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PF Paul Ford 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.

“I don't believe that our life is going to be reading the code the robot produces. I think it will be a dashboard with metrics and lots of tests. And you will be responsible at a gestalt level for figuring out if this is good or not, and shepherding it along, and creating a better platform and better architecture, and thinking one level up. The tooling isn't there. So everybody's just jamming PRs into GitHub.”

The Aboard Podcast · AI Builders · November 2026

“I don't believe that our life is going to be reading the code the robot produces. I think it will be a dashboard with metrics and lots of tests. And you will be responsible at a gestalt level for figuring out if this is good or not, and shepherding it along, and creating a better platform and better architecture, and thinking one level up. The tooling isn't there. So everybody's just jamming PRs into GitHub.” — Paul Ford, The Aboard Podcast

Context

Responding to an engineer buried in AI-generated pull requests, Paul Ford describes what he thinks the job becomes once tooling catches up with AI coding.

Transcript

The Aboard Podcast Around 15:54 into the episode
Paul Ford

And it's really weird because it's like essentially you got a little, you know, you just sort of, you're getting, you were being exploited on terms that were good for you.

Speaker 4

Yeah.

Paul Ford

And now you're being exploited on terms that are feeling really shaky. So that's a real thing that's happening to lots and lots of people. I don't have, that's a structural thing right now. Like we can't fix that. But to what Rich just said, there's a new craft that is emergent. I don't believe that our life is going to be reading the code the robot produces. I think it will be a dashboard dashboard with metrics and lots of tests. And you will be responsible in like a gestalt level for figuring out if this is good or not and shepherding it along and creating a better platform and better architecture and thinking one level up. Yes. The tooling. Isn't there. So everybody's just jamming PRs into the tool GitHub. It's all very textual. It's very hard to sort of see and perceive what's going on. And these little robots are making enormous number of changes. So it just feels like you're eating. It's just oatmeal all day long. But I do think like the future will not look like that. It can't. It'll look like a little bit of an assembly line, a little bit of a control unit to decide how you want the assembly line to be working and so on. You can build that craft. You are an engineer with tools and…

Rich Ziade

Good formatting of your code or the number of lines you got something done for many, many people in business, were never meaningful. I never walked up to an, I've been a consumer of engineering output for many years, almost all my entire career. I've never gone to an engineer and said, wow, that…

Paul Ford

I'm going to be flattering to you. You're a pretty enlightened engineering manager. Most are not. No, no, no, but most are not actually. What I would say is what Rich Ziade is very nice. But what I would do is I would build a really nice dashboard that shows all the progress that I make and how I'm…

Speaker 4

near-term system. I would just make sure I am

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

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