The future of code is exciting and terrifying
3/17/20261 hr 7 min
A new era of software development is upon us. Career coders are no longer writing code, but rather managing teams of agents that do the work on their behalf. You can Claude Code your way through seemingly just about any problem. So what does that mean for the software we use, and the people who make it? Paul Ford, a writer and technologist who both writes about code and manages a team of coders, joins the show to explain his somewhat conflicted excitement about the new crop of AI tools, and his worries about what they’ll do to the world. After that, The Verge’s Dominic Preston helps answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email vergecast@theverge.com!) about the differences between the US phone market and the global phone market, and whether US buyers are missing anything important. Further reading: The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun Claude has been having a moment — can it keep it up? How the creator of Claude Code sees the future of AI Ftrain From Bloomberg: What Is Code? Xiaomi, unlike Google and Samsung, thinks camera hardware comes first Oppo’s new foldable isn’t quite creaseless, but it’s pretty damn close Honor’s Robot Phone is a bad robot, interesting camera, maybe a friend Vivo and Oppo’s telephoto extender comes to iPhone Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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First 90 secondsDavid Pierce· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Vergecast, flagship podcast of vibe coding from your phone. I'm your friend David Pierce, and my power is out. So it's Monday, March 16th, as I'm recording this, and, uh, I live in the Washington, DC area, where we are supposedly in a few hours from now getting some, like, giant generational storms, uh, potentially even including a bunch of tornadoes. But the really fun thing is that the power is out several hours before it's even supposed to start raining. So it's just gonna be one of those days. We're doing super great. But this means that if you, uh, are watching this on YouTube, you get to see what my home office slash basement slash studio setup looks like when there's no lights and no fancy camera, and it's just me talking into my MacBook, because the Vergecast goes on. Anyway, on this show, most of what we're gonna do today is one conversation that I had recently with Paul Ford. Paul Ford, you might know, he's been writing about technology for a very long time. He also runs an AI technology company called Aboard. Paul has been thinking about technology longer than most. He writes a blog called F-Train that's been around for forever. He's also written for Wired and Bloomberg. If you remember that big Bloomberg Businessweek issue called "What Is Code?" that was like forty thousand words of just what is code, uh, that was Paul. Uh, he's just a smart person to talk to about technology and is one of the people I have leaned on over the years to just try and think through where we are and what's going on. So where we are right now