Reqless: Software in the Age of AI

AI is on the verge of utterly transforming the software industry, but how quickly will that change come? While Paul has been betting on a shorter timeline, Rich had thought the pace of institutional change would slow things down significantly. But on this week’s Reqless, Rich explains why his thinking has shifted—and how he’s coming around to Paul’s speedier timeline.

In the wake of the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Paul and Rich look towards the future with an AI lens—especially with the incoming Trump administration unlikely to put any regulatory guardrails on this rapidly evolving technology. What can AI do for people in our deeply fractured state? Are we doomed to poison the information environment forever, or could we use it to start building things that help people make sense of the world?

Non-profits often have tight budgets and specialized needs—and wind up having to pay a whole lot of money for consultants and imperfect, out-of-the-box software solutions. As generative AI promises to drastically reduce the cost of development, how will that affect the non-profit and NGO landscape? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich assess this question, and offer up both immediate and longer-term advice for organizations struggling with software right now. 

The Biden administration recently put out their first-ever National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence, so on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich unpack the memo and discuss what it might mean for the U.S. government’s future attitudes towards AI. Plus: They talk about recent developments with Anthropic’s Claude that allow you to control all the computers in the world.

How has public perception of AI changed over the past two years? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich welcome on writer and editor Josh Tyrangiel, who’s been the Washington Post’s “AI tourist” columnist since early 2023. They discuss what he’s encountered in various industries experimenting with AI, and the overall sentiments he’s observed as ordinary people grapple with this technology. Plus: He discusses his recent collaboration with Oprah Winfrey on an AI special for ABC News—and the remarkable lettuce she served him for lunch. 

Reqless tends to take a measured yet optimistic stance on AI, but a lot of people out there hate it—for reasons including the environmental impact, the dubious origins of LLM training data, and, of course, the looming threat of AGI, A.K.A. our future robot overlords. On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich discuss some of those critiques, as well as zoom out to look at the longer arc of the technology industry and its impact on the world, asking the question, “In five years, is the world in a better or a worse place because of AI?”

You’re a business stakeholder trying to evaluate AI tools for your organization. How should you assess them—and how should you measure the value of their outputs? On this week’s Reqless, Paul pitches Rich an acronym for this very task: TRACE. Transparent, Repeatable, Actionable, Clear, Efficient. How can these metrics help someone understand these tools before letting them into their org, and help them calculate the potential return on investment? Plus: Paul and Rich discuss a recent interview with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu on just how many jobs he’s calculated will be eliminated by AI in the next decade.

These days, it can take longer to plan the software launch party than to spin up the software itself—which is exactly what happened with Aboard Climate, a new integration Paul, Rich, and the Aboard team debuted last week. Hangovers nursed and moderately rested, Paul and Rich discuss the event and the feature itself—which lets you incorporate real-time data from the climate-change literacy organization Probable Futures directly in Aboard—before talking about how the building process reflects today’s rapidly shifting landscape of software development.

Does AI mean the end of software development jobs—or is this the start of a brand-new boom? Tech industry narratives are painting a gloomy future for coders, but on this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich take the opposite tack. AI will shift who has access to software creation and the way things get built—so how should technologists position themselves for the coming decade?

Is the SaaS era coming to an end? On this week’s Reqless, Paul and Rich discuss recent comments from Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski, who says that generative AI has allowed them to build internal tools that let them dispose of products like Salesforce and Workday. With the cost of building software on the brink of dropping precipitously, what does that mean for the SaaS giants going forward?