¶ Intro / Opening
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¶ The AI Revolution in Software Development
From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels with Peter Kafka. That is me. I'm also Chief Correspondent at Business Insider. And today we are talking about vibe coding for dummies, which means vibe coding for me. Or another way to think about this, you are listening to this show, so you've definitely heard about the revolution that AI is bringing to coding.
It's something that tech people in my life are very, very excited about, and it's something that scares the bejees out of people who invest in tech companies. But there's a very good chance you don't code yourself, so you don't really know what any of this means for tech and for the rest of us. Wouldn't it be great to hear from a coder who could explain all this in plain English? I thought so too. So I asked Paul Ford to come on the show and help us all out.
Some of you know who Paul Ford is, which means you are a member of the Paul Ford fan club. For everyone else, Paul is someone who codes and who writes about coding in a way that normals can understand. He's the co founder of A Board, an AI Software Shop, He also blogs at f Train.com. I'm delighted he came by the studio to chat.
Here's me talking.
Our guest today is Paul Ford, who I would describe as a unicorn and a perfect channels guest. Welcome, Paul.
How can I be helpful? Thank you.
Keep talking then we're good.
What do you want to know?
Earlier this year you wrote a piece of the New York Times, great headline, The AI disruption we've been waiting for has arrived. That is a classic curiosity gap title.
That was one of like five A B tested headlines.
You got the right one. So what what is the AI disruption? How has it arrived?
There's a lot of AI disruptions, right? But the one that I'm focused on, because I I I am a technologist and I run technology consulting companies with partners, right? So so I'm very worried and concerned and curious about what it's doing to coding and delivering software. So for people who don't know, right, like a lot of software, most of the software in the world falls under this big bucket of like custom and enterprise.
Which is, you know, if you ever wonder like what SAP and Salesforce are, they're kind of the base of that. And you go and you build tools for companies that help them manage sales or do that. That's right. So the opposite of off the shelf. Very custom, very bespoke. Usually you're starting with something and building up from it. That's been my whole career when I'm not a writer, right? And so
watching a couple years ago I I I watched um everybody was like, Oh, you know, what's going on with AI and it just kinda talks to you but I watched it do really boring code things, things I won't even explain, but just like stuff that would translate, you know, fifty year old code into something much more modern.
And that's the stuff that is like the absolute trillion dollar core of everything. That's like why you call Accenture, why you get, you know, giant consulting firms to advise you on how to transform your organization.
Incredibly boring, but in many cases very necessary.
Well it's it's you know, every order for Macy's or every um shipment that comes in on a on a container ship is tracked somehow, right? And there's taxes and there's it's just all the governance and compliance. Every word that makes people fall asleep.
is software. And I saw a a couple of years ago that that suddenly the robot could do the thing. It could just kind of do a pretty credible job, get you started. And most of these projects, a lot of them fail. They just kind of they're 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 and and and I think they are, they truly are.
¶ From Assistants to Advanced Code Generation
And and and d tie that to vibe coding or maybe or should we tie that to vibe coding and sort of what kicked in late last year?
Okay, so late last year well late last year was a this had been kind of billionaire for a while. So open AI let you do a lot of coding, Anthropic let you do coding, Google's Gemini lets you do coding, but Uh and what what what happens is you sit down and just as you would prompt it to answer your question, you know, make me a bullet point and w tell me where to go when I go to Tuscany, you know, that kind of thing. You could be like
write me a script that converts from a legacy database format. And it would do an okay job, but usually it was pretty buggy and you know, it was cool that it would kind of get it moving. And it often could save you time, but it was more like that was that was sort of when you hear about co-pilot and stuff like that. Uh that's what they did. They were assistants. They were like a little buddy and it was a little faster than searching stack over.
Do some work but you can't re it's I always think of it like in in in non technical terms like an intern.
That's right.
Run out and do a bunch of stuff, you wouldn't go out and take it to market. You'd want to fact check it or double check it or whatever.
You truly shouldn't. It's pretty dangerous. And it would it would kind of hallucinate code just like it would hallucinate ideas, right? And so, um then and I got but it was getting steadily better and so you saw this kind of curve. And then what happened is around November of last year Uh, anthropic, the makers of Claude, nothing radically changed around the way that that LLMs work underneath the the large language models underneath AI.
But they built kind of a a real nerdy product called Claude Code. They'd been building it and they just did a few things to it. that were sorta software things, like it's gonna think a little longer, it's gonna go into more loops, it's gonna do this, it's gonna do that. 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, and so it could build you a whole website. It could
So that's not just going from an intern to a first year associate. That's several levels up.
That's right. And it still is hard to manage. You still have to know a lot, et cetera. But for those of us who've been at it for a while, it was a very kind of shocking moment because it was partially because you could see it we we got there incrementally and then to see it actually kind of just come into the light was r overwhelming. And I I found myself that's what the Times piece is about, I found myself just kind of compulsively
trying to figure this out. I I hadn't been coding a lot, I'd been b mostly managing. And I was like, I gotta go understand this'cause I've never had a moment like this in my career. Just I thought I'd seen everything. And so I just was like I just constantly was prompting, building, prompting and building. What happened is things I'd been putting off for a decade, little personal projects, that's where I started.
They just yielded in like a weekend. Mm-hmm. And that was after ten years. And it was and then I I s it started doing really, really boring, difficult things for me. Things that I don't understand very well, like
Chip programming, F P G A programming. Like the which is don't even worry what it means, but just like know that it's one of the nerdiest things you can do. And I don't really understand how it does it, because I don't really understand it, but it like it just is like, yeah, you want to do that? We got it. So
You're describing noodling on sort of side projects, right? The equivalent of like someone building a table at home'cause it sounds fun.'Cause they're into that. But obviously this is has implications for the actual accentures of the
Like, oh man, we gotta rent on that kitchen, and then you're like, you know what? Hold on a minute, and then you do the the sorcerer's apprentice, and it's suddenly clean, and and there's a new stove.
I I guess what I was getting at is is is ha when you when you when you s sort of this light bulb clicks on, is it oh, this is gonna allow me, Paul Ford, to do cool shit that I wanted to do but never got around to versus Or is it and or this is gonna really reshape the way professional software is made?
You don't wanna bring the you know, the fleet of goblins in to destroy everything at work, right? You're we and everybody was kinda building and and we you know, we we're trying to like deal with this technology at work. So this was just it felt alien and it also felt like you had to prove it out. And everybody was kind of going through that experience. That was that's why it was such a sea change. Like everybody was like, hold on a minute.
¶ AI's Disruption: Jobs, Markets, Adaptation
If this is what it looks like, this will be really different in the future. And that's a that's a thing to say, but it's another thing to kind of fully internalize. And a lot of people are still I mean, I talk to people all day about this stuff. It is very, very hard for organizations to actually adapt to this level of change. I'll give you an example. Like I'll I'll do a proposal.
I'll throw something over the wall and I'll be like'cause what'll happen is instead of writing a set of bullet points, I'll just go ahead and build the thing they're talking about. Now it'll look like real software, but I would never trust it. It's just kinda whipped together, but it's still something you can click and work. It has a database, all this all the nice stuff.
And then they'll go silent for like three weeks. And it was very confusing at first'cause I'm like, Did I do something wrong? But it actually just turns out that like humans can't metabolize this rate of change. And so they would just treat it like this alien object. And then later they'd be like, Hey, that's really weird that you did that. We should talk.
So i i is the I again just want to dumb it down for for me, not for my audience. Is this this is going to take time out of coding? This is gonna take cost, I guess this is the same thing. Is this gonna allow serious coders to do things they couldn't do before?
Well, here's the thing. It's so disruptive that everybody is absolutely sure they have the answer to that question and there there's no clarity, right? So
I mean we see in Wall Street, right, go and slash the the prices of all these enterprise software.
Well, you know, Claude says it's Anthropic says it's going to do legal and Harvey comes okay, so that's AI versus AI. Harvey goes down in its in its stock price. I don't know if it's public or anyway, regardless.
Yeah.
Yeah. So suddenly the suddenly the legal category loses value, right? Claude comes out with Claude Design and suddenly Figma and Adobe stock drops, right? So but the market's dumb. I also have a feeling that like there's a lot of like Blockchain money where they just read the paper automatically with AI and just trade.
Yeah, and this is the same market that told us Peloton was a gazillion dollar stock five years ago.
So let's go back to the original question, which is it uh it's very confusing, right? Because 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. And everybody has the experience of using tools that aren't custom to them but they have to use because the customizing is really, really expensive.
So what we don't know is will a new world in which it's fast to customize, in which it's easy to make something that's really bespoke just for you And where engineering might be more of your service org, you know, kind of here to help you along with product and solution people, as opposed to this sort of alien entity bolted onto the org that does its own thing.
Right. How does that all fit into the future? And and so where this plays out is like, do we need junior engineers anymore? Because a senior can do a whole lot more work.
Do we need senior engineers because now a management consultant or a product manager can code all day? And so like and and produce code all day. Are we all just QA for this thing? So It's very tricky as to whether this is like a was it G Von's paradox thing where we're gonna have more code and more resources and we can just have as as mm
The more the more we can create, the more will be used.
Is that real or is this going to eat the market? You know, I I don't Figma drops and Adobe drops, but nobody gave up Photoshop. Nob everybody's like, All right, well I guess Claude has one too now, right? Like and it's actually a pretty big lift for these new orgs to to get away from that lock in. So I I I hate to be the person who comes on the show and is like, boy, I don't know man, but nobody
Yeah, that's a reasonable position.
You really shouldn't I I wouldn't you know, people are like, Can they they will ask, Can I lay off my whole engineering team? The answer is no.
Or not yet.
Well I don't know about Nina because you just don't know.
mean one of the reasons that open AI is eight worth eight hundred and fifty two billion and Anthropic is now suddenly worth about that as well. is not because i part of the premise is and people always say that's gonna create new stuff and new drug discovery, but it's also this is gonna eat a take away a bunch of cost, is the explicit, implicit promise of these companies.
I think that's right. I do you know, obviously the market likes a good zero sum narrative and it it helps things make sense. I just think we're in for some weirdness and I think there are Uh there's gonna be winners and losers. There already are, right? There's already people who get laid off because AI is coming. Like block is a good example. So you're working at
Uh you're you know, you're working for Jack Dorsey and one day it's over and one of the reasons given is AI. And so is it really? I don't know because they haven't done it yet. But certainly if you got laid off, you feel that you lost your job because everybody got too excited about it.
Yeah. Or you might be really angry at Jack Dorsey for other reasons. But both things can be true.
Really kinda both.
Um l I have heard a bunch of folks like you who are actual technical people raving about this, saying the equivalent of what you were talking about. I I did this thing at home over the weekend'cause it was fun or I always wanted to do it or I would have
It's not just that it was hard, it's that it used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Right. And they would say, or I would need ten a team of ten people and I could do you know, I was a project manager and I would need ten people to do this and I could do it on my own. Um so I get that appeal for a certain kind of person.
¶ Empowering Non-Technical Users with AI
Often those people will also say, you should vibe code, Peter Kafka. And I'll say I touched basic in the mid-80s, and the last the last time I've touched code, um they said, no, no, no, you should do it.
Um
Is this really something a non technical person can do and and should we be playing with this stuff? Or the novelty?
Well, pause for a sec, right? Like sure. If you wanna yeah, so you as reporter might wanna go do a few sessions just to figure it out. But don't look at it that way. I I think we here's what I I do think the way that we look at technology will change a little bit as a result because something that was very expensive is now available to everybody.
But it does still require a set of skills and understanding. And what I will tell you is that I've been building a bunch of stuff and I've been working on it sometimes for months. And the code part is fast. But the actual product thinking and understanding is still really hard. And a lot of times I end up going back on knowledge that I've gained over the last 20 years, like
you know, I wanna use embedded vector database technologies and like just like all that stuff that piles up over a career, it d tends to come back and like you don't have that, right? You've other skills. So so we have to translate your question into do you have something software shaped in your life that you'd really like to see?
A lot of people are like, ah, I really want the to do list. I really want that you know, that to do list is that is in my head and it does di one in a duck quacks whenever I click the button and they can have that. Absolutely. You could sit down if you want the duck quacking to do list. You want a better way to Organized notes. You want an archive of your
All the podcasts you've ever done, but searchable, right? These are things you really can build now. You might you might need a buddy. Yeah. Like we could do it right now.
Because even that step though, and I've had this experience and I've compared notes with a few other people like who are like me, who who d interact with technology and write about it, are not technical, and we've gotten the same. You should make a thing. And and we all are stuck on what would I make? And and when I've asked like Chat GPT that question, they come back with the most boring like you could literally rename your file folders and I'm like
Aaron Powell Well that's wrong. So is that does that tell us more about sort of our failings as people who should know more about technology? What's the gap there?
I don't think that's it at all. I mean I I think it's You not seeing the world in a s as a set of software shaped problems is good for your readers. Right. You see it uh you see things in terms of the problems your readers might have, right? So I don't really need you to go off and become a technologist if you're gonna keep providing utility to the world like you do. And in fact if
If I was your boss, I wouldn't want you to. I'd be like, Whoa, what what Peter's over there dabbling. Don't do that.
Well actually the bosses are like, Go use AI Yeah. But that we'll we can come back.
Whole nother narrative, right? I mean what I can tell you, like you would expect look, these things are good at like making a lot of bullet points and powerpoints, and you would expect that consulting would be nervous right now. It's not. Like it's numbers are going up, consultants are really busy.
Um there are certain places where people are getting laid off, but mostly it's like Accenture just made a deal with, you know, Anthropic to have thirty thousand Claude certified this, that, or the other. Like I think there is an enormous
There's an enormous number of people whose job is to answer these questions and they seem to be doing pretty good when we all thought they might be doing pretty bad. So I think what's happening is yes, the boss is saying, hey, we gotta accelerate everything with AI, because they heard about it and they wanna get that they wanna get those margins. And yes, some people are getting laid off because maybe they overhired back in the day or or
Well maybe they're not hiring the new college grads.
Yeah, that's right. But ultimately you know what's funny is like Somebody asked me if uh uh they're like what's this gonna mean for local journalism? And I'm like, Who is gonna write the the restaurant review? Like who's gonna be like you know like like what you g'cause I think what happens is people are like, All right, well, you know, this thing could cover little league baseball games just from the stack.
Yeah.
but that's not what it's- We do, right? A lot of these patterns have actually been around for twenty or thirty years and people are just seeing them for the first time and they got a real nice glaze on'em and they're like, Woo, huh. It actually seems like a person. But ultimately, like I don't know man, you seem to be doing okay. Like like I mean, so why would you go care about software?
So i the the fact that I can't think of what I would vibe code other than like a literally a joke app like like I want an app that uh just tells me how great I am, like ChatGPT I always respond to my question. Wouldn't that be funny? Haha. Okay.
You don't you don't see the world as product shaped problems. No. I do. Right. And so like that is just like but I don't I don't I don't know the value of you seeing the world in product shaped problems. You should just call a guy like me.
¶ AI in Creative Output and Friction
Because one of the other scenarios you hear people talk about excitedly is well this is gonna open up the world and let lots and lots of people code and in the same way that pick your disruptive technology and media, blogger or Spotify or whatever, allow people to make music I mean garage man. Make music or make Make media and distribute it widely and yes, most of it sucks.
Mm-hmm
But some it will eventually allow a Mr. Beast, and whether that's good or bad, to create really, really popular stuff in North Carolina at age nineteen with really no background. I is does that scenario make sense to you? That there are people who have coding and product skills that are going to be able to take advantage of this in a way that they couldn't have before?
Mm-hmm. I mean take it with a grain of salt, because I can't remember the exact stat, but I think like year to year app store submissions are up like thirty percent. Uh-huh. So more people are making soft more quickly.
but I don't know if that's good.
I am a person who tends to believe that more people making things is pretty good.
Just'cause the you'll still have a hit rate.
Yeah, and and it's also like it also is really good with um the sort of performative and exhausting and and sort of rote aspect. So just getting stuff into the app store, getting it built and tested is a real chore. Getting a website deployed on onto a server is a real chore. And it so it helps with that. So that last mile Gets a little bit shorter and I think that's good'cause it's boring stuff.
I was gonna ask you about the you mentioned this in a in a different conversation, first smile and last mile, that AI is good at first smile and bad at last. I guess you kind of answered the second part.
It's no it's good at clerical. Last mile of like I need to make something really good that people like that is just as hard as it was before. But the the last mile of now I need to put it on a web server at a URL and and that kind of like that got a lot easier. That cleric'cause it's just like Everything always is changing and everything is c you know, and like I gotta use Amazon web services or whatever, it's frickin' exhausting. And so
A lot of a lot of passion projects and a lot of little apps didn't get shipped just because the the form filling bureaucratic aspect of software sucks so bad. And I think that's gotten a lot easier as a result. And so I think you're seeing just like friction go away there. But back to the earlier point you made about I remember when
I was an early I was like an OG web writer, even before the word weblog. And I was convinced that what everybody would do if they wanted to participate in this world was learn how to program and build their own systems, right?
'Cause I'm in my twenties and I just had a thought like that. And the reality is no. It took, you know, live journal and blogger and WordPress and all that stuff. When that stuff showed up and people were like, Oh, I just put the words in the box, that looks cool, I'll do it. But building infrastructure is actually a really Only a very few people want to build infrastructure.
Well and even on the writing and music part, mo people will say they want to do it and then it turns out it's easy but not rewarding or no one's I'm not good at it or no one's consuming this stuff and they move on.
You know, I have um Ableton Live, which is a digital audio workstation. I dabble with it. I don't have any talent in the world. It's really fun for me. I like to learn about music and synthesis. End of story, right? Did that make me a musician? Am I suddenly this, that, or no, but I'm having a good time.
Another scenario maybe it's I guess related to what we've been talking about is No, you're not gonna be a coder, but you are gonna be in an org and you're gonna be using word processing software or whatever and you wanted to do a specific thing that's important to you. And normally you would not be able to ask for that because that would be a whole new set of software. But now there's a world where you can tell someone hey, add this thing or subtract this thing. Is that a world?
Yeah, absolutely. I think about this a lot. One of the things we built something at work that literally 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 and then it answers by going to the database, right? That wasn't there before. You couldn't do that before. Now you can do that. And I also have a friend
Different different use case, but but she's kind of always in my head. She works in um immigrant rights and this use case is in my head because she has to cut and paste. from uh from I think it's like Salesforce, like once a month or once a quarter, she has to like do all this clerical work in order to go and get funded. Right. And so it's just like not a good use of her time. It's the opposite of what she should be doing, but she has to do it or she can't get her funding renewed.
And that really and you know, no one's gonna do that for her. Like no one down the hall has like got that on the queue. She can have that. Maybe not at that org, maybe it's moving slow, but like the future is you're gonna ask questions of your systems. and you're gonna say, I need this report every month and there's kinda no reason you can't have it.
And you will direct that request, you think, to like s an internal IT person to Some equivalent of Accenture that's still providing software?
You might address it directly to the box inside of the
That is the kind of work you might do. And you wouldn't think of that as coding, it'd just be I want this product feature.
I think that is a hundred percent coming. You will say, Hey, I really want this report once a week, and the little eager beavers inside of Salesforce. or whatever its mascot is. It's got that little bear boy, you know. They go off and they start typing for you in a little animation and it comes back and they're like, Is this what you wanted? And I think you're gonna see a lot of that with every Sass and
Does that feel transformative or just like normal product?
That's more transformative than the coding. You gotta remember, like I you know, I love technology, I I think of myself as a programmer, but like Somebody once asked me, you know, how do we get more teens into the world of, you know, digital power, how do we get them that? And I'm like, you can teach them the code, but if you really like we're in Manhattan right now. The power in this town is not people coding, it's Excel and PowerPoint. Right. And so like
Teaching people really good Excel skills is probably better to give them more like actual economic power than even coding. And and l and and it's infinite what you can do with Excel and what they're doing with Excel right now. So Anything that makes that easier, lets you do more with it, gives it better, gives the data more integrity, checks the data, is really, really good kind of for society.
We'll be right back with Paul Ford, but first a word from a sponsor.
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¶ Reliability and Tackling AI Hallucinations
And we're back. I've gotten pretty comfortable with the I well using chat GPT the last year or so again, pushed by my employer to use a lot more of it.
And so I'm like pretty comfortable that some of it pr some of what it makes is good. Yeah. Some of it's okay and I can make it better, some of it is bad and or wrong. I just asked ChatGPT to plot a trip for me and it gave me the wrong train time. I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't double checked. Yes. Um How does that play out in in a world of software where stuff either works or doesn't?
Um, it's funny'cause there's so many ways for it to break. I'll tell you what's wild, right? So the the lo the issue you just described was totally real, which is you can end up with something very, very sloppy, but there are all these coding techniques like
test driven development or type safety and and sort of all these things that are really nerdy and really boring to implement. But they're not boring because you can just tell the system to do it. You'd be like, hey, I want all every single variable needs to work this way. and you need to double check'em and you gotta write a m zillion tests and its little simulated brain is like, Okay, gotta do it and it it adds an extra twenty minutes to the process, but
It's checking its own work the whole way as it goes. And I think you've seen that pattern even in chat, right? Like if you tell it to like go back and look again, it'll get a little smarter. It's just that. It's just a robot in a loop.
Right. I mean I just I feel like I'm just writing chat on an angry note. Like I d feel like a year into like me using it all the time, I shouldn't have to say Check the actual train schedule because I'm gonna take a train. It's important that I take the train at the right time. If you give me the wrong information, that's bad. And we just had to go through that whole process.
That is inherent to the technology. It's incredibly hard to fix that. And So what you need to do is find loops where you're actually like feeding it the train schedule and then getting it to interpret uh letting it you know, I had this I'm building something right now where Um, I needed it to do a web search and kind of it it's like a very light kind of fact checking, not real fact checking, but I just wanted to make sure that like links were connected to ideas, right?
And I I you can't get Claude to do that and it's hard to get Chat GPT to do it, but Google Gemini will do it for you. So I was like, all right, let's switch over. We'll do Google Gemini just for that part, blah, blah, blah. It comes back and I was like, Oh good. I click on the links. They're not there. They just don't exist. Because I forgot to say you're doing web search.
It just was like, oh, they want URLs. I got'em for you, man. And it made up like twenty Bloomberg links, which felt bad. That just felt bad for everybody. And and so then I like I I once I figured out the just the right little magic code. Then it went and it always made sure to look at the web and that the URLs were real. And I was just computer doing computer. Like one of my big things with this thing is we everybody wants to give it everything all at once right now. The reality is
To me, the first job of AI should be to clean up the old computer's mess, like all those old invoices or all the old OCR documents or the pod p the podcast transcripts or whatever. Like go clean all that up, index it, make it nice and easy to use, make it easy to search. And only then do we get to move on to like phase two.
Even that indexing part, you feel like it is gonna do uh at a high enough accuracy that you're not any more worried about it than if you'd asked a human to do it.
There's a really good rule. There's a uh Technologist person named Laurie Voss and he's great. And he wrote a blog post in which he said he was working in AI, works in AI, and it was just like look. If it's going from more text to less text, if it's summarizing, you're gonna get good results. If you let it make up text, you won't get as predictable a set of results. It's along those lines, right? And that is a really
So if you think about like what is deep research? It goes out to the web, finds a bunch of text, and then it summarizes it and it looks like a miracle because it summarized, you know, it's like this big research report. But that's all it's doing. It's kinda like it's going out and it's boiling stuff down.
Aaron Powell One of the things we've taught ourselves in the last couple of years is to identify AI or we think we're identifying it. That thing Donald Trump posted, that's an AI post, and you're you're probably right. Or that person has f too many fingers. Okay, that's AI. Or that writing has too many M dashes.
of the polydactyl community. I bet they have had
By the way, I I some of the chat GPT writing is writing that I like. Um uh but um anyway, there's a the sense that you can sort of see it, feel it. Um and again, you're maybe wrong. Does that exist in code? Can you see Oh, this is code made by an AI and it's not good. It's it's off because a computer made it.
Unfortunately, it's the opposite. It's like kind of really good and consistent because it's really hard to code an exhausting and everybody kind of gives up. So, you know, when you see One of the funniest things I've noticed as a writer, the writer part of my brain, is when you you can always tell Chat GPT'cause the paragraphs are balanced and they're sort of nice e everything is actually kind of organized in a way that humans just don't do. So
What you get is all this all this output that doesn't have jagged edges. And with code that can be really good. All the docs are there and everything. It does tend to blob stuff up. It there's all sorts of weird one offs, but In general, and this is the the really tricky part, maybe the scary part is a lot of times you're not looking in.
It's you're it's just telling you, I did it. And then you go to the website and the website loads and you're like, all right, I guess that's okay. Especially for the personal projects. If it's at work, everybody's gotta read it. That's the rule. But if it's just Paul alone at night, nobody needs to look at that code.
¶ Managerial Strategy and AI's Impact
What you you wrote uh what in Nerd Circles is a very famous Bloomberg cover story twenty fifteen, What is Code? It's great. It's also technical. Thank you. And if I understood it correctly, you were essentially saying, hey, you middle manager, um upper middle manager, you actually need to know, you don't need to know how to code, but you do need to understand how this technology works.
It was a funny thing'cause that piece was about me explaining what code and what the technology industry kinda but it but yeah, it's business week, right? So they're like, Could you make it for the R reader who is a manager? So I think if I wanna if I'm talking to people now What I want them to know is that
It just got a lot cheaper in some ways, not in every way, but like you can kind of have your thing now, or you should at least be talking about having your thing in these sort of like if you've got like an 18 month delivery roadmap, you might want to really sit down and talk about this.
Is the update from if you update that story from ten years ago, um eleven years ago, is it Um everything I said is still true and it's just that much more important for you to understand this or because we have made the tools more accessible You manager should be more hands-on about this process. Don't just hand it over to the nerds and let them come back in three months.
I mean, when I wrote that I'd never really managed anything significant before and I'm thinking about myself Managing is funny. Like managers, you're you're trying to communicate in as few words as possible and you're existentially exhausted all the time. So I don't really want to ask them to do too much looking into the code. I think
What I really want managers to know is that there isn't a magic trick here. It is a set of processes that are emerging. Your your developers are probably as overwhelmed and confused as as they've ever been. Uh they're feeling sometimes defensive and sometimes excited. And you can either ride that wave or you can wait for it to turn out. What you can't do and what no one can do is kind of get control of this'cause it's so big so fast. Like we forget
Chat GPT, what was it, like three five was the one that kinda broke over? That's twenty twenty two. Like we've had Four years for the entire like scope of the internet to just happen in in in that amount of time. And it's really only in the last two that it's just gone bananas, right? And there's a lot of hucksterism, there's a lot of false promises, and there's a lot of stuff. There's something absolutely real here. There's a lot of transformational stuff. It's it's time to internalize it, but
I don't...
Like everyone is just as overwhelmed and no one really has solid answers, including the L L M companies.
Again, uh appreciate that you don't know the answers, but I'm gonna keep asking you anyway. There is this fear Discussion about the fear that using AI makes you dumber, at least in the humanities, right? The more you ask it to write your book report, the stupider you're gonna get because you did actually need to read the book. And also you needed to think about how to express your idea. Have an idea and express it.
And you can now just short circuit the whole thing and and ace your test or ace your
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um does that exist in code? Do uh do c people who are hand coding worry about what happens to their skills when they are outsourcing the stuff?
Coders are funny because a lot of them are relatively progressive and somewhat adjacent to the universe you just described. And they all just kind everybody just got real quiet around November. Um no, I I think you'd be It's a pretty intense position to say I will not be using any AI tools.
So I think like just about the whole industry has transitioned into this at least a little. A lot of people don't have access. Like they have a little bit of copilot access. They don't have like full on Claud Code Mac. So they're they're able to kinda touch it and learn, but a lot of big orgs won't let this stuff in just yet. So A lot of people are working the way they used to. I don't think that they're
Absolutely. People feel they're getting dumber. Absolutely. But they also felt that way about copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, or they felt that way about you know, there's always um any intellectual industry always has like this real intense hierarchy as to who's really smart or not. Um
But also who's paid dues, right? And part of it is literally I paid my dues full stop. Also I paid my dues and I learned stuff while I was doing that.
Yeah, but that never in technology there's always always going to be a shortcut coming down the pike. Like it it's unlike in the humanities, unlike in in culture where you kinda really unless you do the work, you can't fake it. You just uh then you're just plagiarizing if you're fake. But like here Um the shortcut is just built into the culture. So I think that it's a little more complicated culturally than that, but the reality is
You need to be really honest about what you know and don't know. Like you don't there are certain things that are just magical to do because you never could do them before. And you won't know what's happening inside and that would be really bad. Like, I'm learning FPGA programming. Okay. Don't worry about exactly what it is, but let me tell you what it's absolutely critical too. High frequency trading. Okay, so
'Cause it lets you just do a certain kind of thing really, really quickly. I'm learning it to make little synth noises. It goes beep boop. Very little chance that I can destroy the American economy that way. But if I was doing it, if I was feeling lazy and I decided to just go ahead and load up my chips with, you know, with all the algorithms, I could take down my fund.
And so like that's where like somebody needs to know what's really going on in that situation. I don't need to know when I'm playing. I just and the funny thing is now, now that I've done a little of it, I know five times more than I used to. So I'm backing it out that way. So there's other ways to learn here too. Like you make it, it works, and you go, Okay, it's not done until you can tell me what it's actually doing. That's okay.
You're still using your brain, using it different ways, different things.
I have learned more about coding in the last three or four months than I ever knew in my li like I've it's more actionable and so on and so forth, including lower level stuff. But that's not every brain. A lot of people are just gonna be like, I got it done. And there is a lot of that going on. There's a lot of people going like we allow people to vibe code.
They turned in good working code, but it's very clear that no one has read it, and it's been automatically tested. Now it's my job to review it. What am I reviewing? Like like this are like there's a lot of really existential questions about what the job is anymore.
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¶ Corporate AI Mandates and Governance
And we're back. The normals are being told we need to learn to use AI, we need AI skills. Reese Witherspoon said it's time for us women to learn AI. I think I properly criticized for that. Um but be beyond the gender part of it. Is learning AI something? middle aged people should do? Should my kids be learning AI? Or is the whole premise of AI that you it just does the things for you without you having to learn it?
I mean I'll tell you what I would really like people to know is is is understand I'd love I'd love it if more people understood this as a technology. When people understand it as as a
It's a weird magic box that does some stuff and they don't know if they like the dudes who are in charge of it. And there's a lot of folk narratives that are emerging around that. And a lot of like a good a good example of a folk narrative that happens to often be true is Boy, there's a lot of data centers and I don't know if I like them in my community because they're emitting a lot of
And they're big.
And they're big.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. That's a f that's simultaneously like something people have rallied around, but also a point that makes sense, right? But I think that we don't have that going in the other direction. We have like, no, no, it'll do your taxes, it's gonna it's you know, should I marry it? I don't know. And the reality is you've got These a a really
complex and weird set of technologies with its own history that actually have very hard limits. There's just certain things they can do and they only seem intelligent. They're simulating language. They're not even simulating intelligence. And so Um or maybe they are and you can have that fight. But but I I feel that like that when I think about so my my son, I've I have fourteen year old twins. My son wants to um
He wanted to learn to program. And it is a little tricky'cause I'm like, ah, you know, he and he was into it. He read a book about Python and so on. And I'm like I don't I still want him to learn that. I think it's really important he learns it. I think that he will have tools that will teach him if he is engaged, if he wants to learn, he will have a tool that will let him do learn everything.
a zillion times more a zillion times more quickly in a highly interactive way in this. If he just wants to slap together some like bad game, throw it together and it kinda works, he can also do that.
You don't have to learn Latin to be to know how to write English. Maybe it's helpful to have known Latin.
I mean that i it there is that, but at the same time, like if you wanna make the game better, you know, you gotta actually go to the root and figure out what's happening. And and so um I don't know. I mean when you're when you're coming up as a journalist you had to rewrite and revise a lot, right?
And I think if you hadn't done that, you wouldn't be as good. You just wouldn't. You know it. Yep. And like where what is that process here? What is revision? Like revision can be talking to the L M and saying make it better. It can be looking at the code. We just don't have it yet. It's too soon.
Aaron Powell Um I think I know what you're gonna say to this one, but what do you make of this token maxing moment we're in where the tech companies and now non-tech companies are are bragging and in incenting their people to use AI so they can burn tokens and then bragging about it?
So there's there's two schools of thought here. And there's one, um there's this idea that like I'm gonna put in one prompt. And it is these the the little eager beavers are gonna go and they're gonna make me so much software and they're gonna come back and they're gonna say, Here's your software, sir and I'm gonna I'm gonna kiteboard the whole time. Okay, that's like the Silicon Valley narrative right now.
And so what they're doing is they're like, guys, go, as many agents as you want, show me progress, solve every problem. But I don't think most problem there is a class of problems that can break down to that. Like really big thing like make me a custom database that does blah blah blah like really, really granular, boring, big stuff. Maybe, maybe some of it breaks down that way. And I'm um but I think it's just
bros broin out. What I'm finding with this stuff is even now I burn a lot of tokens, personally. I have two Claude Super Max accounts. I'm using the prototype because now I'm doing stuff at work to kind of like prove out points and and to pitch and I'm doing stuff to and I'm doing stuff at home. So I'm probably in a weird way a token maxer, but it's iterative. And I occasionally send it off to do research and
Right, but you're not bragging about your And you don't have a leaderboard where you can say I've
I am ashamed of my token maxing.
This is the right time to to talk.
Yeah, no no no. I don't I don't like the e cobble. I'm going to a climate event.
I mean I guess what I'm getting at is from the outside it seems to me pretty obvious this is hey Sh w we must show progress. We can't we the only way we c this is a way we can demonstrate it, even though it may not actually I mean it may not only will does it not really show progress, it might be counterproductive. But I can also imagine people saying, look, we just have to get the things moving and if we leave it up to the individual workers to decide how much AI they want in their lives
They're going to get lapped by the guys down the street or just by the technology is going to come swamp our company. I don't want to get too too specific here, but I can think of several media companies with just a lot of impulse to use AI and it seems kind of not well thought through, but also waiting for AI to come take over your business is also bad. And I can see them just saying, let's just go run at the problem and yes, we will run into the wall, but let's do it.
I mean this is I mean, w you're back to terms like change management and governance, right? And and nobody wants to have that conversation because that's that would get in the way of all the fun. But that's what we need. It's sort of like uh look. Let me take a deep breath back and and just sort of be my consultant self for a minute. Not my writer self, not my technologist self.
Enormous significant changes have occurred and there are tremendous economic impacts and they're happening on an industry industry industry by industry basis. And it's very similar. It's new infrastructure in the world. It's not one new thing. It's as if suddenly they just replaced all the plumbing.
And you're like, whoa, this is weird. The the toilet screams when I flush it. And you're like, well, you know, and just okay okay, but yeah, you know, that's how it works now, right? Like that's that's where we're at. And so um and so you have to like figure out how to live in a world of constantly shrieking toilets.
And what is your next step and what do you do? But the what this involves is that the CEO ideally would be the person or the or the you know, the the CTO or the CIO would be the person.
who would really understand that there's a lot of ambiguity here and a lot of concern and wouldn't just put um foot on the gas in order to get maximum revenue or to say burn more tokens, but would be like, what are the outcomes that are gonna actually help us drive forward the business that we already decided that we're in?
And everybody's like, well, wait, what if we could be and this happened, yeah, this has happened every 10 years. It's like, we are now a technology business. And they always put like a it's either it there's always a prefix or a suffix. For a while it was E, then it was I, right? Like, you know, now it's dot AI. And so and I I think we're kind of that simple as a species. So I I I to me I'm just like Boy, could you just you gotta take a breath for your people.
¶ Beyond Software: World Models, Jobs
Let's let's wrap it up by going back to where we started and this idea of AI disruption. You've made a convincing case of what this is doing to software.
Yep.
Um and we I think we sort of have our heads around, all right, there's probably a good case that entry level work at places like consulting firms, law firms where you're doing a lot of drudge work in your first couple of years, that is impact.
Anything where the job was like to search the web and and cut and paste things you found, that's not as safe as it used to be.
So that's impactful enough. Do we think this is also a precursor to other changes in the way we work and interact with the world that sort of you'cause you could there's lotta people who are listening to this and go, Well, I don't do any of that data entry equivalent stuff. I'll be okay. Should they feel that they're gonna be okay?
People should be aware of this stuff. And I'll I'll t I'll tell you It's not necessarily that a AI is coming for your job, but like your life touches software and systems in a lot of different ways that you may not be fully aware of, right? And that might change. Your bank software might change. Like there's all that. But I do think that
You know, I'd hire people or I'd work with people and you'd realize people don't often know what business they're in. They don't know where the money comes in. They know that they're a graphic designer, or they know they're an accountant and they do the work but they don't
They may not even even the accountants may not really understand the revenue. And somehow the salespeople always make a lot of money because they s there's they're close to it, right? Go figure out where the money comes in because that is actually like there's just gonna be a lot of money.
The best beat reporting advice ever is like understand the business you're gonna write about. You think you do, but you actually where does the money start and where does it end up?
And I gotta tell ya, actually AI is fantastic at this. It's incredibly good at explaining where the money flows, like'cause it's got all that generic information. Go understand that because that's where the change is gonna happen. And that might not be your department, but it's like
just like get your head around it and figure out where you want to go and who you wanna stand next to as some change might come down the bike. The one thing that I keep an eye on, there are three or four really major what are called world model labs. As I was coming over, I was on a city bike.
Uh, and I was right behind a Waymo. And'cause Waymo's are kind of piloting New York. And they still have drivers, I think, but they're they're checking us out. And I mean I love them. I love Wiimo's. I can't help it. But anyway, regardless, let's put that aside. Um Way modes are run on a thing called a world model. The world model is different than a large language model. It has a whole model of how physical reality works, okay?
And um Waymo with a good world model coming down in price in New York City is a real job muncher. It is not great for jobs. Like just flat out. And so I like the product, but I also like people having jobs. And so I that is real tricky. And that's going to be like governance has to figure that out. World models could also help robots make things in factories. World models could, you know, trim your hedges. And so
That we're not there yet. It's just not there. There's no gener but that is the thing that I will say, like, keep I don't know if the large language models really keep me up at night because I just see so many new things happening while maybe some old things are going away. And I just have that kind of
But if Elon's dream of the robot comes true, and many people are dreaming of the robot, I can't remember what I mean.
It turns China into like one giant three D printer. Yeah. And so That would be and I we're not there yet, but that's the only sci-fi scenario where I'm actually like, poof, boy, we're not ready. We're not ready for all physical manufacturing to be handled like'cause you could prompt it. And it would write some code to run the robot and then the robot can prompt itself and now off we go.
I told you I was wrapping up but I'm I'm wrong because you reminded me th you sometimes in your writing you say, I'm gonna get yelled at for this. Yeah. You're very defensive about it. And I didn't really fully understand what you were talking about and then it became clear when I was researching this. You're on blue sky.
¶ Explaining AI Amidst Public Skepticism
I was, yeah, yeah. Oh, you were? No, I am.
And and I don't spend much time there, but apparently you're getting a rash or a shit for saying anything remotely positive about AI.
I knew it.
Look, so but I I I guess what I wanted to get at is the blue sky versus Twitter of a aside, how do you think about talking to n And again, we'll s like we're s we're carving out Blue Sky and Twitter, which have their own sets of weirdos. But you're talking to a normal person who is thinking about this, whether it's their job they're worried about or their kids' job, or they just
Or they actually feel really uneasy about being in a Waymo. That creeps them out. How do you talk to them about that without sounding like you are working on behalf of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?
I mean a certain number of people will will say that if you say anything about this technology that isn't um first and foremost about its cost to society, its ecological cost to that you shouldn't s you then then everything else you say is suspect. But I most people are just trying to figure out where they're at. And I what I see
I think what's really what's really tricky here is there's a th a lot of people have kind of made it a little bit of their identity. They tend to be very you know, they're kind of humanities adjacent and they're like Stay away. Don't want anything to do with this.
And then you know, I just I did an interview recently with um somebody who's super low vision named Andrew Leland and like these are amazing tools for him because he's able to do he's able to hack um tools for himself as a as a very low vision blind person. with this stuff that he couldn't have access to before, but he's also a writer and he's really feels mixed about it, right? And so
And I I think i I think those are normal feelings. I just f honestly, I didn't even want to come back out and start writing m and doing stuff about this. I like the technology, I find it fascinating, but I didn't want to participate in culture. But whenever I get asked I feel that I kinda I'm on the hook. I'm like a technology explaining guy, right? Mm-hmm. This is the biggest thing that's ever happened in my career.
It's not the only big thing, but it is a wild thing really quickly. And I sort of sat with myself and I was like, I am gonna get yelled at because people don't wanna hear what I have to say and I could be wrong. Like just I'm a j you know, that journalist part of myself. I just really could be wrong. But what I see is a really significant change, I find it very overwhelming, sometimes very scary, but it's also incredibly interesting. And things that I
could not do for ten years, I can do in a few days. And I felt ethically and I still feel ethically on the hook to just narrate that change. And if people think this guy sucks, he should go to hell. He is sitting in Anthropic's back pocket. Then I I that's fair. Like I g all all m more power to you. I don't kinda care, right? Like I'm just
But it's too big of a change to turn away from given what I know about this industry. And so I've I lean back in and I can't I f it feels like you know in the movie when the when the guy's like at his kitchen table and the helicopter lands on the lawn and they're like, We need you back in fool.
One last job.
No, no, I'm this me and Cindy are doing a good job. I don't wanna go. And so um
We're gonna leave it there with the aliens coming to take you into the helicopter.
They're not aliens, they're just normal.
Well they're men in black suits.
Yeah yeah, just your normal colonel.
And if you don't like that image, just imagine toilet scream.
Thank you. I think I'm actually thinking of the movie McGrover.
Paul Ford, you're awesome.
Hey, thank you. Anytime.
Thanks again to Paul Ford. Really great to have him in the studio. Thanks to Charlotte Silver who produces and edits the show. Thanks to our sponsors who bring it to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. See you next week.
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