Show Notes
Learn to code, they told us. Then the computers went and learned to code. Now anyone can do it, in theory, courtesy of Claude Code and other vibe coding apps.
Tech people I talk to are very, very excited about this. But they often have a hard time explaining to me, a non-coder, why AI-powered coding is such a big deal. And whether it’s a big deal to everyone who already codes or deals with software for a living — or whether it’s a big deal for everyone who uses software. All of us, that is.
Here to the rescue is Paul Ford, a guy who learned to code and who also learned to write and talk, like a human. Paul is the guy who wrote an entire issue of Businessweek dedicated to a single question — What is Code? — and blogs at Ftrain.com; but his day job is making software, which he does at Aboard.
Paul is not the guy who can tell you what’s going to happen to Saas stocks, or if AI is going to wipe out all the jobs, some jobs or will create a gazillion new jobs. Anyone who tells you any of those answers with confidence, he says, is making it up.
But he can tell you and me why the recent change in AI-produced software — something that really kicked in over the last few months — is changing his life, and why it’s going to change software for good. And he’ll help you think about what that means for you, a normal person. You’ll like this one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from Channels with Peter Kafka
It feels like 2022 all over again: Netflix has hit a wall, and is scrambling to respond. That means layoffs, a purge of its top content people and… what else?
Most of us stopped watching traditional TV a long time ago. Political campaigns, meanwhile, still spend most of their ad money there.Rob Flaherty has been trying to change that from inside Democratic politics. He’s been the digital guy for Hilary Clinton, and then Joe Biden, and then Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. (Here’s his post-mortem of that one.) Now he runs a political shop of his own.
Larry Ellison bought his son a media empire. What does he want from it? Vanity Fair’s Tom Dotan joins me to talk about the billionaire behind Paramount and Warner Bros., his connection to TikTok, and his politics. Tom’s reporting suggests there may be less of a master plan than you’d think. We also discuss why even Ellison’s enormous fortune has limits—and how his media bets are tied to Oracle’s AI gamble.Then, Kevin Roose joins me to discuss his new book, The AGI Chronicles, and a question I keep coming back to: Why did people who think AI could destroy humanity work so hard to build it? We talk about whether those same people can be trusted to slow things down, and I push Kevin on the gap between AI’s promises and what most of us experience. Plus: Why he left The New York Times to build a media business with Casey Newton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
David Ellison has won Warner Bros. Discovery. Now he has to figure out what, exactly, to do with it.
I went to Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters to try Mark Zuckerberg’s newest face computer: a $1,300 pair of virtual-reality glasses that are much lighter and cheaper than Apple’s Vision Pro, and still make you ask a very basic question: What am I supposed to do with this thing?So I asked my pal Mike Isaac, the New York Times tech reporter and longtime Meta watcher. We talked about why Meta keeps spending billions trying to put computers on our heads, why this version might have a better shot than the last ones, and where Meta’s fast-growing Muse AI agent fits into the company’s plan.Then we turn to the much bigger—and darker—AI story Mike has been reporting on: The fight over whether the companies racing to build more powerful AI systems can actually control them. What are the real risks? Who gets to decide what counts as “safe enough”? And what happens when the people building this stuff say they can’t afford to slow down? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices