Files are over. All you need are URLs
Episode
36 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Investing, Startups, Artificial Intelligence
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓URL-as-document architecture: Storing document data after the pound sign (#) in a URL means the data never reaches the server — browsers process it locally. This makes tinylittleoffice.com documents fully portable: paste the URL anywhere and the recipient receives the complete, functional document with zero server dependency or account required.
- ✓AI-assisted development compresses build time: Ford built a complete office suite — word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, outliner, and encrypted link shortener — in approximately 20–30 hours of work spread across 10 days, primarily during commutes. Pre-AI, this scope of software would have required months of development and significant infrastructure investment.
- ✓Browser encryption is production-grade and underused: Modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, WebKit) include AES-256 post-quantum encryption natively. Ford implemented this without being a security expert by delegating cryptographic logic to the browser's own libraries, keeping the entire app to a single JavaScript file that anyone can audit on GitHub.
- ✓Social platforms function as document storage: Bluesky supports URLs up to approximately 4,096 characters, meaning a tinylittleoffice document of several pages can be posted directly as a Bluesky post. This reframes social platforms as lightweight, ephemeral publishing tools without requiring any dedicated hosting, CMS, or backend infrastructure.
- ✓Ephemeral software requires structural transparency to function: Ford deliberately kept tinylittleoffice open source under MIT license with no monetization, no hidden data collection, and no server-side storage. Any attempt to add tracking or a business model would destroy user trust in the core privacy premise — making radical openness a non-negotiable architectural constraint, not a preference.
What It Covers
Paul Ford, cofounder of Aboard, built tinylittleoffice.com — a full office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, outliner) where all document data lives entirely inside the URL itself, never touching a server, challenging conventional assumptions about where files and data should live.
Key Questions Answered
- •URL-as-document architecture: Storing document data after the pound sign (#) in a URL means the data never reaches the server — browsers process it locally. This makes tinylittleoffice.com documents fully portable: paste the URL anywhere and the recipient receives the complete, functional document with zero server dependency or account required.
- •AI-assisted development compresses build time: Ford built a complete office suite — word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, outliner, and encrypted link shortener — in approximately 20–30 hours of work spread across 10 days, primarily during commutes. Pre-AI, this scope of software would have required months of development and significant infrastructure investment.
- •Browser encryption is production-grade and underused: Modern browsers (Chrome, Safari, WebKit) include AES-256 post-quantum encryption natively. Ford implemented this without being a security expert by delegating cryptographic logic to the browser's own libraries, keeping the entire app to a single JavaScript file that anyone can audit on GitHub.
- •Social platforms function as document storage: Bluesky supports URLs up to approximately 4,096 characters, meaning a tinylittleoffice document of several pages can be posted directly as a Bluesky post. This reframes social platforms as lightweight, ephemeral publishing tools without requiring any dedicated hosting, CMS, or backend infrastructure.
- •Ephemeral software requires structural transparency to function: Ford deliberately kept tinylittleoffice open source under MIT license with no monetization, no hidden data collection, and no server-side storage. Any attempt to add tracking or a business model would destroy user trust in the core privacy premise — making radical openness a non-negotiable architectural constraint, not a preference.
Notable Moment
Ford pointed out that printing a tinylittleoffice URL as a QR code transfers the entire document into that image — once someone photographs it, ownership becomes impossible to enforce. The document now belongs to whoever scanned it, with no server record, no permissions system, and no way to revoke access.
Episode Transcript
Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. Your work lives in scattered places, and it's not only your team searching for context, your AI agents need it too. Jira taps into Atlassian's Teamwork Graph to bring that context together across Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, and makes it easy to share with agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot. Assign them work directly or connect your agents through Atlassian MCP. Learn more at jira.com. That's jira.com. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of everything afterthe.com. Your friend David Pierce. And today on the show, can you build an app that works inside of a URL? And what does that mean about where the computer is? But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. I'm Travis Larchuk, and this is ninety seconds on The Verge for Monday, 10/26/2026. The iPhone duo is in the wild, and all the Internet is talking about is crack gate. Some customers are posting pictures of inner screen damage apparently caused by a defective hinge. Hard to say how widespread the issue is, but if I were Apple, I'd hope to have two new product announcements lined up this week to take people's minds off of this. In AI news, looks like Anthropic will beat OpenAI to an IPO. It filed its S1 prospectus with the SEC today. Did Anthropic use Claude to fill out the form? We don't know. What we do know is that Anthropic took an $80,700,000,000 net loss earlier this year and that Anthropic has deals to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with SpaceX, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon over the next decade, which as you'll recall is the same timeframe some Anthropic researchers say AI could lead to the end of humanity. So spend away. From IPO to IP67, Apple put out a new water resistant iPad mini today. It's also got a bigger 8.5 inch OLED display. It's thinner and lighter, and it's $100 more expensive than the last one. But this is the opening act to Wednesday's main event, the rumored announcement of the long awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro. That's ninety seconds on The Verge for Monday, 10/26/2026. We talk a lot on this show about where the computer is, especially in a world of AI. Is the computer your computer? Is the computer in some Amazon server somewhere? Is it a thing that you self host? Is it this unknowable set of agents and AI systems that just become a black box you pour all of your data into? What is the right answer? How is any of this supposed to work? And in a really important way, where is my stuff? That's a hard question to answer in the year 2026. Paul Ford is the cofounder of a company called Aboard working on AI software and all kinds of interesting stuff. He's also a blogger and thinker and writer who has been trying to figure out …
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by Paul Ford
“Paul Ford, cofounder of Aboard, built tinylittleoffice.com — a full office suite (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, outliner) where all document data lives entirely inside the URL itself, never touching a server.”
“Bluesky supports URLs up to approximately 4,096 characters, meaning a tinylittleoffice document of several pages can be posted directly as a Bluesky post.”
company
“Paul Ford, cofounder of Aboard, built tinylittleoffice.com”
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