The Vergecast: Ad-Free Edition The future of code is exciting and terrifying
Mar 17, 2026
Paul Ford, writer-technologist who runs Aboard and the F-Train blog, shares conflicted excitement about AI tooling and its impact on coding. Dominic Preston, mobile hardware reporter, breaks down global phone trends from MWC and why big sensors and telephoto tech matter. They explore AI-led ‘vibe coding,’ job risk versus usefulness, and which phone innovations Americans might be missing.
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Rebuilding A Personal CMS With Claude Code
- Paul resurrected a 25-year-old personal website and built a CMS using Claude Code that would have cost ~$25,000 to rebuild manually.
- He imported podcasts, articles, created taxonomy, deployed, added instrumentation and secure login via iterative prompts.
Product Layers Make LLMs Practical
- LLM products succeed when code and orchestration are built around models rather than treating models as standalone magic.
- Paul Ford credits Claude Code’s product layer (prompt management, code inspection) for making hard engineering tasks solvable in months instead of years.
Excited but Uneasy About Job Displacement
- Ford feels an ethical conflict: AI tools empower individuals but threaten many tech jobs that were reliable entry paths to the middle class.
- He likens his mixed feelings to experiencing a medical miracle (GLP-1s) that society wasn’t ready to manage responsibly.