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 fundamental, just grumpy narcissism of humans is an incredibly good force when it is applied in an interesting way.”
The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · September 2026
Rich worries that big enterprises will simply buy one cheap contract from a large AI lab. Paul answers that tens of millions of people want something other than two or three people deciding what happens with computers, and that people are too chaotic, greedy and discontented to let everything stay locked in. This is what makes him hopeful.
Transcript
like i just like our our ability to be discontented and miserable and greedy far exceeds our willingness Willingness to be comfortable with this is what makes you hopeful. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree. The fundamental, just grumpy narcissism of humans is an incredibly good force when it is applied in an interesting way.
I agree with this. Yeah,
that's that's what I see here. What I expect is near term, everyone's going to roll out their own version of these and so on. But what it did is it opened up a category of like, hey, wait a minute, this is a lot cheaper and faster. It does a lot of stuff I want. I'm a little tired of like, Claude 9.x is going to do the burberry. And you're like, I mean,
it seems like it's every month at this point.
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