Paul Ford
Writer and co-founder of Aboard, who has published essays and stories on Ftrain.com since 1997 and writes about software, AI and vibe coding.
“The fantasy is that you will put enough information into the system and it will resolve it for you so that you can avoid talking to people who may or may not like or trust you... The fantasy that you're being sold is that the robot will do it for you and it's never going to work.”
The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · September 2026
The episode is about employees sending long, legal-sounding AI-written complaints to HR instead of starting with a conversation. Paul's conclusion is that the tool cannot resolve a dispute between people, and that either way someone still has to talk to you.
Transcript
I think what is, here's what I've been getting at throughout, and I wasn't quite sure where I was going with this. The fantasy is of resolution.
Yeah.
The fantasy is that you will put enough information into the system and it will resolve it for you so that you can avoid talking to people who may or may not like or trust you or have to defend yourself or all of that. HR is scary. Where you feel just very unsure of yourself. Sure, sure, sure. The fantasy that you're being sold is that the robot will do it for you and it's never going to work. It's
never going to work.
It's never going to work. It can do other things, but it will never resolve that for you. And so I think that that is, that's something that's got to get baked into culture: that this is not really a tool for resolving problems.
No, it looks like a killer move, and it's actually not.
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