Paul Ford has been writing about software and making software — his newest company is Aboard, a New York City-based business software agency — for decades.*
Like lots of people who work in software, he’s tremendously excited about AI. He’s also someone who can explain what’s happening in plain English.
Ford is enthusiastic about developments like vibe coding, which promise to let anyone build any software they want. But he doesn’t believe we’re moving into a world where everyone is a coder.
Ford recently told me why the AI revolution in software is real, what it could mean for the industry, and why it’s going to matter to people who will never write code.
You can hear our full conversation on my Channels podcast; the following is an edited excerpt.
Peter Kafka: You recently wrote that the “AI Disruption We’ve Been Waiting For Has Arrived.” What is it and how did we get here?
Paul Ford: Most of the software in the world falls under this big bucket of “custom” and “enterprise” — you go, and you build tools for companies that help them manage sales, etc.
It’s very custom, very bespoke. That’s been my whole career. And starting a couple of years ago, I watched AI do really boring code things. That’s the trillion-dollar core of everything.
Suddenly, the robot could do the thing.
It could do a pretty credible job, get you started. And most of these projects are really hard, they take a long time. And I was like, “Wow, this is gonna speed it up, which means that things are probably gonna change all over.”
How does that tie into vibe coding, which is what we started hearing a lot about in the last few months?
This had been building up for a while. OpenAI let you code, Anthropic let you code. You sit down, and just as you would prompt it to answer your question — “Tell me where to go when I go to Tuscany,” you could be like, “Write me a script that converts from a legacy database format.”
And it would do an OK job. Usually, it was pretty buggy. It was cool that it would get it moving, and it often could save you time. They were assistants.
Like an intern — someone who can run out and do a bunch of stuff, but you wouldn’t take that work to market. You’d want to double-check it.
You truly shouldn’t. It’s pretty dangerous. It would hallucinate code, just like it would hallucinate ideas.
But it was getting steadily better. Then last fall, Anthropic, the makers of Claude, built a real nerdy product called Claude Code.
They’d been building it, and they just did a few things to it — software things like “it’s gonna think a little longer, it’s gonna go into more loops.” But as a result of all those things, combined with a slightly smarter model, it started to just write relatively good code in large quantities.
Much more than an intern.
That’s right. And it still is hard to manage. You still have to know a lot. But for those of us who’ve been at it for a while, it was a very shocking moment.
I found myself compulsively trying to figure this out. I hadn’t been coding a lot — I’d been mostly managing. And I was like, “I gotta understand this.” Because I’ve never had a moment like this in my career. I thought I’d seen everything.
I was just constantly prompting, building, prompting, and building. Things I’d been putting off for a decade — little personal projects — that’s where I started. They got done in a weekend.
You’re talking about noodling at home on side projects. How did you think this would change professional coding? Is it taking time and cost out of coding? Is letting coders do something they couldn’t do before?
Here’s the thing. It’s so disruptive that everybody is absolutely sure they have the answer to that question. And there’s no clarity.
Up until now, no one has ever been able to get enough software. Engineering was very expensive. It took a lot of time. You had to buy stuff off the shelf.
What we don’t know is: A world in which it’s fast to customize, in which it’s easy to make something that’s really bespoke, and where engineering might be more of your service org — to help you as opposed to this alien entity bolted onto the org that does its own thing — how does that all fit into the future?
So where this plays out is: “Do we need junior engineers anymore, because a senior can do a whole lot more work?”
“And do we need senior engineers? Because now a management consultant or a product manager can code all day.”
I hate to be the person who comes on and is like, “Boy, I don’t know, man.” But nobody does.
People will ask, “Can I lay off my whole engineering team?” The answer is no.
Or not yet.
I don’t know about “not yet” because we just don’t know.
Technical people rave about vibe coding, and they tell me I should try vibe coding, too, even though I have no programming skills. Should I be vibe coding?
As a reporter, you might want to go do a few sessions just to figure it out. But don’t look at it that way.
The way that we look at technology will change a little bit, because something that was very expensive is now available to everybody. But it still requires a set of skills and understanding.
I’ve been building a bunch of stuff. The code part is fast, but the actual product thinking and understanding is still really hard.
So we have to translate your question into: Do you have something software-shaped in your life that you’d like to see?
Even this part trips me up, and I’ve talked to other code-curious people who have the same problem: We can’t figure out what we would want to code. I asked ChatGPT for suggestions, and it came back with stuff like “You could make a tool that renames your file folders,” and that has no appeal.
Is it our fault that we don’t know what to do with this?
No, I don’t think that at all.
You not seeing the world as a set of software-shaped problems is good for your readers. You see things in terms of the problems your readers might have.
Another scenario I hear about is that I won’t end up coding, but I’ll be working on word-processing software, and I want it to do a specific thing that’s important to me. And normally, I would not be able to ask for that, because that would be a whole new set of software. But now I can say, “Hey, add this thing or subtract this thing.” Is that a world?
Absolutely. I think about this a lot.
We built something at work that is like a lot of dashboards for health orgs, but you can talk to the dashboards. You can be like, “How’s this doctor doing?” And then it answers by going to the database. That wasn’t there before. You couldn’t do that before. Now you can do that.
I have a friend who works in immigrant rights, and she has to cut and paste from Salesforce once a month. She has to do all this clerical work to get funded.
It’s not a good use of her time. It’s the opposite of what she should be doing. But no one’s gonna do that for her. No one down the hall has got that in the queue. And now she can have that.
The future is, you’re going to ask questions of your systems, and you’re gonna say, “I need this report every month.” And there’s no reason you can’t have it.
So you wouldn’t think of that as “coding.” It would just be “I want this product feature.”
That is a hundred percent coming. You will say, “Hey, I really want this report once a week.” And the eager beavers inside of Salesforce, they start typing for you, and they’re like, “Is this what you wanted?” You’re gonna see a lot of that.
Does that feel transformative? Or just like progress?
That’s more transformative than the coding.
Somebody once asked me, “How do we get more teens into the world of, you know, ‘digital power?’ How do we get them that?”
You can teach them to code. But really: We’re in Manhattan right now. The power in this town is not people coding. It’s Excel and PowerPoint.
So teaching people good Excel skills is probably better, to give them more economic power, than even coding.
*A very specific kind of tech/media nerd gets very excited talking about “What is Code,” a 2015 essay that took up almost an entire issue of BusinessWeek.
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