Programmer/entrepreneur Pablo Ford is the co-founder of an AI-powered enterprise software platform Aboard. This week he wrote a guest essay for the New York Times titled “The AI Disruption Has Come, and It Sure Is Fun,” arguing that Anthropic’s Claude Code “was always a useful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got a lot better, and since then I’ve been deleting side projects that had been sitting in folders for a decade or more… [W]”When the stars align and my directions work, I can do hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of work for fun (fun for me) on weekends and evenings, for Claude’s price of $200 a month.”
He elaborates on his point. on the Aboard.com blog:
I am deeply convinced that it is possible to accelerate software development with AI coding: not to completely deprofessionalize it or simplify it so that everything is fast, but to make it a more accessible craft. Things that not long ago cost hundreds of thousands of dollars could cost hundreds of dollars and be doable for you or your cousin. This is a remarkable accelerator, thrown into the public square at a bad time, without a guide or manual, and the reaction of many people who could get the most power from these tools is rejection and anxiety. But as I wrote….
I think there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should exist: dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers, and many others. People want these things to do their jobs or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.
I don’t expect to change your mind; That’s not how minds work. I just wanted to make sure I used the platform offered by the Times to say, in the most cheerful way possible: Hey, this new power is real and should be in as many hands as possible. I think everyone should have good software and that is more possible now than it was a few years ago.
His guest essay:
Is the software I’m creating for myself on my phone as good as custom, handcrafted code? No. But it is immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might not pass a company’s quality test, but it would meet all deadlines. That’s what makes AI coding such a shock to the system… What if you suddenly wanted to distribute the software? What if all that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling variety of costs it takes for the computer to calculate, simply disappeared?
That doesn’t mean the software will be good. But most of today’s software is not good. It simply means that products could hit the market very quickly. And for many users, that will be fine. People don’t judge AI code the same way they judge junk articles or glass videos. They don’t look for the human connection of art. They are looking to achieve a goal. The code simply has to work… In about six months you could do many things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I could never write before, but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, at least we can hop on for a ride.
The simple truth is that I am worth less than I used to be. It hurts to become obsolete, but it’s also fun to code on the train. And if this technology continues to improve, then all the people who tell me how difficult it is to make a report, place an order, update an application, or update a record, might as well get the software they deserve. It could be a good business in the long term.
