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 minute somebody starts saying you can parallelize this with lots of agents, you know you're in a pickle. Because that means more software, whereas absolutely no one outside of our world is actually sitting there saying, I need more software.”
The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · July 2026
Paul is describing his own feature creep while building with AI: a visualization nobody needs becomes the most important thing in his life, then abstracting it into a library does. He uses it to argue that the tools make it easy to produce more software than anyone asked for.
Transcript
And then while I'm working on that visualization, I realized that I could abstract it into a library so I could reuse it. And then you know what becomes the most important thing in my life?
Abstracting to the library.
Building a library. Component of the library. And so, and because this enables it, the minute somebody starts saying, you know, you can parallelize this with lots of agents, you know, you're in a pickle. Yeah. Because that means more software, whereas absolutely no one outside of our world is actually sitting there saying, I need more software.
No.
No one has ever said those words. No, let's
go back to the valley.
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