(2026-01-31) Ford Ai Is Ushering In A Miraculous Age We Shouldnt Waste It

Paul Ford: AI is ushering in a miraculous age. We shouldn’t waste it. There’s a lot swirling right now

On a personal level, despite my co-founder’s best attempts, I keep moving forward on my Claude Code experiments...leaves me convinced that next year is going to be a different kind of year.

I recently had a good conversation with Dan Shipper on the Every.to podcast about some of these ideas, but I wanted to zoom out a little and just describe what I think is happening.

My observation is simple: Making a computer behave in a deterministic, predictable way requires a lot of skilled human labor, but, starting now, it will require less skilled labor

This kind of change has happened before

For example, I was an English major in college, not a computer scientist; building web pages to publish my own stuff was how I learned to program

My hunch is that, before 2026 is done, a smart non-programmer who can understand high-level concepts will be able to build a working, usable platform—say, a basic TikTok clone—with a few weeks of high-level training

So what? We know AI does stuff fast. A lot of conversation about generative AI has focused on “soft skills” type of tasks.

But programming is different. If you zoom way out, programming is about taking something very soft—human desires or needs—and making them follow a deterministic model.

The instructions we type into the computer (or copy and paste) break so much that most of the work of programming is actually debugging. And it sometimes took years to build a large robust software product, but taking something complex and human and making it deterministic—like health records, or college application management tools, or sales lead managers—drove so much productivity that we literally organized our economy around it, and coders became a big part of that.

Now you can describe, in plain language, what software you need, and an LLM-powered tool will break it into subtasks, take a swing at each one, test the swings, and then use the debugging information to take another, more refined swing. Given time and a little steering, they can—not always, but increasingly—provide well-tested, well-architected code that looks and behaves like code written by large teams over many months.

There’s a reasonable assumption that this is happening so rapidly that it will eat up many of the millions of jobs mentioned above. Then again, if the past is a guide, this new capability will not lead to the destruction of the software industry. Every one of the giant step changes had the effect of bringing more people into the software industry.

So maybe what this means is that (1) way, way more people can build custom software; and (2) that software can be built much, much more quickly

What would the world look like, I wonder, if, say, half a billion people could make software—ten times as many as now? Or five billion? I love software and I love mess; I say it would look awesome.

There are a lot of people who I think of as basically programmers; they just don’t usually work in code: Deep spreadsheet users, musicians yelling out chord changes, sociologists, pollsters, music producers, research clinicians, baseball nerds, and climate scientists. They think algorithmically, they get data, and they understand that you put information into a system and get different information out. All of them are going to be able to do really complex software things in the future

Of course they have to want to.

how can we welcome in a new group of algorithmic tinkerers? What databases can we help them convert, what websites can we help them set up, what dashboards can they use to do a better job? How can we bring the magic of taking something soft and making it repeatable to everyone?

And in the reverse, what can these groups bring to the table? Can sociologists bring us their simulations of mass behavior? Can scientists translate their models so that we can use them in our systems?

In short: I spent the bulk of my career saying “no” to new ideas and features because of cost, and it always broke my heart. Now, it feels like I’m in a position to say “yes.” We started talking about some new, weird website designs to explore and someone said, “It’ll take two months,” and I said, “Why not just do it in a coworking session next week and see where we get?” I recently heard from a not-for-profit focused on hunger relief that’s having a hell of a time managing multiple databases of donors. I can just say “yes” to them, and figure out the details later. This is new.

I can feel a lot of eyes rolling, including my co-founder’s. I get it. But I keep building apps and doing test migrations and building component systems, and I’m starting to sit down and teach people what I know. I like the spongey parts of culture, and I like determinism. I think it’s a bit of a miracle that I get to see all those boundaries collapse at once. Sometimes it feels like everything is a disaster, but at the same time, we live in a miraculous age—and I would hate to waste a miracle.