Voices
Paul Ford on the paradox of democratized coding: accessibility clarified who shouldn't be relying on AI tools
In a passage Willison quoted on September 12, Ford grants that AI writes competent code and has genuinely broadened who can program, then argues that broadening did not raise the quality ceiling: 'making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together.' His framing is that the tools made the distinction between competent and cutting-edge more visible rather than less, because the competent tier is now free. It is the counterweight to the Rauch position in the same 48 hours — one says the human constraint on language choice is gone, the other says the human constraint on hard software never moved.
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