a true delight.

THE BOTTOM LINE

For someone with coding experience, self taught or a basic CS course, Windsurf is a supercharger! And it’s easy to see how these tools are making software engineers 30% better. However, that’s not what we were doing here. Recall, there are 30 million coders and I was taking the other side of the path to 100 million, evaluating Windsurf as the role of a newbie.

Spoiler alert, it's not ready for the newbs to build more than toy apps or low level functions. I would also argue that if someone does build a complex app with the current product they’re doing so by taking time to have the AI agent teach them some coding basics. If a person spends hours iterating and being taught how to edit code and update tools by an AI agent, are they still a newbie?

The good news, many of these shortcomings are at the user experience level of the product and can be addressed with feature updates. I feel a Product PepTalk coming on, so next time we’ll be digging into some opportunities for improvement and what’s ahead for Vibe Coding and platforms that enable it. Until then, sign up for a Windsurf account and and feel the vibes for yourself, there’s no better way to learn than by doing!