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AH Anthony Ha Anthony Ha Weekend editor at TechCrunch, writing about technology, startups and AI policy.

“There's sometimes I want to grab my programmer friends and just be like, have some self-respect. Like, don't you want to make things that work well and are good and you understand how they work?”

The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · November 2026

“There's sometimes I want to grab my programmer friends and just be like, have some self-respect. Like, don't you want to make things that work well and are good and you understand how they work?” — Anthony Ha, The Aboard Podcast

Context

Ha turns interviewer and asks where craft and expertise come from if more programming is automated. He says people show him vibe-coded work and apologise for how janky it is.

Transcript

The Aboard Podcast Around 38:25 into the episode
Paul Ford

They're getting the news about the crazy thing that their founder did when Anthony reports it.

Rich Ziade

Yeah.

Anthony Ha

Wait, okay, so but let me take over this for a second because I'm always a little bit more comfortable asking questions than answering them. Is that we were talking about craft. Paul, you've written beautifully about sort of the craft of programming. I'd like to think that maybe there is a way where more of programming gets automated. That's fine. But then where does craft and expertise come from? What role do they play? Because I've had so many also conversations where people will show me something and then be like, oh, I mean, it's super janky because I vibe coded this. And it feels, I don't know, there's sometimes I want to grab my programmer friends and just be like, have some self-respect. Like, don't you want to make things that work well and are good and you understand how they work?

Paul Ford

I think there's just flat out, you need to understand the systems that you're building, right? And so if you're going to understand this, so I'm working on a funny thing that it extracts timelines out of Wikipedia. Like just, it's using Wikipedia, it's open data, and I'm just kind of, and I end up…

Rich Ziade

Here's what's still hard. And Paul talks about this all the time. If you wrote a book and you sold a couple of thousand copies and you really was hoping it would be a blockbuster, right? And you weren't just hoping for that for your career, but for money, but because of the potential reach of your…

Paul Ford

it's every author you just described. Yeah, every author,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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