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.
“It gets rid of the concept of ownership. You can't own one of these documents the minute that URL gets into somebody else's hands. So, one of the examples I like to use is you could print it as a QR code. The QR code now has the entire document inside of it. Somebody else takes a picture. You can't own it anymore. It's their document.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Context
Ford on Tiny Little Office, his tool that stores a whole document inside its own URL, so nothing sits on a server. David Pierce had pointed out that pasting such a link anywhere hands over everything; Ford says that provocation is the point. He pitches it for pasting into chats and ephemeral work, not everyday office documents.
Transcript
…encrypted. So I, amusingly, hundreds of thousands of people are messing around with this thing. I have absolutely no idea what is inside. I don't know what they're doing unless they post it on Blue Sky. I do see that there's a lot of usage in many different countries, and that's all I know.
…about where data lives and then how we share it with each other. This turns all of it on its head in a way that is, I think, really useful in some ways, but also just so different that if I want to share something with you, I'm actually sharing it in a more open way in some ways. That I have.
It's exactly that provocation. That's what I'm messing with. That's what I wanted. What does it really do when you do something like this? It gets rid of the concept of ownership. You can't own one of these documents the minute that URL gets into somebody else's hands. So, one of the examples I like to use is you could print it as a QR code. The QR code now has the entire document inside of it. Somebody else takes a picture. You can't own it anymore. It's their document, right? It's on, and it's the tiny little office loads in, it evaluates the string that's in the QR code, and now it's their spreadsheet. It's their presentation. This is not for your day-to-day office work, it's for pasting stuff into chat, it's for ephemeral stuff, it's for stuff where you want to have just a very light privacy layer because you're dealing with, I don't know, private stuff, or you just don't want stuff saved. You know, the other thing tier two is just like, you know, one of the wild things about Google is like where it doesn't care. And where it doesn't care is, yeah, no, but it's like Google Drive sortability. Like when you go into…
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I mean, this goes back to what you were saying about kind of the advent of AI and vibe coding. It does feel like the reason this kind of software doesn't really exist is that it's the gap between how hard it is to make and how much sort of revenue potential there is in it has always been quite…
I spent 10 days and most of those were sessions where I was on the train going home. And I think like the last couple of days, I really did kind of do a lot of loops to get it. But no, but like maybe 20, 30 hours total, right? So like let's put that into context. That's not me saying what a good…
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