Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And this is The Aboard Podcast. It’s the podcast about how AI is changing the world of software.

Rich: It is.

Paul: Boy, is it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Mmm, goodness.

Rich: Let’s go.

Paul: Let’s talk about Claude Code.

[intro music]

Paul: AI changing the world of software. We say that every week.

Rich: It’s trying.

Paul: Well, it certainly keeps changing our world of software. We’re trying to build and deploy a product, we’ve got lots of people we’re working with and so on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It seems like every couple of months a new inflection point shows up. We have to sit down and be like, “What does this mean for us as software builders who’ve been building software for over 2,000 years?”

Rich: Yeah, I mean, when you go to market, you assume that the market goes at about 10 miles an hour.

Paul: The whole point is you’re gonna go 15 miles an hour.

Rich: You know, a little faster.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And surprise everybody with things. And this isn’t an us thing, by the way, to be very, very clear. Like, the level of flat footedness that’s happening across the industry is wild, because the innovation that’s happening, also massive. Endlessly funded companies are playing around.

Paul: Let’s take a step back and explain—

Rich: It’s a wild time, it’s a fun time, it’s a hell of a time.

Paul: How would you—and I’ve got, I’m looking at, there’s an article by Ethan Mollick, who is a professor at Wharton.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And is kind of the business explainer of AI transformation.

Rich: What’s great about him is that he’s a tinkerer to no end. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But he’s a layman tinkerer who deeply empathizes with his audience, which is not a technical audience.

Paul: Well, he’s ultimately, I mean, boy, is he a professor.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, he’s trying to make this accessible to—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: —essentially the next sort of—

Rich: We’re fans.

Paul: Yeah, yeah, no—

Rich: He’s been on it, he’s been at it for a while.

Paul: He’s doing good, and everybody yells at him. So his most recent is just like, “Okay, Claude Code—” Which, you know, if you’ve been listening to and paying attention to this podcast, you’ll know that Claude Code is a big deal. This wouldn’t have been a surprise to you.

Rich: Yes. I mean, let’s break down—Claude Code is a product out of Anthropic.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Anthropic has a product called Claude.

Paul: That’s their LLM, that’s their ChatGPT.

Rich: It’s like a slightly nerdier ChatGPT but it’ll do everything. You can ask it medical questions, you can ask it what to shop for.

Paul: It doesn’t generate images. There’s a few things it doesn’t do.

Rich: It’s a little narrower, yeah.

Paul: For the most part, yes.

Rich: But the niche Anthropic has found is around building software with AI.

Paul: I wouldn’t even call it vibe coding anymore. I would say like it is, it is—it’s a new kind of development environment that uses LLMs based on prompts. So—

Rich: Yes. And we’ve touched on in the past, like, the usefulness of simulating expertise and generating specs and letting that head off the chaos that can come from, you know, AI-generated code. They’ve put it into the piping of Claude Code. It’s impressive.

Paul: Let me describe the value. The value is you can describe software you want based on your level of expertise around what software is and what it should do.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: And you can say, “Hey, I want to—make me a game that’s, like, a clicker game that, you know, that lets me simulate, I don’t know, climate change or Pokémon cards or whatever.” And it’ll do it. You want to have a lot of control over the fine-tuned bits of it because you may not be a programmer, but it’ll do it. Like, you’ll get a thing.

Rich: You’ll get a thing. You will get a thing

Paul: And then you can keep talking to it about the thing, keep typing in what you like and don’t like.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’ll keep taking swings.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: So that’s one new kind of programming that didn’t really exist before.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Now there’s another kind, which is what I’ve been doing, which is instead of trying to get a one-shot app?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Give it some existing code and say, “Hey, I want you to use this, and I want you to do this new thing with it,” and then kind of get in there with a screwdriver. “Do this with the data…  Give me this view of this…”

Rich: A little more technical, a little more in the weeds.

Paul: It’s me as a programmer saying, “Hey, can I accelerate what’s in my brain?”

Rich: Managing a team.

Paul: That’s right. So I’m a combo of—

Rich: You’re an engineering leader.

Paul: I’m essentially a product manager, at that point, because I’m—

Rich: A technical one. But yes.

Paul: I’m rarely reading the actual code.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Although I am sometimes, when it really breaks. There’s a whole range, and I think. like, wherever you’re coming from is going to look really interesting.

Rich: Yes.

Paul: Because if you’re a programmer, it’s going to look like it programs really quickly. If you’re a product manager, you’re going to look like you’ve now got a team of engineers working for you. If you’re a neophyte, it’s going to look like you can now build apps all by yourself.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And I will say, I think that, you know, one thing, when you look at the Ethan’s article here—Professor Mollick’s article, sorry—you find that, like, there’s this real sense of urgency at the end. Like, this kind of like, you know—

Rich: You better get on it.

Paul: You better get on it. You got to learn it. Got to learn it right now. But I will also say that I went to an Every.to meetup around Claude Code, and it was really useful. Dan Shipper runs Every.to. We have friends over there. They had me on the podcast, and I went to the event—and I really wanted to go, like, I wanted to check out the scene.

Rich: What’s going on.

Paul: And I’ll tell you, like, really smart people, Dan is just building apps all day long. So is his team. Like, he’s really into it.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And he’s like me. He’s like, “Okay. A huge number of things that I always felt were really—” He wants access for everybody, right? So that’s really exciting, if you care about access.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But what I noticed is, as I’m just kind of reading the room, is he and I are aliens, which you’ve pointed out about me many times.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, the fact that we just jump in like that?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Most people are really trying to get their heads around—they’re very excited.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: They’re seeing it do things for them. But they’re just kind of like, “Okay—”

Rich: But what’s the profile of the room?

Paul: I mean, kind of, what do you think?

Rich: No, tell me.

Paul: Nerdy dudes.

Rich: Programmers?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Almost entirely?

Paul: I couldn’t get a clear read, because it just was like, it was a lot of people. There’s a lot of bodies, though. People were very engaged.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: But yeah, it just definitely—

Rich: Mostly—

Paul: I talked to multiple people. They tended to be on, like, the engineering side and they worked in orgs and they’re trying to figure this out.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah. And what did you find?

Paul: Nobody knows anything.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I think there are people like Dan and me who are just like, “Great. This unlocks things that are in my head,” but a lot of people are just like, “I’m not quite sure where this is going to land.” I talked to one person who’s really struggling because they’re in a giant organization and they can’t use tools like this. Yet.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Right? And so people are really triangulating based on—I have so much autonomy. I sold a company with you and I can, if I decide that I want to go learn something, I get out my credit card and I learn it.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Let me ask you—

Paul: Most people don’t have—

Rich: Have you ever met an engineer that pauses and is in awe of the power in front of them and says to themselves, “Gosh, I wish I could share this with the rest of the world and empower others?”

Paul: I wish I could say yes.

Rich: I mean, very few do, right? Like, it’s not what they think about. They think about their—

Paul: Some do. I think I personally know all of them.

Rich: Yeah, exactly. Do you know engineers who are like, “Hey, hey, before I code this, can you walk me through the use cases? I want to make sure this really feels useful to the user.” Rare.

Paul: This hurts when you say this. This makes me feel bad.

Rich: I—

Paul: I think this is what’s interesting. Like, Dan started a media company to give people more access. It’s an unusual profile to be like, “Hey, there’s so much value being created over here.”

Rich: Yeah. That’s right.

Paul: “How do I get this value out?” And literally we’ve built an office space so that we can help New York City get some of that value, right?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And what I’m finding, and I think what you’re getting at, even if I say, “Here, I took the value, I put it in a bag labeled potato chips, and I wanted to serve it to you while you lie on a couch.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “No matter what, I’m ready to give you this value.” People are like, “Mraaaw, I don’t knooooow.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: “I don’t knooooow.”

Rich: Well, there’s that, too.

Paul: Right?

Rich: So in this, this goes to, I want to draw a very, very strong distinction between the AI as genius butler that seems to answer everything, how it just truly took over the world. Right? And a billion people are using it. And that’s because it was immediately—its value was immediately recognizable. And the hurdle, the barrier to use it was near zero. It felt like you were chatting with someone.

Paul: Even to the point that even if you got really sloppy, bad, or incorrect information, it still felt like you were getting value.

Rich: Well, it was very flattering.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So it was like, “That’s a great question. I’m glad you asked.” But yeah. And it’s incredible. I’m not gonna sit here and say, this is like, you know, you’re getting fleeced. It’s an absolute no-brainer to use these tools to get answers.

Paul: And this is what’s tricky. People are like, “You can’t let it write short stories for you.” And I’m ready to be like, “Yeah, okay. Fine. People do what the hell they want to do, but, yeah, fine.

Rich: Fine. Do whatever you want.

Paul: But it’s pretty good at making a list of, like, state colleges that have good biology programs.

Rich: It’s incredibly good at that.

Paul: Right? And if your, you know, daughter is interested in biology and you have to figure out, like, “Well, maybe I can’t afford to send her to Harvard.”

Rich: It’s incredibly good at that.

Paul: “But what are the best ones?”

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: That—16 hours of your life just got given back to you.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: So people see that value and it is really motivating to them.

Rich: Exactly.

Paul: And I think, like, just those use cases get lost because there’s so much drama and everybody involved is so whackadoodle.

Rich: Yeah, but I mean, look, people are using it to shop. People are using it to get answers. People are getting medical advice. And the truth is, it’s essentially a much more elegant way to mine the internet. It’s just easier than sifting through search results and squinting against, you know, because ads are flying in your face. That is a massive, resounding success in every way.

Now you shift that, and what humans tend to do is like, “Wow, it did it for that. That means that’s the end of disease. That means we don’t need lawyers. That means we don’t need, that means you can just sort of stare into a box and see software materialize. That means robots are going to cook in your kitchen.” The CES just happened, by the way.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: It’s a lot of robots with cameras in their heads.

Paul: See that, did you see the robot that could smirk?

Rich: No.

Paul: Yeah, you did. We watched it together.

Rich: Oh, that wasn’t a robot, my friend. [laughter] That was a very disturbing…

Paul: That was bad stuff.

Rich: Like, buddy, that you, that had, like, plastic, it was skin-like plastic on it.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: That was creepy.

Paul: There’s a lot of just, like, just bad stuff. Just bad. I don’t want to talk about that.

Rich: Anyway, I mean, look, here’s what we’re getting at. The consumer space was an absolute home run, partly because of the tech, because the answers are great. Most of the time, it’ll give you the right answer. It helps you shop. It helps you make decisions.

Paul: Well, awkwardly, it turns out that even if it doesn’t, most people don’t care.

Rich: Most people don’t care.

Paul: Whatever.

Rich: But also, the usability was probably one of the most basic entry points you could ever put in front of someone.

Paul: To the point that they were afraid to do—like, Midjourney was like, “We’ll just do it in Discord.” Right?

Rich: Exactly, exactly. So now you shift gears and you want to take over, you want to conquer other worlds with this thing because it’s so amazing. Right? And we talk a lot about—I mean the name of this podcast is “AI is changing the world of software.”

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And the usability—we can talk about that question. Let me back up a second. AI changing the world of software. We can talk about that through two narratives. One is engineers are going to do way better.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Classically trained people who know how to make software are going to be ten times more productive. And that’s mostly what we’re seeing.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: All of these tools are aimed towards—I mean, there’s Cursor that integrates with your IDE. There’s Copilot. There’s all these capabilities, so that the experts are more productive.

Paul: And we’re going to build them into existing systems. So, like—

Rich: We’re going to build them into existing systems.

Paul: I’m going to fly a rocket ship, but every now and then I’m going to need to ask it a question, and it’s going to be right there, built into the rocket ship. That’s my IDE or my photo editor—

Rich: Correct.

Paul: —or my word processor or whatever. I’m going to put that little crystal icon, drop that in there, and now we’re all going to feel better about ourselves.

Rich: But I am the pilot.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Right? To use Microsoft’s parlance. You’re a co-pilot. I’m the pilot. I’m an engineer. I have expertise. I know what to do. Then there’s this second narrative about changing the world of software, which is, like, there was this promise of democratizing building software so that it’s not just in the hands of engineers. And the truth is we stepped in shit the first go around. Everyone did. Vibe coding, all it did was looked real shiny in the beginning, and then it immediately revealed the complexities of software. No, the person who’s never built anything and doesn’t understand engineering can’t have a full-blown CRM that’s custom tailored to them. They just can’t.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I’m talking about there’s probably a dozen vibe-coding tools. Insanely well-funded. They’re grabbing at it. They’re grabbing at it. But it’s hard.

Paul: Replit.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Loveable

Rich: It’s messy, right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Now Anthropic is wading into new waters. And this is what gets to the Mollick piece. What gets to the Mollick piece is, this is like, Ethan Molick is not a programmer. He’s sort of a very curious professor of business, I think, he’s in the business school, if I’m not mistaken.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: And he’s essentially saying, “You know, I’m not really into the—” Because he does it. He looks at the image generators, he looks at everything.

Paul: His big test is, like, an otter on an airplane—

Rich: Yeah, he tries them all, right? And he tries them in different contexts and whatnot. And then he dove into Claude Code, which is Anthropic’s product. And what he saw was he’s like, “Huh, I grabbed the wheel here for a minute, and I’m not a programmer, and I feel like I was moving forward and I understand how the steering works.” That’s essentially, his message was, “I’m not an expert now, I’m not a genius about making, I can’t make full-blown enterprise software yet, but boy, I’m starting to feel comfortable in the driver’s seat like I didn’t expect to, right? And here’s why.” And it’s an article we encourage you to read.

Paul: Well, it’s interesting, right, because he’s looking at these tools, looking at these tools, saying, “Here’s what they, here’s what they can do, here’s what they can do,” and now he’s a tool builder. And I think that’s a really confusing moment just in general.

Rich: That’s right.

Paul: And I think, you know, look, software is funny as a category, because we, you know, art is a real—photography is a good example, right? Like, there’s a lot of fighting online about, like, you know, can you take a real photograph with a phone or do you need a proper camera?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Or just like do the, you know, if you use a filter, does that count? Like, there’s all these sort of rules that people set up and they set them up.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You’ll think it’s about AI, but actually I’ve been tracking this. I can go back, I gave a talk, like, 10 years ago about those dynamics. 15 years ago. People patrol forms of communication.

Rich: Sure.

Paul: They say, “This is what’s real and this is what isn’t,” okay?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Code is ultimately interpreted by a computer.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it either runs or doesn’t.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Now there are a million qualifications, and I’ll tell you what, I’ve had a million fights and so has everybody about what’s real and what isn’t. Is HTML real? Is the web a real application-delivery platform? [laughter] No, you’re laughing, but you know it as well as I do.

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: This language is going to be better, and in fact, we’re only going to use this language from now on.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because it’s the best language.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So all of those things, ultimately, fine. Humans are humans.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But it runs in the computer. And then if it runs in the computer, it’s real.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Yeah. How you got there, the tools you use, the languages you committed to. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen—we were an Ember shop. It was a JavaScript library.

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Rich: At our old agency. And then React showed up, and that was that, right?

Paul: Like, in a week.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: So back to Ethan. What he’s essentially saying is the journey this time around is different. It’s not a box that everyone can use and sees value instantly.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: It’s taken us a minute to get there. I think maybe this might be the path, because the other paths didn’t really work. And this one might get us there. So let me pose a question.

Paul: Well, no, and I can tell you something because, you know, I’m on Bluesky. Bluesky hates AI.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: With one exception.

Rich: What?

Paul: This is starting to slip. You can see people go like, “No, it’s really letting me code.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: The utility and the value, as opposed to, like, I’m going to look, it can draw, it can illustrate for you. People are like, that’s not really illustration.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But this is like, “No, I’m really creating this code. I might even read every line of it. But this is such an accelerant.” And so…

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: A new political dynamic is emerging at the exact same moment that people are making lists of open-source code that allows the use of AI so that you can reject it. Because people are saying, like, any AI touching any code is evil.

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: So we’re headed there.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Just to be ready.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Someone will buttonhole you at a party and tell you that AI must never touch your pure open-source code.

Rich: Blessings.

Paul: It’s coming. This is coming. I can’t wait for it.

Rich: Which leads to an interesting question. Will a layman—and maybe the follow up is when? But will a layman make any software they want without ever talking to an—never, forget databases and logic and architectures. Will they just get the thing they want? Let’s skip the how.

Paul: I got two responses to that. Three. One is sure. Two is it may not really matter that much. And three is the Valley always has this fantasy of, like, it’ll be a solo unicorn, because they can only think about this stuff in terms of how it translates. [annoying Silicon Valley voice] “One guy—” Guy. “—will be sitting in a room and he will make an app and it will be worth a billion dollars. I’ll invest in it because I’m so cool.” We’re headed for that. That’s another narrative. Right?

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: The narrative of the individual doing the thing, and it’s like so powerful and important, is nonsense. It doesn’t mean anything. It just always comes back, like, “Yeah, you can go build your thing. Then what?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? Are you gonna also, can you get the LLM to market it? I guess. It’ll buy ads—

Rich: No, but let’s dial it back. Let’s dial it back.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I have a chain of flower shops in Chicago.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I own seven of them.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Right? And I’m having a hard time keeping up with my suppliers who obviously, you know, bring stuff in from different places. Some get flown in, they’re very expensive, because they’re tropical flowers, and some are local and they’re grown in greenhouses.

Paul: I’m trying to even think what a Chicago flower shop would be called.

Rich: It’s just meat hanging off a stem.

Paul: [laughing] It’s actually just a butcher shop.

Rich: It’s just a butcher shop is, really what I meant.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: I’m losing track of who’s got what. And I can’t, I’m not negotiating as well as I could, because I know three different suppliers have the same flower, but I don’t know how much each are charging. And I need software for it, and I got, lord knows, I run a chain of flower shops. I’m not gonna hire some fancy firm to build me custom software.

Paul: Accenture won’t return your call.

Rich: Right. Right.

Paul: You can’t afford SAP.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: It’s too much for you anyway.

Rich: And I use AI all day. I helped my daughter get into the right high school. I get recipes. I use it all day long. Is going to solve this for me?

Paul: Here’s what I would say is I don’t want you—I want you to focus on running your flower shop and making sure they’re running well.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: We are going to get to a point where you’ll be able to type something in the box and it’ll ship software.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Right? It’s got to get hosted somewhere. It’s got to be secure. Somebody needs to know who logs in and not. It actually should integrate with your accounting software and so on.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: So if you actually play out what real software is and where it’s going to land—and this goes back to conversations we’ve had, like, when I was like, “I think I can clone Seamless in a weekend.”

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: That’s a bad idea for you to chase that. You’re gonna spend a lot of time learning stuff.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And the thing, you’re not—what are you gonna deploy it on DigitalOcean and have MyFlowershop.biz. And then—

Rich: What’s a DigitalOcean?

Paul: Exactly. Right? Like, what’s a hosting environment? What’s AWS? So what you’re really gonna be doing in the future is you’re gonna pick a core platform, like, MyFriendlyERPforSmallFlowerShops.com, and you’re going to go there and it’s going to say, “What are the things that you need?” And you’re going to type them into the box and it’s going to customize for you.

Rich: Then I’ll have the software.

Paul: My guess would be that’s where your Airtables are going to land. And that’s where, from a consumer grade software coming up, you’ll be able to customize the consumer coming from the other direction. Salesforce is going to be like, “We already have all your data. Don’t take it out. That’s not a threat. Just happens to sound like a threat.”

Rich: Yeah, I just want my thing. I don’t know what Salesforce is. I tried Airtable once. My brother is a programmer and he told me to try Replit, and it looked really good and the colors were nice but nothing worked. I just want my thing. Can I have my thing one day? Is is there gonna be a place where I can go type in what my problem is? It’ll follow up with a few questions and then give me the software I need?

Paul: If history is any guide, there’ll be a million places. They’ll be your cousin who knows how to do stuff. There will be the customer—there will be the consumer tool like the Airtable or the Smartsheet and you’ll..

Rich: My cousin’s in jail.

Paul: Okay, no—

Rich: I don’t want to get into my family history.

Paul: You just watch The Bear too much. You have to calm down. [laughter] He runs a pork store. No, look, how is this really going to shake out? There’s a—take a deep breath out. There’s two ways that value can be created. One is the AI LLM companies capture all the value. Claude is like, “What are you even talking about? I got a baseline here for you. It’s called FlowerShop.biz. All you had to do was tell me you needed a nice flower shop manager and I’m going to build it for you.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Don’t you—it’s built into your account, and don’t you ever go looking anywhere else, my friend. That’s it.

Rich: You don’t know how my flower shops work.

Paul: I’m going to ask—

Rich: We’re weird.

Paul: I’m going to ask you some questions, because I’m Claude.

Rich: And we’ll tweak it.

Paul: And I’m really smart.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: I want to make all that money.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because I’m going public at $350 billion valuation and I need to capture, just like Amazon captured all commerce?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I got to capture all the SaaS.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Because that’s my future.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? So that’s one hypothesis is that absolutely giant orgs, including Google, are going to try to capture all of this.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: In history, whenever they try, it just kind of, they can’t squeeze, they squeeze too hard and everything flies out of their fingers.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Just in the same way that, like, Google, Microsoft, everybody has tried to create their own database tool, like a kind of, like, a spreadsheet-plus?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It never lands. People still keep using Airtable. I don’t know exactly why. It’s just, unless it is inside of your heart, people are just like, “It’s not a real product. I don’t want it.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: I can’t even remember the names of them. But you know what I’m talking about?

Rich: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Paul: There’s always like a—

Rich: Well, Microsoft’s notorious for it. They’ll always take a swing if something takes off elsewhere.

Paul: And it did—

Rich: Because they can grab a dozen people and try it.

Paul: Well, and then they can lock them into the broader ecosystem.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And they can actually—they’re doing it with Teams. Like, you don’t need Slack.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: You need Teams. And then you talking, they’re like, and everybody you talk to is like, [dejected voice] “Yeah, we gotta use Teams.”

Rich: Well, it’s also if you have Office 365, you get it for free.

Paul: That’s how you win.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So that’s one. Then there’s other, completely polar opposite, which is anyone can have any software they want and that will be the ecosystem. And the giant platforms will end up, whether they want to or not, enabling that. Organizations like ours or others will be flying around trying to figure out where the value is and delivering very specific kinds of value to very specific kinds of customers.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Because things are so adaptable and malleable.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So instead we thought we were in the software business, but everything is now it’s, like, going, and you just find really good clay by the riverside and you’re like, “I’m going to make you a bowl.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, it’s just, that’s two. And somewhere in the middle is where reality is going to be. Right?

Rich: Hmm.

Paul: The big platforms are going to try to grab the value, the little players are going to try to create value.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And it’s going to just swirl. And this was the story of the early web as well.

Rich: Yeah. Let me ask you the—okay, so let’s close it with this question, back to Ethan.

Paul: Okay.

Rich: Ethan seems to be hinting at a path where people like himself, who are curious, mildly technical, very good at, like, the basics, but not a programmer by any stretch, he admits that.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: He seems to be pointing at a future where a much, much broader population beyond engineers.

Paul: Sure.

Rich: Capital E. Are building things they need.

Paul: Sure. Absolutely. It’s coming. That could happen today.

Rich: Okay, but the picture you just painted was all about all these hurdles that I’m gonna have to go through as the florist.

Paul: You’re neglecting how hard it is to learn how to use a spreadsheet the first time.

Rich: True.

Paul: Right? We assume—

Rich: The barrier is higher.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: No matter what.

Paul: There is a barrier. That’s all you need. Have you ever seen people outside of New York City when they’re presented with stairs? Unless they’re in, unless they’re, like, in San Francisco? They’re like, “Oof.”

Rich: Gotta go up.

Paul: Oh no.

Rich: One foot at a time.

Paul: Not another one.

Rich: One step at a time.

Paul: Another one of these?

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: I think when we think about our own product and when we think about how we go to market in this incredibly insane, frothy earthquake of an environment, I think the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is how do we make it slightly more accessible and approachable every week?

Paul: Listen, dude, the minute everybody can do something, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: There’s no moat left for them to—so what I think is going to be really exciting is that if you’re someone who’s like, really, like, if you work in a role or a good understanding of statistics is valuable, but it’s, you have to, like, learn a lot of programming or get really good at Excel or do really specific things to make those reports? That’s going to get unlocked for you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So you can go do the other thing. You can talk to the constituents.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Or you can make a better website. You’re going to get to do the next thing.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And AI might even help you with the next thing, too. You should be thinking about that acceleration wave. Here’s what happens. I’m going to just tell you straight out. And you see it over and over. The engineers are like, “Now I can engineer 10 times faster.” The product managers are like, “I don’t need engineers anymore.” The designers are like, “Whoa, this thing can actually do some interesting design stuff. I don’t need product.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everybody is just, like, essentially saying, “I’m going to grab all that value just for myself and my discipline.”

Rich: And there’s one more wrinkle which takes all of that and makes it twice as hard.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Which is the users, the people who are going to use these tools don’t change their habits. People still think in dashboards. They still think in classic ways.

Paul: Yeah. Software has the shape it has for a very specific reason, right?

Rich: It’s not going to get dislodged in two weeks. It’s simply not.

Paul: Here’s the only thing I can say, and I say it over and over and over again, and I don’t think anybody hears me, it’s driving me bananas, which is figure out where the value is and then drive it outwards. And what instead I see is everybody—

Rich: Wants to capture it.

Paul: Just this, “Wow. Finally I got all that value.”

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: I’m gonna leave you with something. Because I want you to think about it.

Rich: We’ve threatened to end this podcast, like, four times.

Paul: Well, just—

Rich: But we’re a better pod—we’re a nutrient-rich podcast.

Paul: We sure are.

Rich: I try to listen to other podcasts. Can I go on an aside for a minute here?

Paul: You can do it. It’s our podcast.

Rich: [boring podcast voice] “I forgot to return my Christmas gift within the window.” [laughing]

Paul: Richard, my job is to drive value to as many people as possible from this very confusing moment, using the resources in my stupid brain.

Rich: Okay.

Paul: Okay? Like, this is real. Like, everybody’s kind of trying to figure out how to make this about them. It’s not about me.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: It’s about you, the user out there. You have more power than you ever knew. I will actually sit down with you and teach you.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: But most people are so fried they can’t listen.

Rich: Yeah, but I also think if we make it elegant and easy so it feels like magic?

Paul: That’s just product work. And that’s the hard part.

Rich: That’s the hard part.

Paul: Yeah. No, no. You know, things are better and they can move faster.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: This is what I’m getting at. Everybody can do it now.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And so what’s going to matter is discretion, utility, security, trust.

Rich: No, but better product, too. I think.

Paul: Better product. Even better product—

Rich: 99.9%, nothing against flower shop owners or butchers or both. 99% of those people, no matter how good Claude Code is—

Paul: You just described the most New York City store possible, is, like, the flower shop/butcher shop.

Rich: Oh, I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: None of those business owners are gonna want to come near Claude code today.

Paul: It’s in the future, too. And I’ll tell you why. Because look at how they just adopt Seamless.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Like, look at how they adopt Squarespace.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: They just—it’s not their job.

Rich: It’s not their job. Yeah.

Paul: We assume—everybody in our world tends to assume a natural curiosity.

Rich: Yeah, but when you lower the barrier 5%, many millions can come over the wall, right?

Paul: I gotta say, you have two choices.

Rich: That’s the opportunity.

Paul: You can say, a lot of value is about to get destroyed. Or you can say, I wonder what it’s gonna be like with 5 or 10 million more people who can ship software.

Rich: I think that’s the answer, right? Not a billion. Like, we shouldn’t try to replicate what just happened. That was unbelievable. Everyone knows how to type into a box.

Paul: That was like, “What movie should I see? Which sneakers are cool?”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Like, you can say those things.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: That is not, “I need to build—”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: If you want to build something complicated using open-source software?

Rich: Yeah, right.

Paul: There’s a lot you got to know.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: No, I think, but I would say, like, what a great time to reboot the curriculum.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Software skills are actually only going to be more and more valuable.

Rich: And accessible.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: We are Aboard. We are in the middle of this.

Paul: Whew!

Rich: We ship complicated software powered by AI. We also love to talk to you, talk to people about how they’re grappling with things. It’s very strange—a lot of our sales calls, Paul, are people who don’t really know what they want, but they definitely want to talk.

Paul: Our job is to take the value of this bizarre inflection and drive it to your organization. But you…be ready.

Rich: Hit us up. Hello@aboard.com. Give us five stars. Thumbs up. Subscribe, like, star. What else is there? What else? What other widgets can we glue on?

Paul: 2026 is going to be wacky, man.

Rich: Subscribe and follow.

Paul: Hydrate.

Rich: Hydrate.

Paul: Just get out there. Get hydrated. Get ready.

Rich: Yeah. ’26, baby.

Paul: Yeah. That’s right.

Rich: All right, everyone, take care of yourselves. Have a lovely week.

Paul: Bye.

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