Paul Ford: Hi, I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul: And you are listening to Reqless—R-E-Q-L-E-S-S, the podcast about how artificial intelligence is changing the world of software, especially business software. Yeah!

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Paul: Okay, so we are our own sponsor, but we don’t have to do anything with that right now, because we’re going to talk about our product and sort of some of the things that have happened in the last week, because they’re interesting! So let’s not do an ad.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Or let’s make the whole thing an ad. Everybody get excited. Anyway, so, I’m mostly recovered, but I was a little bit under the weather yesterday.

Rich: Mmm. Tired, is what I’m seeing.

Paul: Yeah… [laughing] I came into the office and you were like, “Why don’t you just go home? Just, just go.”

Rich: Yeah…you’re a little fried, it was a big, intense week. No one knows what we’re talking about. Maybe you might. You might know what it’s all about. We threw a big event—

Paul: Well, I’m leading with the hangover for comic effect, you know?

Rich: [laughing] Okay, you’re doing good, Paul. Keep going. Barrel through.

Paul: This was a big week for us because, look, I mean, we’ve been kind of working around different levels of abstraction in our conversation for a while, but our product is going to market, and it’s going to market in phases, it’s not like we’re going to be running TV ads in the next couple of months. But we did two big things last week. One is launch a new website to promote our product, Aboard. Aboard.com.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Check it out. It’s a pretty website. Looks good. And in launching the website, we changed kind of the story we’re telling. And now the story that we tell on the podcast and the story we tell on the website and the story of the actual product when you use it are kind of coming into focus.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And then the second thing we did, which actually wasn’t AI-related, but connects to the whole product, was we launched a whole new subproduct and added climate change data from from our good friends at Probable Futures directly into the product for anyone to use. And so, I don’t like, you know, launches are funny. I don’t really believe in software launches because you’re never done.

Rich: Mmm.

Paul: You know, it’s not like we’re like, “Okay, there it is.” But this feels more like—a good, healthy launch, we had a big party, we should also talk about that. It was well-attended. Things are good. A good launch should feel like things coming together, not like, because when you have a launch—

Rich: It’s not the finale, yeah.

Paul: Well, that’s actually a path to mental illness, right? [laughter] Like you do the launch and then you’re, like, I don’t think people understand how depressing software launches can be.

Rich: You should talk about that for a minute, because that’s a fascinating thing.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Just to context for the non-software—this is like, you know, you’ve worked on something for months. Designers, engineers, architects, QA. And then you pick a date and then you start to line up a website that announces everything. And then you launch. And then you imagine that there will be festivals in the streets—and there aren’t any. [laughing]

Paul: No, there’s none. And in fact, in the era, in the early days of the web, it’d be, like, people were still hungry for new stuff.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Right? And they would be like, oh, a new website, and it’s designed in a certain way.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Or they were early days of Twitter and Facebook. It’d be like, “Check this out.”

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: And everyone is tired of new things. They just want old familiar things.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: Basically. Unless you are throwing money into somebody’s hands, it’s very, very hard to get their attention. So the world doesn’t care very much. That is the fundamental reality. And—

Rich: There’s also, I mean, just to add to that, there’s just endless stuff.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: You can go on Product Hunt every day and there’s 50 new things.

Paul: And so it’s a really funny thing, because when I mentor, or when I advise younger people in the field, especially product managers, it’s like, just want to let you know, post-launch depression is, like, a real thing, and they’re like, “No, no, no, not a problem for me.” And then you see them and they just can’t believe—it’s so devastating that all the work you did… There was a poet named Don Marquis, in the forties, and he once described publishing a volume of verse as dropping a feather into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. [laughter] It may have been a rose petal, but it was that kind of idea. Just like you’re just [imitating noise of something dropping down a canyon].

Rich: Yeah, I think, you know, I think we adopted the idea of launch or release, like this big moment. I’m going to guess the only sort of analogy I can think of is movies. Like, when a movie is released, it’s a big deal. Sometimes there’s lines—to this day, by the way, even, it’s actually a fascinating thing to see. Even with the advent of streaming and TV and just uh, people watching stuff on their phones, a movie can still make a billion dollars.

Paul: Yes.

Rich: Because the launch and the release of it is still such a formidable thing. Music used to do that. Now albums are leaky. They just sort of leak out. I don’t even know if people know what an album is anymore.

Paul: What is the worst user experience than you go into, like, Apple Music and there’s a new album, but there’s only—

Rich: They’re greyed out. [laughing]

Paul: —there’s two songs, and you see the rest of the titles, and you’re just like, I actually don’t like, do you know how much you have to care about a musician for that to actually be impactful? Like, like—

Rich: [laughing] Well, it’s also, you know, it’s sitting in someone’s folder somewhere.

Paul: Yeah. It’s like, really? We’re gonna wait? We have to do this. We have to play this out. I just wanted to hear it.

Rich: Oh, and they unlock a song a week or every two weeks. It’s just the most ridiculous thing.

Paul: So, look, I want to finish this thought on launches—

Rich: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: Because I don’t think people talk about it enough. There’s also something else going on here, which is software is more like music now in that it leaks out. Like, you get those release notes in the app, and it’s like, “We’ve made it more secure, and we added a way to make your avatar wear a hat.” And then what’s sad is they hire the marketing firms and the PR firms who send out the big release, like, “Revolutionary new avatar hat functionality.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Everybody’s just fried. Because what happens is you just update everything all the time. Like, the whole point of software is you don’t have these big releases anymore. There’s no, like, Windows 95, where the Rolling Stones are going to play at the event.

Rich: No, you don’t. I mean, Apple, I think, is one of the few big names that still, it’s like, “iOS 18!!”

Paul: Yeah, but, man, that last event was a snooze.

Rich: It’s a snooze. And also they decoupled the hardware from the software. So I think in May, at WWDC, they talk about the future release, and then in the fall, they launch a new phone.

Paul: That’s right.

Rich: Which is millimeters bigger than the last one, and the camera is a little bit sharper than the last one. And that’s kind of where we’re at. Yeah, and I think, those moments, for the team that worked, and it’s sometimes hundreds of people—

Paul: Oh—

Rich: —at Apple, it’s thousands of people.

Paul: The dynamic island team, on iPhone. Right?

Rich: Do you think they paste the 20 seconds where Tim Cook talked about the camera?

Paul: Absolutely.

Rich: And be like, “Guys, we did it.” [laughing]

Paul: Absolutely. And then, you know, and the review, somebody, they cut, somebody puts the reviews together, and they’re like, “Boy, oh boy.”

Rich: All right, this is sounding like a bummer, Paul. I’m going to cut this short, man.

Paul: No, no, no, no, I just, like—

Rich: You launched. I’m going to say, I just want to say congratulate you. This was an incredibly productive, successful week. It’s the culmination of a lot of energy and effort.

Paul: And I will say: No post-launch depression, I felt really good. Okay, so here’s what we’ve done. If you go to aboard.com, you can see it, and if you go to the footer, you can click on it. There’s an organization that we’re really fond of. We used to work with them and we reconnected with them and said—they’re called Probable Futures, and they provide a whole bunch of climate information, climate science, climate-change models, and they make them available as maps and data. And you can do all kinds of stuff, and they have a great API.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: You can actually incorporate these maps right into your product. And so we did that. If you put an address, which we call a climate field, into Aboard, and you have to like, set it up special, this isn’t available, just like—

Rich: Right.

Paul: —with your bookmarks, you have to go to aboard.com/climate. And it’s still kind of beta, alpha-y. Like just, you know, get in touch if you need help here. We’re still small and we still want to talk to you. But you get a new field that you can add to any card, and it’s called a climate location. When you put an address in, it pops up a Probable Futures map, and you can see different kinds of risk about heat and precipitation and drought. And then you can also get much more information at the Probable Futures website, and we can help you interpret this stuff to you. Like I said, get in touch.

But what it means, and we’ve been building and testing a prototype product to help warehouses adapt before the worst effects of climate change hit them. Because warehouses are, like, they’re down in the ground, like they are. They’re prone to floods, the roads might flood even if the warehouse doesn’t flood.

Rich: Yup, yup.

Paul: Inventory, health, all kinds of stuff, right?

Rich: Yup.

Paul: And so we’ve been working with warehouses, wacky as that might sound, and showing them Aboard and showing them how to prepare their employees, prepare for hot days, prepare for floods, prepare for all this stuff.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: And so what we’ve done is, and this is, again, like, I mean, it’s a marketing product. This is not an AI story. We took a very clean, well-defined API in really kind of short order.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: We embedded it into our product, took a couple of weeks of development, and frankly, could have taken less, but we were thinking about design and lots of other stuff.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And now every single card in Aboard can have climate knowledge built into it. That knowledge is live. It comes from their API. So whenever they update the model, our system gets smarter.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And then we built a workflow to help the warehouse and to protect people, facilities—

Rich: Like a plant.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: So putting this all together over the—anyway, it took a couple months. And then we threw a really big party for climate week.

Rich: I mean really big. It was like, a couple hundred people showed up.

Paul: A couple hundred people showed up. And it was data, and there were a lot of other people sort of speaking and talking about the work they’re doing in fields like insurance. I’ll tell you what was exciting: This was—I’m gonna get to it. And this is the part of the launch I’m really, really proud of. The more I’ve learned about climate and the more I’ve learned about the world, I feel that software is increasingly disconnected from the physical world that we live in. Computers just kind of don’t have to care about the fact that they’re on the ground or that it’s getting hot. They can just kind of keep going.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: And what we did is we brought the physical world into our product in the form of climate data.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: I feel that, like, there’s more and more work to be done there, but like we kind of did something real as opposed to yet more software stuff.

Rich: Mmm hmm.

Paul: And we’re seeing in the conversations we’re having with the warehouses, they’re ready for it, they want to see it, they want to use it, they want to help their employees. So that, to me, like, the ability to get that together, throw the event, other panelists were there talking about the same kinds of things. I’m really proud of that because our product enabled that to happen. And now we’re going to go do direct things that are going to just directly help human beings.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, I want to share a couple of thoughts here. I mean you went fast. You assumed a bit of context here. You know, we built an AI software-generation platform called Aboard. Essentially, you can spin up bespoke, fairly customized integrative software quickly. We had an idea a month ago, maybe longer than that, but the actual work started weeks ago, and we executed it on the, on that idea and built something useful. And I think this is worth saying out loud: We’re riding a wave in a lot of ways, but this would have taken six months. Like it would have taken a really, really, really long time. And it’s kind of bananas—

Paul: I think it’s real that it took more energy to plan and organize the party than to integrate the third-party code.

Rich: Which I think is fascinating, right? Like, I think that part is fascinating, too. It’s so nice to field test this thing with a real goal.

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Because we could sit here and talk about, you know, stare at the ceiling and talk about AI and software building and all that, but we built a thing and we showed it to a room full of people and now it is available out in the world at aboard.com/climate. That’s not us selling, that’s us sort of showing that a lot of the world is shifting towards this incredibly accelerated way of working and building things. And what I think about as someone that has been in the room with a lot of leaders, the things that people worry about isn’t the work ahead, it’s that they’re going to pick the wrong work, and then they’re going to realize months in that they wasted a lot of time and money. And it’s a very strange thing to say, “You know what, can you do me a favor? Make this one happen. See if it’s right. And if it’s not, that’s okay.”

Paul: This is what is changing, right? This is the fundamental thing that is getting weird. And this is not just us. It’s that the entire world around technology is built on the idea of it being an incredibly high-risk endeavor to try anything.

Rich: Most don’t bother. Nobody wants to get fired. Nobody wants to look bad. So most don’t bother.

Paul: We talked about a company like Klarna getting rid of Salesforce, right? Because suddenly that’s on the table. They’d rather just sort of do it themselves.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: What does, what does that actually represent? What that means is that their entire relationship to ship risk on software has changed, because why do you buy Salesforce? Because it has already shipped.

Rich: Yup.

Paul: You have to live in their world, but you don’t have to take the risk of building.

Rich: Takes years for them to build the trust and the, like, brand equity so that—you know, the running joke and nobody gets fired for hiring IBM. You could say that about Salesforce. You could say that about a lot of really, really big companies who have proven out in other places. People worry about their jobs, and people also want to get promoted, and that drives so much of the thinking. And now the shift here culturally is that this could have not been good. We built, like, three different pieces of software for this event, the climate event.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: One of them might not have been great. We would have presented two. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah, right.

Rich: We wouldn’t have flinched about it. Like, we would’ve been like, “Oh, that didn’t work out as—it wasn’t as cool as we thought it was going to be.” And then you move on. That’s huge. That is a big, big deal.

Paul: I mean, let me throw you back on your heels and challenge you for a sec, because here we have that, we’re like, we’re saying, “Okay, the risk is so low. You can use these tools and you can build some stuff and it’ll move really fast, and Amazon saves a lot of money, and Klarna’s getting rid of Salesforce.”

Rich: Yup.

Paul: So now we’re coming in, we’re stumbling in, drunk, hungover. Maybe, maybe we’re wearing our loose-fitting blazers. And we’re saying, “No, no, no, but we’ll help you out anyway.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Why is a company like ours, which is essentially a set of software components, and then you’re going to orchestrate it with AI and it’s going to help you have a solution. Good for us. Good boys.

Rich: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm.

Paul: Why wouldn’t you just do it yourself? Why wouldn’t you just tell the ChatGPT, “Make me this?”

Rich: Because business people, people who think about using these things, don’t want to zoom in to Figma. [laughing] That’s the best way I can put it. And they don’t want to see your repo. They’re not interested.

Paul: I can actually make it simpler now that you’re saying it. They want de-risk. And when you say we’re going to do it all ourselves, that’s now, all the risk goes back into the organization.

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: Without corresponding upside, right? For Klarna, there’s a certain amount of upside to get rid of Salesforce for certain things maybe it shouldn’t be doing, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t get rid of Salesforce as my CRM right now. I think it’s pretty good at it.

Rich: Yeah. Also, I mean, when the electrician opens up the box and shows me all the wires, I’m impressed. That’s something I don’t know and I don’t understand.

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: But I gotta be honest with you. I start thinking about lunch about five minutes later. I’m like, “I’m really glad you’re here.” [laughter] Right?

Paul: You just unfortunately articulated, people would like the world to be rational, they would like it to be risk oriented, and they would like it to operate like a spreadsheet. But that is the truth. They’re like, “You know what? That’s really exciting there.”

Rich: I’m just glad, you know, what, he’s like, “Now, we got you running at 220 across these four breakers and only 120—” And I’m, like, thank God, you know, I’m really glad this came out that way. [laughing]

Paul: Yeah. Yeah.

Rich: I have no clue what they’re talking about.

Paul: And here’s the thing. Like, he’s really proud of the service that he’s providing to you in your home.

Rich: And I’m proud of him.

Paul: No, no. But he knows that all the other electricians in the world are second to him, and they kind of suck. He’s the best.

Rich: Fine.

Paul: Right?

Rich: Fine.

Paul: And the truth is, and the brutal truth of the world is that you, in your role, cannot really tell the difference between him and any other electrician.

Rich: I can’t. I can’t. And it only goes bad if—

Paul: Like, unless a spark is shooting out of a thing, you actually have no idea.

Rich: I have no idea. Right?

Paul: Yeah.

Rich: And look, that knowledge gap is often exploited. It is exploited by a shady electrician. It is exploited by a shady mechanic. It should have been a $40 hose. But, you know, they told you it’s the transmission. And I’m going to say this, and I—

Paul: [laughing] I love that our marketing podcast is landing on, “Listen, all practitioners are corrupt, but the buyers are idiots.”

Rich: Here’s, I think, what’s mind-blowing, and I’m still, I’m still workshopping the new message, dude.

Paul: That’s not it? You don’t. You don’t think we should double down on what I just said? Okay.

Rich: No. The new message is this: You just empowered a whole population and demystified a whole other population. I don’t know what to make—I think we’re going to, it’s going to take us a minute to process that.

Paul: I mean, you and I have been talking to powerful executives, and they’re just like, “Hey, can I do this?”

Rich: Yeah!

Paul: “Can I do this?”

Rich: Look, you committed 20 years of your career to building the incredible knowledge that you have, and all of a sudden, this little computer is barreling through and spitting stuff out that took you years to craft. It’s a mind blow—it’s a wild thing to have, all of a sudden, to be confronted with. As an expert, as a professional practitioner of some sort, to see a computer throw up fairly credible code is a hell of a thing.

Paul: Well, you know what? I’ve been through this twice, because I watched as people are like, “Look, it writes for you,” and I’m a writer. People would send me, like, “Hey, I had to write in your tone.” And they’d be like, “Write it in the style of Paul Ford.” And it would, and I’d be like, “Okay.” But nobody, nobody is going to hire ChatGPT to write one of my essays.

Rich: No.

Paul: But—

Rich: No, no, no.

Paul: So I was like, “Okay, here it is. Everybody’s probably taking it a little too seriously. They’re a little too upset about it.” But I’m a good coder. Not the greatest, but I’m definitely good.

Rich: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul: Like, I shipped code and I built my career on it. And I was like, “Yeah, no, this is about as good as I can do.” It was just flat-out real, right? So, like, it found its thing. It found the thing where you’re like, “Okay, it’s about as good as I am, as long as you specify what’s, what needs to be in there.”

Rich: Yeah.

Paul: And now word is starting to trickle out to the smarter executives, who are now going like, “Hy, what about—” And they want a different dashboard. And all the stuff that they haven’t been able to get, they’re like, “Can I have it now?” And they’re excited.

Rich: Yeah. You know, we tend to think culturally and socially about the impact of tech, and I think culturally and socially, there’s something, it’s going to take a minute, but there’s something dramatic happening. The cost of change is going down so dramatically, which means, essentially, that the potential risk is going down dramatically, because if you got it wrong after two weeks, it’s different than getting it wrong after six months. A consequence of that is that the expertise and the delicate handling of these things, because they all have been treated as such precious objects for so long, that only experts should handle, is being shattered.

Paul: By these things, you mean sort of, like, large code bases—

Rich: Design—

Paul: Legacy systems—

Rich: Code—

Paul: Mmm hmm.

Rich: Deployment. Testing. All of these things that required so much rigor and so much expertise and so much energy, all of that is being questioned now.

Paul: Which also means that the sort of witches and wizards who guard the cauldron are also being questioned.

Rich: That’s right. And my advice to those people, because it’s you, can you immediately get defensive, dude. I am a freaking seasoned software architect. I am an expert. My hour is worth a lot of money. And you get defensive and you get guarded about it.

There is good news in this, which is you are still very much needed. You’re just going to need to stand on top of these machines and really understand how to get things across the line, because they’re really only good at the easy parts. They’re not great at, like, really rounding it out. And that’s actually hard and requires higher-order thinking.

I’m not going to predict the future of AI and where it gets there, but we still badly need that expertise for the last bit, and that’s real. Rather than worrying about what got commoditized, go and run to the higher ground. That is my advice to the practitioners. To the business people? Have at it, man. You’re not allowed to say, “We can’t afford that.” It just got real cheap.

Paul: Yeah, we’re about to have a new-idea playtime party, in code. If we let ourselves.

Rich: Yeah. Mess around, mess around, mess around. A lot of great filmmakers let the actors kind of go and go off script and play a bit. And some of the best moments in all of cinema is because people took a little, played a little bit. And this has been such an industry that is so worried about breaking things. You can break them now. Break some things. You could throw it in the trash and try again.

Paul: Speaking of this, let me close on a question. Are you going to go see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis in a theater?

Rich: [lets out a heavy sigh]

Paul: Great filmmaker of The Godfather, Apocalypse Now. But apparently he has created an either compulsively watchable or completely bananas disaster.

Rich: I gotta tell you, I think I’d go see it, only because I just, I revere him and I think I gotta go see it. But I think this might be a disaster.

Paul: I think I want to see it in 4DX, which is when the seats move around.

Rich: [laughing] Seats start shaking.

Paul: [laughing] Get the popcorn flying everywhere.

Rich: I would say I once took a hot Starbucks with me to a 4DX movie. It just started tossing me around

Paul: [laughing] How’d that go? How’d that go?

Rich: Not well. Not at all.

Paul: Oh no. If you don’t know about 4DX, I don’t want to ruin the fun for you. You look it up and—

Rich: Just go look up a video, yeah.

Paul: If you like the feeling of seasickness while you watch an absolute piece of garbage, it’s, like…

Rich: The movie almost is required to be garbage.

Paul: It sprays mist. I remember once you, we took, we did a, like a company outing to a 4DX movie. Somebody gets shot in the head, and at that moment, it sprayed mist on all our faces.

Rich: [laughing] I think that was the blood splatter.

Paul: Like, even for me, I have a pretty high, like, tolerance for tastelessness. I was like, “That is not good.”

Rich: I have an idea for 4DX. I’m going to end it with a joke, Paul. Sophie’s Choice 4DX.

Paul: No!

Rich: No—

Paul: No!

Rich: —it pushes out a light, sort of chamomile-infused perfume at you throughout the film. What do you think?

Paul: Uhhhhhh…That’s one of the grimmest things. All right, my friends—

Rich: All right.

Paul: So look, be in touch. So we had a good climate event. Thank you for everybody who came out. We had some podcast listeners there and that ruled. Happy climate week, everybody. It’s over. Now we can get back to destroying the environment.

Rich: [laughing] Check out the new website. We’ve got a lot of new information about this amazing rapid development platform that uses AI to ship software. It’s at aboard.com. And reach out to us at hello@aboard.com. We can build stuff real fast for you, but we also love to talk. If you have questions, topic ideas, hit us up.

Paul: Yeah. Custom geographic systems, now a specialty.

Rich: Paul, get some rest, man. You did good.

Paul: Yeah, it’s time. I need a little break. All right. Hello@aboard.com. and we are grateful. Thank you.

Rich: Have a lovely week.

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