DHH’s new way of writing code

How has the creator Ruby on Rails changed how we build software now with AI agents? David Heinem Heyer Hansen, often referred to as DHH, created Ruby on Rails, Omachi, and is the co-founder of 37 Signal. He bashed capabilities of AI coding tools on Lex Friesen's podcast six months ago. Then, over the course of a few weeks over the winter break, he did a 180 turn and went AI first on everything.

In today's conversation we cover how David and his team at 37 Signals built software today and how AI tools are making them more ambitious than ever before. While Ruby on Rails and Linux could become even more popular than they are today, as they are both well suited working with AI agents.

Why taste and beautiful software are becoming more important, and why both standout designers and engineers who care about the craft could become more in demand, and many more. If you're interested in what one of the most experienced builders in the tech industry thinks about the practical utility of AI tools,

and how these tools could impact software engineers who care about the craft, then this episode is for you. This episode is presented by Statsig, the Unified Platform for Flags, Analytics Experiments, and more. Check out the show notes to learn more about them and our other season sponsors, Sonar and WorkOS. David, it's awesome to have you here.

Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming, I should actually say. You're in Copenhagen. That's my city of choice at the moment. It's a beautiful city. It's got so much going for it. And so what have you been up to? I'm always building stuff. I have been building stuff for a good damn three decades now on the internet. I got started back in ninety-four, I think it was, when I first got exposed to it, and basically just never stopped.

And in the past six months I've been building a variety of things. One of them is a new Linux distribution called Umachi. I switched to Linux about a little over two years ago I think now. First spent some time on Ubuntu having fun with that and then realizing I actually wanted to make my own system from scratch.

building it on top of Arch and Hyperland. So put a lot of time into Umachi. It got started as a summer project in between racing at the 24 hours of Lamont. There's a lot of downtime in that week. So I just started hacking on it and it really took off very quickly thereafter. It's been a Truly inspiring ride to see that even in a market as crowded as Linux distributions, there's about seven thousand different distributions out there. Some of them with long pedigrees and

many of them even based on sort of kind of similar vibes to some extent. There's room for something new. And it's a great reminder that all the ideas in the world may be taken and it doesn't matter because your spin on it isn't. And I put my spin on Linux, build Amachi, build the perfect computer system for me. And saw exactly the same thing I've ever seen whenever I build something that really just hits the spot for me personally.

There are thousands of others just like me, or close enough to what I like, that they find the same pleasure and joy in it, whether it was Ruby on Rails, Kamal, getting out of the cloud, any of these things, it's the same syndrome. Yeah. With with Rails, you were literally scratching your own itch. You were just building your own components and then open sourcing them. Is that how it started?

Basically, I picked up Ruby in the early two thousands and really put it to the test in two thousand and three when we started building Basecamp, and I did not have a mandate of what to use to build it. Prior to that, I'd been working for a lot of client projects that would say, well, we're building this in PHP because we have someone who knows that. So this is what you have to use. And then we were building our own system. We're building Basecamp.

And I was free to choose. So I chose Ruby. And at the time Ruby didn't have any tooling or ver not very much when it came to web application. So I had to build it all myself and that turned into Ruby on Rails, which is still going strong. I'm still very heavily involved with that. I think in some ways Ruby on Rails is having a little bit of a Renaissance now that it is one of the most token efficient ways of building web apps, it's ideally suited for the agent workflows we're dealing with now.

We'll see how long that lasts. Maybe all the agents are gonna be writing machine code or assembler in uh about five minutes, so maybe that comes to an end. But for the moment token efficiency still matters and it still matters whether the agents produce code that humans are able to read and verify. That may also come to an end at some point. But As it is right now, it's uh been a fun ride to just see these kinds of projects where I'm scratching my own itch.

resonate with a much larger community of people who then show up and want to help. I mean for Omachi, which has only been around for what is that, just over six months now. We have what, four hundred contributors who've made code changes to the distribution. And on top of that, we have tens of thousands of people who've installed it and used it as their daily driver. So I always Love that discovery of something new, novel, and inspiring like Ruby, or it sounds weird to talk about discovery of a

operating systems that's been around since what, ninety one? But for a lot of people, Linux now is that discovery because they have not been using it on their personal computer. So they're seeing it for the first time. And for me to help a new cohort of Linux users and hopefully even enthusiasts come to be because

I'm flattening the curve a little bit. I'm making it easier to get started. I'm making the default installation just look amazing so that they don't feel like they have to invest a hundred hours into tweaking the system to get going. It's really fun. But what's also fun, of course, is that both of these things, both Ruby on Rails and Amachi, were not just hobby projects. I love hobby hoppy products, and I will always do those.

But I also like to apply them to business. So at 37 Signals, we've built an entire business for 20 plus years on top of Ruby and Red. We're now running Linux on the majority of developer machines because we now have our own distro. So it's I mean people can choose, right? Can they? Well, sort of kinda. We started with uh with an open choice, and then at some point it just doesn't make sense anymore. In the same way it would not make sense.

for someone to be at thirty seven single and say, I wanna write this thing in Django. We're gonna use Python and this other framework, even if you have Ruby on Rails and you're doing that. So we pivoted from an early invitation to play around. That was what when I first switched to Linux, I just said like, Hey, if you wanna check it out, check it out. Then when things got a little more serious with Amachi

I just said, let's go all in. For everyone who's on the technical side of things, not the IOS developers of course, but anyone who's working with the web, who's working with Ruby, who's doing DEVOP They should be on Linux because first of all, that's closer to what we deploy. We've always deployed on Linux. We've been a Linux shop.

on the server side since day one for developers and system operators, I actually think it is a material advantage to be closer to your production environment and just be more familiar with the tools. Then on top of that, of course, we are building this distribution and we should have as many hands help out as possible. And given the fact that I'm the CTO of this company, I get to set the technical direction and this is the direction we're going.

Can you just like do a like just a very short recap of of you know like how you grew and right and right now, where are you? Like where where is the business as a whole? And you know, you keep you keep building you keep launching new and exciting and just cool stuff. I think Fizzy was the latest one. Yes. So 37 Signals was founded in nineteen ninety-nine. It started as a web design firm. And then I joined up in two thousand one, two years after. And for a couple of years

collaborated with Jason on these consulting projects. And then it was in two thousand and three we started work on Basecamp, released it in two thousand four. Actually either the day after or the day before Facebook went live, which is kind of a funny coincidence that we were of that same time and cohort. And within about a year we realized this thing was taking off and we went full time and switched from being a consultancy to being a software company. And that's now twenty two years ago?

Uh a little more than that? And in that time we've released a ton of products. Basecamp was the first. remains the biggest and most important, which is also kind of funny because you Sometimes perhaps have this delusion that as you learn more and as you get more experienced, you'll get smarter and you'll have better ideas than like

No, there's tons of people for whom their first idea was the best idea. And I have no shame in saying that Basecamp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business. that we've ever had. And I'm incredibly proud that we've been able to keep that going and growing and flourishing for over twenty years. Very few software companies, let alone software products.

can boast of that longevity and legacy. But we've tried a ton of things over those years and had some other great successes. We launched Hay dot com, our email service back in twenty twenty, which was a crazy mission when you think about it. Yeah. Here is a sector completely dominated by single player, Google, with Gmail that's a good product It hasn't really changed in 17 years, but it was really solid and lots of people are perfectly content with it.

they think. They hold this duality in their head where at once they both hate email, but somehow don't connect it to the fact that they're using Gmail, which I find curious. But either way We launched this that is not only a competitor to this very entrenched product that has probably a greater on market share in any major category than any other product I can come to mind of. In the US, I think Gmail is something like eighty five percent of all email track

Which sounds insane. Maybe it's eighty percent. It's incredibly high. It's basically Gmail and then All the rest is in this tiny little part of the graph. So we thought that after using Gmail, I used it since I don't know when I signed up. A few weeks into it I got one of those invite codes that was a really clever launch. And I used it ever since.

So that's literally seventeen years or something of that of Gmail usage. And over that time I built up a lot of opinions about things that didn't work quite like I would prefer it to work. And we put all those opinions into a new Software products spent about almost two years developing it, millions of dollars in accumulative R and D funds, and launched it in the summer of twenty twenty, which by the way, time to launch a product.

Twenty twenty wasn't great for a whole whole host of different reasons. We were kind of trying to slot in a can there just be a week where the whole world is not just Insane. Yeah. We finally picked a week. We went live and then we had the battle of our lives with Apple. Well I remember that. It didn't want to approve your your app.

They didn't want to prove our app unless we paid the toll fee, the thirty And they were basically willing to say you can't be in the app store, which for an email product like that is a death sentence. you have to be on not just mobile phones, but specifically the iPhone. This is true today. The majority of a paying customers

our iPhone users because that's the largest, most affluent market in the US and the US is the most affluent and market software market in the world. So for that business to work, we needed to be on the iPhone. After a two-week epic struggle back and forth, thankfully time to perfection with WWDC, where Apple preferably didn't want to look like the Goliath squashing a Developer, tiny developer. We ended up being allowed in and Apple sort of rewrote the rules after the fact to make it fit.

Um, it was a small victory, not the ultimate w victory, but at least it allowed us to to be there. And he ended up being an enormous success. In part, ironically, because Apple gave us wall to wall coverage for two weeks. When I look back upon that I think I wouldn't have gambled like that because the outcome would have been zero, right? Like uh Apple refuses our app. We sign up 200 people and the app is dead.

What instead happened was they gave us a multi million dollar launch campaign and coverage in all major media and we signed up tens of thousands of people in those first weeks. That was uh an insane event. But uh also very satisfying and The other satisfying thing was

I just love hay. I use it every day. I basically use Basecamp in terms of web applications. That's where we do all our collaborative work. And then my number two app and many days it's my number one app is hay,'cause I just do all my stuff on email. I am constantly communicating with people, I'm writing, I'm doing a lot of stuff in email, as many people do. And having that be a pleasurable experience and a nice environment and my inbox

being a little more sacred than what happens with Gmail, where total strangers around the world can just make your pocket buzz if you have notifications turned on, which they are by default. Just seems insane to me. Right? This idea that there's direct access to one of my most important daily priority lists. Like anyone can put something on that? Insane. Anyway.

Hey doesn't do that. We have the screener and no one gets to reach your inbox before you've said, I want to hear from this person. And most of the time I say no to most people, right? Like things end up in the in the screener and we have thumbs up, I will hear from this person, thumbs down, I'll never hear from that person again.

This this is how I reached out. I mean, we were I'm not sure we were connected on on X, but I I said lingo'cause your email is out there and your screener seems to have worked because it gave me the thumbs up. It did because the screener's me. So there's not even AI trying to suss out whether I want to hear from you or not. Because what turns out to be true is it's actually not that onerous to once a day go through your screener.

And say thumbs up or down because there aren't that many people in the world. And if you say no to the annoying, pestering salespeople who within Gmail managed to read your inbox seven times. then the workload is much less. And it's very satisfying, I will say too, because when I was using Gmail, I would get roped into this sales tactic that they of course rely on, which is that like you write back and say, like, no, thank you, I'm not interested.

And then they would respond again. Yes. And now you feel like wait, am I now obligated to respond to this person? I kind of feel like I am. And occasionally I would end up writing. And even if I wouldn't write They still have access to my inbox. So I would hear from them again next week. They have a whole drip campaign. They all fucking do, right? That any outreach is seven emails. It's not one email.

It's seven emails and if you show any sign of life, it's probably fifty-two. That's just not how it works. And hey, I say thumbs down one time, never hear from that person again. It's actually amazing how quickly you can curate your garden from that weed.

And then suddenly there's just beautiful flowers. Suddenly email is not a chore. Suddenly you want to go smell the roses. Suddenly the majority of things that end up in my email are things I want to read. It's from people I want to hear from. And that was really the fundamental mission for us with Hay. Can we make email lovable again? Email is so hated by so many people because the systems are so poor.

because they're based on the original premise that email is just what universities use for scientists to talk to each other and scientists have really good manners and will not pester you fifty two times about some stupid app they want to sell you. No, they're respectful and beautiful, right? Beautiful ideal, beautiful thought, beautiful protocol design for those norms and those people.

Then you let it into the world at large and you realize ah not everyone is endowed with such norms and such politeness and especially when salespeople get involved. So you need better defenses, and for me and for us. And for all our many customers, hey, is that defense? It is a way to love email again. And I find that it's really important actually to have a grand why. this is all the way back to Victor Frankel, the meaning of uh of man. Finding a Y allows you to walk through the snow. When it's

It's cold and uncomfortable and annoying, which many things are when you're building with computers. They are cold and uncomfortable and annoying. Now, it shouldn't be that most of the time, but occasionally that will be there. And if you have a really strong why, why are we building this?

Who is it for? What are we trying to do to improve the world? Even if that's not more grand than just letting people love email, it's a lot easier. And it's a lot more enjoyable to then carry whatever burdens you gotta pack. If you can set it up that way. This is a good time to talk about our seasonal sponsor, WorkOS. Having a strong why is what gets you to building something great.

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Focus on building your product, let work was handle the enterprise in perspective. With this, let's get back to David and the old way of thinking versus the new way of thinking. putting our your developer hat on, like can you talk talk me through on how how you built it? You said it was two years, but was it just one or two people starting to build it? I'm sure as tech, you obviously must have used Ruby on Rails a lot.

Uh and then I I don't probably some some native stuff as well, but the two years seems a lot, especially'cause, you know, you're you're a small company, you're an Imble, you're a great developer. I'm you hire great developers. Some of these it's been two years. What what took so long for. And of course it's a beautiful product, but right on the surface, I think as developers, we might have this this thing where I look at it as like two years with with a talented team.

That's the hacker news quipped to basically everything, right? Like I could have built that in a weekend. I mean, famously stated with Dropbox that I could have built that in a weekend. We could have at the original iPod when it launched, it was like five gigabit bits, uh no Wi Fi, uh whatever, less speed than a nomad lane.

So I get that because I also have that same instinct. I think that is our hoopers as developers. We think we are gods and we can make anything happen in no time at all. And you totally could. You can make a prototype happen in these days faster than

Faster than a weekend, right? Like in in a in a few hours we should be able to have a agent yeah but Figuring out what you actually want to build takes a lot longer. And arriving at something that's worth publishing takes longer still. At least it does for us and I think it does for anyone who

arrives at anything good. And the original hay construction was just me on the technical side. This is actually how we've started the majority of our major products is Either it's just me, sometimes it's one additional developer, but is in a tiny, tiny team, until we have a shape. Until we have a an architecture and we have a direction of where the product is going to go, I've found that you actually go slower if you pour a bunch of people into a direction

That is uncertain. If you don't know what you want, a million people's not gonna build it for you. You have to figure out what you want. We can talk about this later, but this is where AI's very recent progress is changing things dramatically. It is now quicker to arrive at what do I want. But Hey. It was me. And then it was Jason and uh one designer, two designers, very, very small team. Trying to figure out the shape. Trying to figure out if you're

taking on Gmail, you can't just do Gmail in blue. No one's gonna buy that. No one's gonna be interested in that. It's gotta be novel, which means it's well not just novel, it's gotta be good. It's gotta solve problems that People haven't even articulated they have with Gmail because the articulation people have of their problems with Gmail is I hate email. Which as we talked about is a bit of a misdirection.

My contention is you hate Gmail, and not just Gmail, but most email systems build on the old way of anyone has access to your inbox and all that stuff. Figuring that out, figuring the shape out takes a while and it's also fun to do in these The original base camp is built the same way. It was just me on the technical side. Is this a shape up intoology?

sh shape up thinking in trying to actually endow the designer with an intention of how should it work, not just how should it look, and figuring out it's also how it should look. products should be beautiful and they should be unique and appealing and so forth. So that also takes time. But figuring out how it should work is primary. Figuring out where's the epicenter, what's the most important part, and teasing all that apart. But

With Hay, as with all the major products we've done, we start with an absolutely tiny team, often just one individual on the programming side and then one or two individuals on the design side. And then we go, we go, we go, we go suddenly something clicks and we go like this is good. There's something here. And then there's a bit of a ramp, we take on a few more people. And then when we get within maybe the last

Twenty percent. We go, okay, now we know what the terrain looks like. We can go way faster if everyone piles in. So one thing that is super interesting and you might take it for granted, but it's very different to how most startups uh that raise VC money, which I'm very familiar with. Uh and and big companies, Uber, Facebook, you name it. The way projects would start there is you take the product manager who works with maybe maybe half a designer and comes up with a spec.

And then developers g get involved later. And what I'm hearing, what is very novel to me is you take one or two designers and a developer. How do you think about designers even? Uh you recently hired a a designer, uh Zoltan actually, who I'm I'm I'm chatting with uh on on on on the side. R a great guy. But my sense is you think of designers a little bit different than potentially the rest of the industry does.

We very much do. Designers at thirty seven singles are not just here to make a spec look pretty. They're here to find what the spec should be. They're product managers in many ways. They are the Finders of the how and the why in many cases, deducing in some cases customer feedback, in other cases just pure intuition, and distilling that into what should we build and how should it work?

And then on top of that, they're also responsible for building it. They're responsible for doing the CSS. They're responsible for doing the HTML. They're quite often responsible, at least dabbling in the JavaScript and the Ruby code to get just something functional. And now

with agent acceleration, they do the whole thing. Not necessarily as it will be merged, but the whole thing in terms of here's the final shape. and design of what it should look like. But I do think we are very peculiar in this sense. And we have found this when we've been trying to hire designers, that many designers working other companies are not used to also wearing the product manager hat, figuring out what we should build.

And wearing the implementation hat, shaping it into CSS and HTML. I found that when you combine these three hats into one, you have an individual who know the materials they're working with, know how they stretch. know which way the seam is supposed to be cut and therefore works natively with the fabric of the internet. When you're working directly in CSS, when you're working directly in HTML, you're just much more in tune with what this medium wants.

And I find that that's probably quite similar if you're a jewelry designer. You should know the properties of gold. You should know how it bends into strength. Some engineering understanding of load bearing structures and so on, not to the degree that

the architect is just gonna design the whole thing and then we start pouring concrete. You still have uh engineers helping you out, but the more you understand the materials you're working with, the more you're likely to come up with something that cuts along the grain. And therefore ends up feeling correct, feeling good.

Just a quick hop to Apple. I think this is one of the reasons why some of the historic super fans like Daring Fireball and others, uh Gruber, have been disappointed by the new direction is that Apple used to stand for these economics. Exquisitely designed native Mac applications, which is a dying breed. Like they're essentially dead. Now we have Electron, which we can talk about that too. It gets way too much hate in my book. There's crappy implementation of that, but it's just a web and a box.

But the disappointment with losing that sense and I think it's about the same thing, that the Mac its native Feel has a stretch to it. Like the button placements, everything you would call a native application either feels synthetic or it feels authentic. And today it's all synthetic. There's no nothing authentic about it left. And I think

For the web it's the same thing. Now, the web is a much, much larger platform and therefore it's gotten much more attention. So there are way more people working on that quality of it. But at the large companies it's exceptionally rare to non existent to have that kind of dynamic. I think some of that is gonna change. Agent acceleration is gonna empower designers to be more capable in these ways. So

The industry's coming a little towards our fundamental stance, which is funny too, because the same is true on the programming side. When I talked about Basecamp being a product of just me on the programming side for long.

That for so long sounded unambitious or even wrong or even to the point of lying from some quarters of the internet where like, yeah, but you can't build anything real, anything meaningful, anything big unless you have a team that's much larger because it's just gonna be a toy produ uh uh product, right? And my insight from the start was that's of course bullshit because you just haven't used Ruby on Rails. You just haven't used the acceleration that's possible if you use better tools.

Now we're all realizing that. We're using realizing, oh, so if you use agent acceleration, a single individual actually can build something highly valuable. And that's just fun to see that like the industry is coming towards, oh, smaller teams are better because now the cost savings you have on the logarithmic curve on communication costs.

starts to be relevant. And this is one of the things maybe we can talk about this where agent acceleration is really changing the Bargain between junior developers and seniors developers. But before we go into that do I feel that you very much value software engineering as a craft, which is very obvious. But what I'm sensing is you're valuing design

user experience design, designing on software design, like you know, like building stuff that feels good, may that be software, hardware. You also value that as a craft and and you look for it. Like these two things. Do I sense this? I mean I think aesthetic

It's truth. When something is beautiful, it's likely to be correct. I think this is true in mathematics, this is true in physics, this is true in a lot of different domains, that when you arrive at something that has the correct aesthetic quality. It's like we have an intuition that guides us towards that level of beauty because it also happens to be correct and noble and something to aspire for. I also happen to believe it's what makes people happy.

Being surrounded by beautiful, well functioned. अप्ट Is a key part of happiness. In fact, I'll put it in a negative way too. One of the great sources of anxiety and frustration is.

When everything is shit, when everything is laggy, when that touch interface doesn't register, when you have to restart it, when you're calling a travel agent, they can't do something because their old shitty copalt system won't let them. Right. Full of Not just in shittification, that is things that went from being good to being bad, to just plain bad. Just plain awful. And I think it is a serious source of malaise for civilization.

That we could literally raise the bar of human happiness if we were surrounded by more beautiful items, more beautiful systems. Both in the sense of its aesthetic exterior qualities, but just as much in terms of its aesthetic interior qualities, because I find those two things are usually in perfect harmony. The reason why Steve Jobs cared about the inside of the box.

was because he intuitively knew that the kind of people who care about the layout of the print board will be the kind of people who sweat the details on the user interface, will be the kind of people who sweat the ergonomics of opening the case. So I think there's Essentially no choice. If you are a person who is attracted to these aesthetics, which I think is everyone, there's just varying levels of um awareness about whether you are or not, but that you want to make it all beautiful. And

For me, Ruby in particular has been disseminal language because it produces the most beautiful code. In my book there's barely even competition. Like there are other things that can be beautiful In a way, like I find looking at small talk, for example, very beautiful in its minimalism, but not the house I want to live in. Ruby is the house I want to live in because it's got that aesthetic quality while not being rigid about its ideology, which is a very rare aspect too. I

More often find now we can refer to Ive again, is that when someone is obsessed in this way, they are a little narrow-minded. Like that's the trade-off, that's the price. And I find that Ruby has somehow managed to be both broad scoped yet also intensely focused on on this. But overall, we have to have beautiful things. We have to work with beautiful tools. We have to produce beautiful fluid interactions.

This is how we should see ourselves as craftspeople, that we care about polishing it until there are no splinters left. How is AI changing how you work? And how do you think it's changing your craft? Or just let's just talk about the craft of again, you're you're hiring people in thirty seven signals who similarly care about design and and software, crafts quality. How is changing what you get out of the craft or how it's how it's making it better or or worse.

in some ways. I I I just wanna, you know, start with like how has your view changed? Because the last time you you talked in in length about this that was on Lex Fr Friedman's podcast and you were still rightfully so very skeptical of of AI. It was a different set of tools. It didn't work as well. And I think you you you went there bashing it pretty hard. But things have changed since.

This is a nuanced point and maybe it's self-serving, but I don't actually think my opinions have changed. What have changed is the circumstances and the facts. Something I called out on that Joe and in many other writings was right from the get go, I could see that we had something new and novel here that was gonna change things.

Chat GPT, its launch, what, three years ago, was clearly and obviously, even at the time, something you would mark on a timeline. Like, here are all the important things that happened in the history of computer science or the world, you ain't

There's the launch of Chat GPT. And interacting with computers in this way and seeing them reason, even if that's still a disputed term, perhaps. To me it seemed obvious that these things were freaking smart. Smarter than me in many ways. Whether those smarts came from parenting weights and data con late so what, we don't know how human consciousness works. We don't know how human wisdom or intelligence works. Barely.

So let's not be so categorical about what constitutes consciousness or intelligence. At least I find no utility in that distinction, even if it's fun to ponder. But what I found with the Early models and the early ergonomics where it was autocomplete, where it was copilot and cursor in your editor trying to guess the next character. It would be something littering it, right? Yeah.

I found it infuriating. I found it as we're trying to have a conversation. You won't let me finish a sentence. You're constantly trying to Oh, is this what you meant? Was this what you meant? You're like, shut the hell up. Can I just finish a thought? And I thought even if it is

capable of occasionally accelerating. It's also wrong so often that that acceleration feels like a nuisance, even if it's somehow net positive, which it wasn't for me, or maybe I gave up too soon. But I just did not enjoy that. I didn't think the models were good enough. I thought the way of using the models with autocomplete versus agent harnesses, which is

dreadful, annoying. In fact, to the point that I got a little pessimistic about the direction of the industry for a hot second because I thought this was what we were all going to do. We're all going to sit and do tap, tap, tap. ご視聴ありがとうございました Cur Cursor even have they had I even got a one of these one of their swags was a tap key. Exactly. It felt very uh and I I haven't I I got it from them, it's really cool, very well designed and all that beautiful design. But

Dystopian. When I see that and I remember that was a meme for a while, just we only need three characters on the keyboard, right? I thought of that episode of uh The Simpsons where Homer puts a mechanical bird on the keyboard that just dips down and hits enter because all he's been doing is hit enter, except

Suddenly there's a warning about the nuclear core overloading and the bird just hits enter and the whole thing burns down. I'm like, wow, that's quite a parallel. The Simpsons really does predict everything. But I did not like that. style of using it. As much as I r retained my enthusiasm for the general direction of travel, because it truly is amazing. And the amazement to me, I tried to embrace as a tutor model, as a pair programmer who doesn't drive.

It was amazing to have ChatGPT and the other models just be there for like, I don't understand this fully. Here's a piece of code. Here's a question. Can you tell me why it works like that? Can you tell me what's wrong with it? Because That's how I've been using the internet since day one, right? That's what Google was for me. Here's an error message.

Here's our concept. Maybe I find something on Stack Overflow with some passive aggressive nerd telling everyone why he's so smart. And then at the bottom there's the solution I'm looking for. Or I don't find it at all. And that's just kind of frustrating. With the chat GPT model. I very often got a really good explanation.

Yeah, this was actually uh I talked with uh game developer, Jonas Tyroller, who who built this really cool best selling game. I I love playing it. And this was during this time of of the tab completion. And he said that in his the way he works is he just turned off all auto completions in his ID.

uh because he got annoyed by it. And then every now and then he went to Chat GPT to ask something or have a longer thing. And then he had the mode of like, I'm thinking and I'm doing the stuff. Oh, I need some help. Okay, here's a specific And I'm taking and and i somehow it felt that, you know, like he j he was in the zone the whole day by controlling it. And somehow those habits sounds like you know, you're saying the same thing. It kind of took it away from you. Exactly. Exactly.

A little worried that that was gonna be the direction that i we were all gonna be the bird and I didn't want to be the bird. Then I was like, Well what should I do instead? Maybe like farming potatoes? Like that's a long tradition here in Denmark. Maybe I could take that up. But then thankfully Two things happened. A clot code.

in what is that? Uh starts in the spring, gets going sort of over the summer, then by the fall has some traction on a new way of using agents to help you code, were with the agent harnesses, right? This is really where we transition from AI to agents. Suddenly the AI has tools. It can use bash. It can use

Everything you got on your terminal, it can call the internet in for appropriate information. It it just is capable of doing more than just reasoning about a thing you gave it, uh or input from a source context file. And then the models. Opus four five to me is the other one of the other points we're gonna have on the line where it's the first model that continuously and consistently would shock me. with the quality of its output. It's quality of its analysis on the basis of vague input.

And even more importantly, the quality of its output. It produced code I wanted to merge without. Very much if any alteration. And if I did want to do alteration, I could tell it. And it would remember and it would not make the same mistake next time. That to me, the combination of those two things, was the unlock. And and you have a high.

I as we've talked about now at length, like the aesthetics of the output really matters if I'm gonna r look at it and I'm gonna review it. I'm gonna give you another anecdote in a second where those things don't even play in. But when I'm using agents to work on Ruby code, I want their code to look as good as mine.

I'm not gonna merge their stuff if it's sloppy, no more than I would merge the work of a junior developer who has not yet fully internalized our style and so forth. So I want it to be on par and on parity, and the early models just couldn't. That didn't mean they couldn't produce working software. At least some of the time. They could. I'm very impressive. I mean I remember when I did my first snake game, and I'm like, holy smokes, I've been wanting to do this since I was six years old.

Like I've been wanting to I have this idea, I wanna get it into a game and I was able to see that in I don't know a few thirty seconds. It was done with the game, I'd copy paste the HML. Magical experience, right? So I think that ramp was very interesting because it actually took a while until we found the form factor of the agent harness of the terminal interface.

that to me was the the big unlock from this is interesting. I wanna have a conversation with it to I want it to write my code. I will now start any project I'm starting with. I'm starting agent first. And That's a massive ship. And it just happened from November twenty seventh, I believe, is when Opus four five dropped. Now, there are other people who have different points they felt like, Oh, is Opus four oh or There's also

Some people talk about Son and three seven. There are other earlier checkpoints, but there I do feel like there's a general consensus I can lean up against that Kapathi and others have expressed like, yep, it was right around end of November, early December.

who works worked at larger tech companies, it was the winter break because people just, you know, like ever ev like the whole industry shuts down for two weeks, save for a few places where you're on call. But again, no production work happens across the industry. Mm. My sense was that people were playing with it because you give it your side project, you never never finish, expecting not to finish, and then they also got shocked. Yeah. And that was just a complete

Sort of break, right? Like if this was a movie you'd hear the scratch sound. Like you're like, wait, what? Revine, what I I feel it was the most collective shock which happened individually and then people came back in January and e everyone a s especially because a lot of the decision makers who are you know like CTOs, director of engineering, etcetera were not as hands on but

They were hands on and a lot of them it's this weird thing where they came back and they start to mandate or like say, All right, you guys need to use this because I've seen the future. I've literally used it. You need to see it. So it's we're going back to a little bit of the hardware. Like people were

trying to give, you know, like the the new hardware into people's hands, saying, you need to experience it'cause you're yes, you're not gonna believe it, right? There's something with this as well where you you really don't believe it. We can talk about this and whoever's not tried it or not had that aha moment, I don't think we can convince them.

This is another one of those cases where words just are not effective. You need to sit down in front of open code or whatever harness that you use, use one of the frontier models. Start with that. Start with Opus. I'd say start with Opus. It's the best frontier model. Other models are better at other things, blah blah. But if you're just gonna work on a piece of code and you wanna see what the current frontier is and if you I mean

I'd be shocked if any of your listeners haven't done it already, but if there should be some left, now is the time. And I don't even want to say in the sense I I found it really off putting this trend on X, where unless you've uh internalized everything there is about uh AI like you've been left behind.

Shut up. First of all, patently not true. You could literally pick up everything in the next three weeks. This is the other magical thing about this kind of project, right? Like or uh or progress. When if we had been having this conversation in spring of last year, everyone'd been like, MCPs, MCPs, MCPs. And do you know what? You can now manage to just have jumped over that entire thing's and go straight to CLIs and skills.

FOMO that unless you're up on all of it as it happens play by play, you're left behind is complete and utter nonsense. That being said, I can still appreciate that some people were early. And for me, Toby Lutke at Shopify is the main individual who saw this and saw the changes that were coming from it.

way earlier than I did and have really helped drag me into this by constantly sending me like, Hey, do you look at this? Look look at this and I do think that's actually quite helpful. It's quite helpful to be surrounded by people who have a higher

Faith or maybe their eyes are a little further up. My my eyes tend to be relatively close to the road, like right in front of me. And some people have a gaze that's a little higher up and sometimes they see things that don't come to pass. In this case Topey saw exactly where we were going two years ago. And I finally saw it because the road came to me in December. And it's funny because.

Along the way I kept saying, like, yep, when the models get good enough, when they can do all this thing, it's gonna be amazing and thinking, Wow. eighteen months, two years, maybe it's five years. It's very hard to predict these infliction points. And I think the industry itself didn't even predict the infliction point, right? You have an entire city, Silicon Valley and surrounding areas, uh San Fran.

focused on making this happen, but predicting exactly when the hockey stick starts hockeying is very difficult. But then it happened. And now my daily work is very different. So My daily work is Agent first on everything. Going. Shifting Agent First is a good time to mention our season sponsor, Sonar. When shifting to Agent First work, one thing that inherently comes up is the quality of the code.

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With this Let's get back to David's Agent First Workflow. As my main harness. I also use cloth coat a little bit. They unfortunately, got that early lead. Opus is currently the best model. So then they started thinking a little bit in that, like the game is single match instead of thinking it's multiple rounds and yanked their subscription from open code. So if you wanna

use your Mac subscription, you kinda have to use their harness, which I don't love it. I think it's a mistake, but leave that be for a second and let's just celebrate the fact that they have the best model. And Opus four four five, four six is also nice, but four five to me was the infliction point. Creates a lot of composition'cause everyone wants to catch up and overtake them.

Of course. And especially because you see anthropics revenues. I think start of the year they're at nine billion. A few years a few weeks later they're at like whatever, fourteen. Now they're at nineteen or something. It's just the craziest rocket ship you could possibly imagine, which is inspiring all this capital to be deployed for competitors and so forth, which is wonderful. Great to see. So even if I don't love everything that they do and

Clawed coat is not my preferred harness. Manage to hold two things in your head at the same time. This is what I also tried to do even with Apple, which is I have serious griefs about how they operate and act as the gatekeeper and all the other nonsense we've talked about. And then I also keep my I just love computers hat on and go, I like the new Neo. I might even buy a new Neo and just see what is possible at$500.

For Opus, I have no qualms about using Opus. In fact, whenever I feel like, uh, this is a really hard problem, I go to Opus right now. But I also use other models. And one of the things I've incorporated into my flow is to kind of have two models going at the same time. At different speed. So I use Tmux.

And I have this layout thing that's built into Amachi where it'll start my NeoVim editor on the left side and then it'll start two panes on the right side. On the top is open code running Kimmy K25. And on the bottom is Opus running in Cloud Code. And then at the very bottom I have a strip of terminal. And almost everything. I started in one of the agents. And I tell'em what I want. Then I hop over to Neovim.

First I do uh space G G to look at the um Lacey Git diff on it. What's this is changing? If it looks correct, I'll just commit. We're we're done. Great. And then sometimes it doesn't look correct, and I'll I'll go in and also the code myself. But the ratio and how quickly the ratio changes is still astounding. I went from early November last year, I'm code first everything. I started the editor

I'll spend whatever long it is and then at some point if I get stuck or if I want a second opinion, I'll go ask my friendly clanker to give me a second opinion. That's just not how it is anymore. Now I start with the agent, now he'll give me the draft, I'll review the draft. And I'll make alterations if need be. And then just recently I flipped it even further. So we're working on a CLI for Basecamp. So we can get full agent accessibility for Basecamp. Astounding. First actually let me rewind.

As soon as I got pilled on how good These agents were and how capable they were, I immediately tried to raise my gaze up toward the end of the road and think, do we even need MCP? Do we even need CLIs? Do we even need anything? Can't the agent just figure it all out? This was when I installed OpenClaw. So I installed OpenClaw on a VM and I thought, What should I do here? Let's see how far we can push it and what it can do by itself. So I thought I want this claw in base camp.

I want this claw in Fizzy. Let me just try to invite it as it was a human. So I just wrote it. Can you sign up for Fizzy? I'm not giving you any tools. I'm not giving you any MCP. I'm not giving you a CLI. I'm just telling you it's at uh fizzy.do. Go sign up.

And you see it, chuck along and then yeah, I've signed up, but it's asking for an email address or I'm trying to sign up, it's asking for an email address. I'm like, Oh yeah, right, you need an email address. And AJ doesn't have an email address. Hey, go sign up for hey dot com. I'm like, it's gonna fail. And it's chuck, chuck, chuck. Uh I've signed up for hey.com. Here's the password. Write it down somewhere safe. I'm now also signed up for fizzy.

I got the confirmation email in my inbox. We're all good. What do you want me to do? What? Are you telling me that you could one shot signing up through a browser to these things. Now, maybe that shouldn't be surprising. Maybe that was already possible with Sonnet three or one of the early models. I don't know. But when you experience it yourself on your own damn claw that you're just telling over telegram. to do something and it's signing up for products autonomously.

That's pretty startling. It was for me. And then the next step I went like, well it ca if it can sign up for Hey and can sign up for Fizzy, let me invite it to Basecamp. So I sent it an invitation to its own email address. Here's the invitation link to Basecamp. Can you just jump into the AI Labs Lab uh project that we have and introduce yourself to the team?

You go, Hey, I'm David's assistant. I it's very nice to meet you all. I've read back the transcript a little bit. I see you're all excited about these things. And you just go again, What? What? And that was fun because it showed me that even if it was gonna take a while, it did take a while. It took a well a while. This is e um agent terms. It took, I don't know, seven minutes. That was like, oh, it feels like an eternity. But

It was able to do it, and that seems like the in state. The in state is that agents will not need any of our accommodations. They do not need any on ramp. They're not coming on a little uh wheelchair. They'll be coming on bionic legs and running five times as fast as you in about two seconds. Which we'll get to in a second too, the speed uh aspect of it. But then you also realize, okay, well I can't just sit around fiddling my thumbs until AGI happens. Let's build for today.

And that's what we've been building for Basecamp, we've been building C L I, we're gonna build it for Hay, we're gonna build it for Fizzy, we're gonna build it for everything, even probably some of the legacy products. And uh what I love about the CLIs, as much as I also love it about these harnesses is that they validated the fundamental Unix philosophy from like, whatever, seventy one. You should just build small tools that can interoperate with pipes and you can Philosophy, right?

It's the total Unix philosophy. And that is actually the magic to me about seeing everything having a CLI. Basecamp is easier to use now with the CLI. No, no. It's that GitHub also has a CLI. And Sentry, I don't know if they have an CLI, but they have an MCP. That you can tie all these things. And now you can tell an agent, hey, we have some errors in Sentry. Can you go check'em out? Then post a write up to Basecamp iterating what's wrong. Then go and GitHub, come up with a pull request.

Post a comment back to Base Camp when you're done and now we have a central record in Basecamp where we're following the work as it's going on, while we have an agent doing work, looking things up and again When we try to talk about it and relay it, I guess some people can see it. And now OpenClaw has enough videos on YouTube and so forth so you can get at least a passenger ride. But try it yourself with your own product, with your own tasks and with your own prompt. And you will be pill.

You will be simultaneously incredibly excited for what we've been able to make sand do, the silicon, the chips, the weights, the whole thing. How? And then also a little bit anxious about where that's all gonna go. And it's in that tension that I and probably anyone else who's been pilled on this live, right? Wait a minute, if we're already here, what is not eighteen months from now?

Like, if in the last three months we've upended my entire understanding of what's possible with computers, what's the next three months look like? What do the next nine months look like? Yeah, this this this is where like I I was a little bit on on your end for a long time and I think I still am where I believe what works and I'm always skeptical of

projections, yeah, Moore Moore's law broke down at some point. I I lived through ever and said it'll continue forever, and you know it c and then it broke, as we all suspected it would. But then it found another way. I think it's a good point about the Moore's law, right? It broke for individual cores. Yes. How much can you push that? And then we just went, Well, what if you just had what's the latest chip? Two hundred and fifty six on the AMD cent chips, right?

And even when performance broke we we we went into power consumption and size and all of those things. So yeah, like but it's it's harder for me to also just to say oh it's going to stop here because we've seen it grow, we we we know the approaches that they're taking, that's it's larger and larger training sets, and it's been working so far. And there's also the bitter lesson which

I think I I think it is a it's such a short paper that it's just so worth reading. I think it's one of probably the most popular papers outside of academic circles. Yeah. Because it just lays out this thing that we we don't want to believe that we want to believe that our our knowledge, our understanding is superior, that you know, you and me knowing how to code or me putting in these fifteen years or however long it's been, it's special. Sometimes it shows it it's it's not as special.

What's interesting actually is like right this second, this snapshot in time, it a little bit is, and this is a funny verification that's happening junior versus senior developer, is that the most successful and applicable agent acceleration that I've seen at 30 times SQL has been from the most senior people. The people who are able to validate whether what the agent produces is suitable to be deployed to millions of people.

There was just this story yesterday about some of the major outages at Amazon. Yep. And Amazon's own internal analysis essentially pinned that. We can no longer let junior programmers ship agent-generated code to production without review. And the problem with that is. First of all, I think that's the realization most companies are now having across the industry. Whenever it's mission critical for something of that nature, we cannot yet rely on the agents to have vetted it all.

And eight or and junior programmers are not capable of figuring it out. Therefore their role is suddenly more tenuous than it was six, nine months ago. Because a senior programmer can. And this is why senior programmers are getting so much more acceleration. They're able to

First of all, working parallel with lots of agents, but critically examine the quality of the agent output and have a high degree of confidence of whether this is gonna work or not, or redirect them if not. Because this is what made them senior in the first place. This was the role that they had, that they had the

uh long insight and history and overview of the architecture, how does it all fit in? Is this gonna work? Is this not gonna work? This was the role they played to junior programmers. But now they can play that role.

to agents. And agents are faster at following instructions and redirections and suddenly you have senior developers who can five. 10X? Their individual productivity. And now this is the second order effect. If you manage to five X or 10X a senior developer that person's value per hour just went up ten X. Now, take that hour, instead of that person spending him with the agents just shipping stuff and making things better, they spend that hour as they would before.

Teaching a junior human how to do things better. There's something in that equation that's in play right now, and it's not clear how it's gonna map out. Now. One way it could map out is that the agents will get so good that they stop making mistakes. They become senior in their capacity to ship work and code. This is what my bet would be if we look

X amount of time forward because this is what just happened with cars. So self-driving Teslas now drive better than humans do. Not all humans, not in all circumstances, but on average. It's very possible that if we're able to delegate the mortal risk, the highest criticality we basically deal with on a daily basis.

sitting in a metal tube along other metal tubes that go sixty miles an hour where you can die if someone makes a mistake. We delegate that to an agent, well they can probably figure out how to make the code work too. Right? So I do think it's coming, but who knows when, who knows how. Right now, we're at a stage where the bulk of the benefits are accruing to the most senior developers.

And also I I wonder just like with self driving, like you realise there's always KV. So for example, inside companies where it matters, when you're a startup, you have zero customers, it doesn't matter, you can one shot it and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work and it you know it crashes. But

inside these companies, uh, at Uber um just got details on how they're adopting AI and and they have all these tools, cloth code and and all these things. But what we realize is, well, when you just put it in there, They have all these internal monorepos, they have their ticketing systems, they have their SLAG, they have so much they have their RFCs, design documents on on how and why they have this jumble of a mess uh with microservices, which

Which was a fun fun way that we we originally connected like many, many years ago. But what they found is they built a bunch of internal systems, a lot of it to help to feed N C D's agent harnesses and now they're working better. But the you know, this where we are right now is is there's and this is why if you're a senior engineer in one of these companies or a staff engineer,

at like Uber and you move to Google, uh suddenly you're not gonna be as valuable or as efficient for a while until you learn all the systems. Right. So I I wonder if just like with self driving, you know, self driving works great. I is well I was an SFN and L L A and way most day day drive. So nice. Like My Teslas was driving in LA, driving us to the airport every time, the whole family. I sit peacefully, watch the road, but do not steer at all on that entire journey.

Well, except uh my my Waymo got stuck because uh uh uh a truck was parking on a on a narrow street and uh a car had a bike shed and I I I I I knew that it should I should not go there but it didn't know. So a human oper operator came in.

But anyway, but even with Waymo's, you know, like there's there's things like there's it they drive in pretty good weather. They've they've been mapped out. So I wonder if in software engineering I Mm I wonder if this has these parallels where w we have all of you know, like these companies have their their special land specialized landscape and once you map it.

Once you do all the tools, once you figure out these things, and with self driving, it took it took ten years, right? Like I was at Uber when they bought the self driving thing and we were hearing in the news that you know next year it's all gonna be over for drivers and no. Yes. There were not gonna be steering wheels anymore. Which by the way is an amazing anecdote because it just shows Elon's

total faith in his mission because in seventeen when he made that proclamation, it wasn't AI. It was five hundred thousand lines of hand coded C plus plus. Right. Like that model was never, ever going to get us to the full self driving. But he had just total faith in the vision. And then eventually, hey, here along comes AI and it's so good. And if you train it on billions of hours of road use, it actually can do it. And it can do it better than most humans. In fact

A pretty good driver, I'd like to say. I'm not the best chauffeur because my I don't know, impatience have a tendency to provoke the throttle. Uh that's not always as pleasant for passengers as it is fun for me. And when I let uh the Tesla autopilot drive, it's just the best chauffeur in the world. It is just perfectly Then you. Better than me. Better than the Queen's chauffeur, I think. I its throttle actuation and deceleration is godlike. It's actually

AGI like or ASI like in its application within that narrow domain. And of course, when we get these anecdotes and these examples of holy smoke. Not on it didn't take ten years for the self drawing, it took ten years from the programming, but what they were doing for seven of those years had nothing to do with what they're doing with FSD now because the FSD that's based on AI hadn't been running for that long. But

The infliction point of I think it was thirteen one, FSD f thirteen one, like the first version, you're like, wow, this is pretty good, but like I better pay attention. Thirteen two. 140, 142. Over the course of eighteen months we went from Yeah, it's pretty good, but like I'm gonna pay attention here to why is there steering wheel?

And that acceleration, that short period of time Of course it's something people look to when it comes to programming and go like, well, if we're here now and senior programmers still have to review it because otherwise you're gonna get all your whatever four severity, eight downtimes at AWS because some AI pushed out some nonsense.

what is it gonna look like when they take the jump that FSD did over the same period of time. Now, I also think you can go completely crazy trying to just sit and soak in all of that. This is what I tried to do over the past year. Go, I'm really excited for where this is going.

But I'm also gonna deal with what's possible today and what's enjoyable today and what we do right now. I'm not gonna try to plan what my life looks like twelve months from now when maybe we do have ATI or we don't. Now there are other people who do that very well. I just watched an interview with Leopold

on Dwarkesh from last year. He's thinking like, what does twenty thirty look like? What does the whatever ten gigawatt data center look like? I'm like, I I'm very glad we have individuals who put thought into that because that's not my favorite spot to be. And I think most people are not that good at polishing the crystal

is a little bit unsettling as a software engineer in the sense of like clearly this is where the industry wants to go. This is where a lot of effort will be put. There will be a lot of businesses, software businesses built on this, a lot of VC money raised on this, by the way, who are going to tackle this and they will either like succeed or die. That that's what that's what these companies do. But today, what do you see

It at thirty seven signals, uh, with software engineers. Well you you of course have ex mostly experienced engineers, although you did hire junior engineers as well. How is there kind of work changing? How is there satisfaction with with work changing?'Cause that's also a thing, right? We we keep arguing about like is is it making us more miserable at these things? Is it what we want to do? And then how is it changing for you, right? I think it

That's the biggest revelation, actually. More than even the capacity of the agents is my enjoyment running them. When I was on that Lex interview last summer, I was talking about, do you know what? I don't want to be a project manager for agents because I had the mental model of a project manager of humans.

And I thought, like, that's not what I enjoy. I don't want to be that far away from the production. I want to be in the mix. I want to have my hands in the code. What I d failed to realize at the time was that running a bunch of agents. feels less like being a project manager for agents and more like stepping into this super mech suit where suddenly I don't just have two arms, I have twelve and I can now look at seven screens at the same time running five keyboards.

I'm still the one doing it even if I'm not typing this. as a keyword in a program. I have been hyper accelerated as a programmer. It's a different kind of programmer, but it still has the same affinity to aesthetics, at least when I'm producing Ruby code. And I'm able to combine that while being vastly more productive on a bunch of things. It's also like getting an incredible brain upgrade on even assessing issues. One of the pilling moments I had was before the releasha Omachi three point four.

I went into GitHub and we had, I don't know, two hundred and fifty PRs pending. And I kinda just sighed a little bit and go like, two hundred and fifty PRs if I spend I don't know, fifteen minutes on each PR, like how long is it gonna take before I get to the end of it? And I thought, Do you know what? Let me try something else. Let me just try to ask Claude

To I'm not even doing anything with a system. I just do review URL and the URL is the issue. Yeah. Or is the PR. Are shocked. In 90 minutes, I think it was, I w processed 100 pieces. And s it wasn't that I merged all of them. In fact I'd say I merged a small minority, maybe ten percent got merged as is. Then maybe twenty percent got merged, but with claude implementation. the programmer had correctly identified an issue.

But hand rolled some code that I could see I didn't want to keep. Or sometimes I couldn't even see it. I just asked Claude and they say like ah, it's not quite right. And then I just asked Claude, Can you just clean room this? This is the right problem. Let's fix it, but let's do it right. It would do it right away.

In exactly the style as I would have written the rest of Amachi. Now, this isn't the high code of something, it's mostly just bash code. But there's still a shape to bash code and how you want it to look and can feel coherent with the rest of the project. Agents opus in this case would just nail it. And then the second half of it was split between twenty five percent things I then just realized, I just don't want this. It shouldn't we shouldn't have it and twenty five percent Claude telling me

Maybe there's something here but it's a really not a good implementation. We don't have a straight shot to make a great one. A hundred issues in ninety minutes and I sat back. This would have been A week's worth of work? Days at the very least? What the heck? And even more than that. Claude's analysis of at least half the issue. Pertain to things I knew nothing about. where it was undeniably a smarter, better reviewer, programmer.

that I could ever dream to be. Well, not dreamed to be. But was in that moment. No, but That was why the PR sat in the first place. In many cases. I would look at it Because he knew that. I think there's something here, but like then I now have to read up on this D bus thing. I have to figure out is this the right way of doing it? I don't want to just merge something that then has other issues. And to be able to do that, agent accelerated. Top twenty programming modes.

I I like how you put agent accelerated and it sounds like it's especially efficient for work that is waiting on you, but you don't want to do it or you're not as skilled of doing it, but it's a hassle to delegate.'Cause again, like you you y you have a team, right? Like like like you But you probably didn't delegate it because you probably knew that it wouldn't make it faster or better.

So I I I wonder if there's a part of AI that'cause we talk a lot about like, you know, like uh companies love to measure, especially larger ones like efficiency PRs and they want to see impact, but about the impact of doing work that we would have not done before. That's the kicker for me. That's the fact that the pie is just exploding right now. It's not growing. It's exploding. The number of projects we have tackled internally that we wouldn't ever even have

Contemplated starting on are Legion. We had a great project where normally on performance work you worry about uh P fifty, P ninety five, P ninety nine. Jeremy, one of our most aging accelerated people. When like what about P one? What about the floor? Can we fix the floor? What is the floor? And he went like, well, right now our floor is, I forget what it was, four milliseconds. Let's say that, right? Well, actually four milliseconds can add up.

If you have a bunch of fast requests, they can still, it still matters. And he just went like, we're gonna do P1. We're gonna optimize P1, literally the fastest 1% of requests. We're gonna make them even faster. He took it from, I think it was four milliseconds to less than half a millisecond. He 10x to performance that I was like, I would never have signed up on this. And he did the P1 project over a couple of days as like a side gesch. because now he

Could. Now he could. Because he had a hunch, he had an intuition that there was something here. He let agents run with it and the number of PRs that like art we fixed this, we fixed this. I think total the PR uh the P one project, I maybe misremember, but I think it was like twelve PRs. Like just fixing all sorts of things. Where I look at the single PRs and I'm like

Yeah, actually. Mm okay. Yeah, makes sense. I look at the total sum of it. You've changed twenty five hundred lines of code. You're like you've done that in a few days. I've never heard anyone do P one because it just it feels like a vanity project. Exactly. It makes no business sense. Right. I I mean, this is not true, right?'Cause everything adds up, but but you know what I mean, right?

I know exactly what you mean. And this is exactly why the explosion of the pie suddenly lets us look at problems we would never have contemplated looking before. It's funny. I remember this scene from Terminator two where they found this chip from the Terminator in the first movie and he goes like This thing gave us ideas we would never have investigated before. And like there's some beautiful parallels here about like maybe we're about to build the Terminator, the cliche.

But also we're getting ideas, we're getting ambitions we would never have looked at before because suddenly the cost of exploring a hunch has just dropped by a thousandfold. I do this all the time now too. I'll give it some vague, crappy instructions. Just because like I have this fleety idea. I haven't even crystallized it into a neat prompt. I just want to see something. It'll p and then I go like, oh yeah.

Delete. As in revert code back to normal. I was like before I would be a little more precious about 75 lines of code because it would have taken me two hours to do him. Now there's no residual value to any of this stuff. And I can just go like

Uh show me a draft. I feel like a little bit like a king where you just go like show me the the analysis of the far from regions. Where are we with the tax recipient? And this boy's like uh this uh servant is like yes I I shall do so and return in three weeks. Except like you can just wave your hands around and agents just come back with answers to stupid questions, terrible ideas, then suddenly it wasn't so terrible. It was actually a great idea and you go like, waha.

I did this with uh Wamachi. I haven't even pulled the trigger on it yet. But one of the things Wilmachi people have been asking for since the beginning is dual boot. being able to install Linux next to the Windows installation so that they can still play all their games. And I just went like, do you know what? I have more than one computer. So when I play play games, I can just do it on the PC. It's not a me problem. Yeah. I totally get why a bunch of people wanted.

I'm not heavily inclined to spend four hours figuring it out. And I just uh a little while ago went like, oh, this is exactly the kind of problem, like I don't have to figure it out. Just make the agents figure it out. So I kicked off Initially the process of just coming up with a plan, this is a pretty g big change, right? Like if you fuck up someone's boot records or you overwrite their petition.

Criticality high, which was one of the reasons I didn't want to engage with it. Secondly, it's a little finicky if you want uh Lux encryption on the Linux partition, but the Linux partition doesn't own the whole drive. It's a little hairy. I didn't want to take on the criticality. I'm like This is perfect for the kind of agent stuff. So it started off basically just having Opus and Codec.

ping pong a plan. Like I'll just I asked Opus first, like come up with a plan for this. But it thinks for minutes and minutes and it's to come up with a good plan. And then like kick it over to Codex and like critique the plan. And then I had him ping pong back and forth a couple of times. And at the end looking at the plan going

Yep, that's a good plan. We should totally do that. And I can't wait to kick that one off and just go, Yeah, now Omachi does dual boot. Not because I did it, but uh thank your uh your helpful clanker. That level of ambition is still something I've yet to internalize. Like even just that that like hey, here are these hunches or demands, projects that I would like to do and maybe someday and you could kick it up on a hunch while you go to lunch.

That is a new world. Which is also one of the reasons I think a lot of people are thinking, well, the model continues to improve. But even if we somehow hit a wall tomorrow. The bitter lesson is no longer true. There's actually a limit. It's nineteen trillion tokens. That's how much they can learn. Not true at all. But if it was and we had to be stuck with these models, we would spend the next decade.

just getting more and more out of them, learning how to use these tools. You see this actually with vintage computers. So the kind of games they were able to make on the Commodore sixty four when that was released back in eighty one.

two eighty five, I think, was the main run. I know they made it a little longer, but then the Amiga and other machines came out were great games. I mean I got interested in games Commodore sixty four, Yeah Kung Fu and all that stuff. The stuff they were able to do twenty years later When someone had just noodled all the secrets and tweaked the one megahertz processor. When they're building games for the old old. Are so much more technically impressive because we just know so much more about the

I mean same thing with the you look at the PlayStation, first games come out on launch, last games before we go to PlayStation two, they look from they're like from different generations. We could totally continue to do that with the models, but We're not gonna have that particular enjoyment because there's a new model dropping in three months.

But this is interesting because if we just run with this thought, like of course we know new new things are gonna come, but the point is like we will be spending so much time learning, applying them.

Building either our internal systems, changing how we build things, taking on new projects, like if you're an existing team. Now that people can do more work and more ambitious work, how are you thinking of of the team taking on more work, launching more products? Are you thinking of of potentially growing the team or keeping it as is. My best assessment for our setup is that the same people can do much more. Mm-hmm. Let's internalize that, but that's also enough. Already we were doing enough.

Already we had margin that we could hire way more if we had enough good ideas for that. All this extra productivity we're getting out of the team allows us now to do things like P1 and uh these other projects that are awesome and they're gonna improve the product faster too, of course they are. The old way of thinking like it's gonna take two months to deliver a major feature. I mean that's out the door. Of course there's gonna be rapid acceleration.

that's gonna filter all the way into our software methodology process. Like ShapeUf was built on two month cycles. That doesn't make sense in the same way at all anymore. We have not fully rewritten those scripts yet because the acceleration is still So fast, no company really has rewritten the script on on all that.

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To learn more, head to static.com/slash pragmatic. With this, let's get back to the shift about the head development. But I still think software developers are delusional if they do not think a shift is coming where before they were the constraint. on how much could be produced and therefore could command the salaries that flow to the constraint.

If suddenly those constraints now loosen, especially if we fast forward a little bit where the product manager is actually able to produce changes that can be shipped and work, things are gonna change. I do Actually think if I was gonna bet we've seen P Peak programmer. In terms of the learned guild of programmers who went to either school or spend um teen hours getting really good at it.

We're not gonna need the same number of them to do the same amount of work. Now, Javon's paradox where as the price of something goes down you get more of it or you get more demand for it is true. But that doesn't mean that all programmers are going to get bailed out by it just because more software than ever is going to be produced. That's for sure. I by the way, I think. GitHub has gotten a lot of Slack or flak lately.

Justifiably so I saw a chart saying they had a ninety two percent uptime, which sounds insane. I'm not sure exactly what that was measuring, but I feel it. I have a little bit of sympathy in that. I also think there's some mistakes were made, but also that the amount of software that's currently being produced is on a rock. we are producing as a civilization globally way more software

than we've ever done before. I mean, OpenClaw itself, I thought um he said it was four hundred thousand lines of code. That used to take ten years and two thousand people to get to that. Well not two thousand we w in in the but yes, it it took a I mean a long time, right? Like you look at uh I think uh the main monolith that Shopifies three million lines of code.

That's twenty years and if you collectively sum up all programs who've worked on that, probably like twenty thousand people. Yeah. Big shifts are coming right now. Um lots of software is being produced. I can see why it it's it's creaking a little bit over there because like the push is just gonna accelerate, right? And we haven't even seen anything yet. If you look at AI adoption

curves. Basically no one's using it. Like we all in our little bubble in X are like, Oh everyone's a No they're not. Like most companies in the world are just not doing it. Notwithstanding that like I think uh

Chat GPT got to eight hundred million users very quickly. Obviously there's adoption, but nothing on the scale of what the companies that are furthest along are doing and how much they're accelerating with it. So I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden Certainly there will be pressures on price because one thing are companies like ours.

that have essentially unlimited scope to come up with new features and do more and we can then plow in all that additional productivity into just do more. There's also a lot of companies who just need to do a thing. And if they can do that thing at a tenth of the cost.

That's actually their advantage, right? They just need to do this thing. It's very neatly scoped and defined. It's a cost center. Anywhere where software development is a cost center, which is actually probably the majority of software development in the world. They're gonna face these pressures. Yeah. Sounds like if I'm a software engineer right now and I'm worried about like well, you know, like just wanna make sure that I'm I'm at a place where things are gonna be better.

you wanna be at a place where you wanna either get out of a cost center or become really valuable there. Obviously, you know, brush up your skills. And also I'm wondering if if the shape of software engineers who will be hired will be changing. Cause if if if I just look back from like the nineties, right? Like even if you look at the movies, you you saw the stereotypes. They were the the nerds who didn't talk to anyone, but they knew how to code. They knew how to do assembly.

And then we went in the two thousands. It was still based on languages. And over time, I think in the two thousand tens, uh, startup started to not hire for languages, but just hire for algorithms because you could learn the stuff. And now I'm seeing companies, uh, some of them the

the latest VC funded companies have for product engineers where they they're actually asking for like empathy, communication, on top of like it's kind of a given that you you know how to code or whatever. So I I wonder like if I'm just looking at just just this curve, right? If I'm just painting it up.

Like you're starting to get people oh and and and the developers I I meet at all these companies, they're all really pleasant. They're all just very communicative, very oh, and they talk cut with customers, most of them. Just it's it's not even a drag. It's like it and uh m m more and more of them love doing it.

That's the constraint value now. The constraint value is figuring out what should we build, how should it be built, which customers should we be talking to? Where should we be focusing? It's product management. It's so funny for me too, because Historically I've not necessarily had the highest esteem for

product management as a function, I thought there was a lot of bullshit. And I thought it was a lot of people who maybe didn't do as much, right? And one of the reasons was that they couldn't, because the constraint resource was the implementation, was the product manager could find out that they wanted to do something. I want to do this feature. And then they had to wait four weeks.

for some very expensive programmers to make that reality happen. And in those four weeks, I mean I guess they could go talk to some they were on a utilized. Yeah. They were not the constraint, right? They the constraint was on the implementation. That absolutely is going to switch. And now pure implementation is going to be solved at some I w I'm not claiming it is right now and anyone who is, I've not tried to just deploy vibe coded stuff with no review to major code base.

But S the lesson of last summer on Lac. I'm not gonna put my heart on the block and saying that's not gonna happen before next summer. This is just like common sense, but implementation. One implementation well we saw for for a general cute case, for the edge cases it will take longer and for some cases it will not make sense. Same thing as I don't know, your self-driving is

Fine for like these size of cars, but for like trucks, it'll either take longer or if you're special as you do. But the point is, like there will be pockets where but those pockets will be smaller. Yes. I just want to sit and code. You have to be John Karmic levels of good to retain that privilege. To just I just want to sit and coach. And even John Carmack, I think. Of course there's also super AI uh.

But but also like he he also saw some trends that he could do. Like for example, like just like you know, the type of games that people would buy, right? Like he needed to have some business skills or just surrounded by people who did that. Totally, totally, totally.

But like you you need to literally be the very best. And not just the very best, but you need to be better than the agents, right? Like for you to get the privilege to just be an implementer, you have to be better than what's available off the shelf from From agents.

So who are the very best? And you're a good person to ask because whenever you advertise a position and this was even well before AI, I remember that you you put out a a a job for b software engineer and a designer. And actually I won't I'm I want to interview your designer who you hired. And because uh you published the salary, which is uh San Francisco

salary, you you put the exact number, you you can check it for it. You have a social media presence. So it it's kind of go goes wide and you get a lot of applications and you do a pretty good job as as I understand. You try to be very fair. You put a lot of effort into it. So

What did it take to get hired at 30 semas signals? Because now you are trying to hire some of the best. And based off of this, what advice do you give to people who are like, okay, I want to be the best in in this age right now? Incredibly good question. No one has figured out. We haven't cracked it. And I say that as someone who have

Run an organization where we we must have looked at tens of thousands of now, of course, if you're running Google, you've looked at millions. But we've looked at tens of thousands of candidates. The number of candidates we've hired is quite small. I mean, total number of programmers that's been through 37 signals over its entire lifespan. What's that gonna be like? A hundred? A hundred and fifty at the most? I haven't even.

Because your team right now ish. Uh Uh we're sixty people at the entire company and we are what is that gonna be like twenty programmers, something like that? Yeah, that's probably a Oh so so who uh what is the other other forty folks? Uh Uh we have designers, uh probably what were we like 10 of those. Wow. And then we have customer support, which is at 14. Then we have a bunch of support functions, HR, finance.

And then we have Operations. Operations is quite large. We have ten folks managing all our servers and yeah, that's about it. But yeah, I probably it's probably about a hundred people in total that I've worked with uh or employed at the company as programmers. Out of tens of thousands we've looked at. And even all those hires did not pan out in the long term. Like I'd actually say I think I looked at this recently. Our batting average at best, I think is slightly better than fifty.

So half of either those higher go through all of'cause you have a really long pro and thorough process. Yeah. You you you put in a lot of effort, right? W no one has figured out just to hire with such efficiency that they don't make mistakes. There's a great paper. That Google published quite a long time ago now, where they tried all sorts of different hypotheses. Well, can we predict? employee outcomes on the basis of Ivory League education background, on GPA, on all of these things.

Conclusion was basically like we know nothing. We can't predict it on any of these things, we can't predict it on leap code, we can't predict it on any of these uh metrics. No. What I'd say is I've clearly been spoiled by working with some very good people, not just at my company, but in open source in general. Yeah. Oh yeah. And therefore I've ended up with occasionally a twisted perspective of what the average programmer

is capable of. And when we do hiring rounds, I am sometimes well not sometimes, I'm every time I'm kind of surprised how poor the majority of the submissions are. How little effort is put into being presentable. And that can sound really boomer crotchety very quickly, but it's also just the reality of Trying to get a job. You gotta stand out. And I understand that that's uncomfortable, right? Like who w wants to look at this as like, well, my the odds are kind of against me.

But it's also a trap to actually fall into thinking of this in terms of odds. Because what I've seen the miscalculation happen time and again is people go like, Okay, so you have a thousand applicants, there's only One who gets the job, or maybe two who gets the job. So that's 0.1% chance. No, it's not. Not at all. With that math, you had zero percent chance. Yes. Zero. And the very best they probably had a 10% chance, 20%, 30% chance. It is not equal distributed. It is not a lottery.

We don't just like pick a thing out and be like, oh, it's gonna be this person because they happen to be the one drawn from the bunch. Not at all. We discard off the bat probably at least half the applications. Maybe it's two. just because they're either not addressing the job directly, they are not following the instructions in the relatively clear spoken, written openings that we have, right?

They're obviously not right for it or or whatever, or we get uh some other smells. Then there's like perhaps a third left. And then we start looking at some of the submissions, then we narrow down historically to a pool of around twenty people that we give a at-home test. The at home test is wonderful. Some people hate it. They feel like it Free labor.

I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm not gonna use your submission to a code test. What I'm gonna deploy to production. How do you think we came up with that code test? Because it already exists in the system. I say that a little harshly. I also get the sympathy of like I don't want to put six hours into making a test if it's not gonna go anywhere. Okay, I get it, but there's no way around it.

If you have it in your head that you just send in a resume, someone's gonna call you up on the phone, have a thirty minute conversation with you and go, You've hired, sir. I don't know if that ever existed, but certainly it does not exist today. It never existed in the lifetime that I've been in this business. Only time it exists, right, is through a very warm referral where correct where you're starting a typic tip If you're skipping the whole pipeline.

When you skip the whole pipeline, it's typically only happens at the very beginning of a company, when you're founding a company. And often it goes both ways where it's very risky. And then you say, like, this buddy of mine, I work with this person for two years straight. I would like trust them with my eyes closed. So that's actually the black pill on the whole hiring process. If we look at the long term success rates, we have had more long term employees from

I've worked with this person for two years, we should hire them, then we have from the open calls. It is actually exceptionally difficult. has been for us to find the kind of programmer who thrives in our environment from open It has happened. We have hired people that way. And I continue to wanna believe, even if the odds seem

Insanely long when you start doing the math of like, oh my God, we've looked at tens of thousands, and how many then got hired and how many then didn't work out? Like, Jesus, there's only like a handful left from starting that. That that's kind of blackmailing.

But then hiring directly on the base of a warm referral, as you call it, um, has worked very well. And that the hit rate there is really high. But how does that help anyone? Right? Like that's not a very actionable advice. Except that's to say, get as good as you can get and Put in as much effort as you can and work with someone. Because I want to say that as a counter. Some people have this notion in their head that if they work at a place they consider shitty, they shouldn't try.

You're shooting your own feet, buddy. If you show up at the shitty place of work and we can even be objectively in unison about that, that it is a shitty place of work. And you then go like, well, I should just try to skirt. I should just try to goof off. I should just try to read X or Reddit all day, right? Everyone else you work with.

They're gonna watch that. You know where that warm reforal is gonna come from? It's gonna come from someone who worked with someone else at a shitty job, but identified that that individual still showed up and did as best as they could to learn to ship. to do all of this stuff. There is no shortcut here. You'd simply just have to be good. And you will not get good if you do not practice. And if you think your place of employment is not worthy of your best You're cheating yourself.

If you're not helping, even if it's a shitty place, if you're not helping that place get better, why would a great place hire you who only hires people to to further raise the

This is total cope. And it's cope both on the side of I work at a shitty place and therefore I don't want to put things in. You could be annoyed. I'm not telling you you have to love your boss. I'd actually say the majority of people I used to work for, I didn't have the warmest feelings about them. I still tried really hard.

For my own edification, for my own education, for my own sense of I'm the kind of person who shows up and does a good job, just that I will be ready when the opportunity arrives, when all my talents are needed and all my skills are honed. But but was this not how you ended up at thirty seven signals where it was just a contract job or something and you know, like uh o on a contract job you have no ownership and but you showed up and Correct. And Jason ended up realizing

Okay, this uh punk better get some equity, otherwise he's out the door. Now that's a siminal story and you shouldn't extrapolate everything from that. I mean all founder stories, by the way, are similar stories in that regard. But the fundamental principle is still the same. Show up. Do as good as you can. Learn more. There also was to my

chagrin to some extent. I perhaps contributed it to it a bit for a while, which was this notion that You can be a great programmer and not really like programs. You don't have to ever care about programming outside working hours. Well I thought of it mistakenly because I was pushing back on the overwork

hundred hour week, hundred and twenty hour week maniacal obsession, which by the way never was my experience. We did not start Basecamp that way. We have worked on a 40 hour week rolling average over those twenty five years. But also, as I said at the very beginning, I really like computers. So I play with computers in my free time. I look at computer things in my free time. It's not work in the sense that I'm whatever, shipping features to Basecamp customers.

Like just twenty four seven, that's not what it is. But I am playing with computers, I am looking at new things, I am exploring new systems and whatever. And I think there was for a while in the twenty tens a misconception that You didn't have to do any of those things. You could just show up and do your work and you would be so sought after because programming was such a valuable activity and there were so few people who could do it that they'd take anyone. Even people who barely gave a shit.

And I think that's over. If it ever was true. And I th it was true. The boot camps were the perfect, uh like catalyst or or like they were the canary when Which also, by the way, is how the economy is supposed to function. When salaries are really high, it means that there's not enough supply of labor, therefore we should get labor into the pool. Exactly. And so I'm not I don't even have any qualms about anything. I'm just saying like that's over.

No, I I think looking but you know, we're talking about like is it is the golden age of the programmer have you passed Pete programmer and I wonder if PEEP programmer really meant that almost anyone who wanted to get into the industry and was willing to put in some effort

few months or maybe a few years could do it. You could learn how to code. You could go to either college or to boot camp or put in the hours and you could get hired at a place because the interviews were their references were not needed. We we didn't check.

And I it's probably coming to an end. You do need references. You more I think more and more companies will be doing reference checks as part of their thing and that it's not just gonna be a heavy work there. Like would you I I've had these calls from uh like Databricks is famous for reference cards, they don't only check for references. they drill you not just would you work with this person again, how what were their weaknesses. Right. Where would you hire them, etcetera, et cetera?

No I understand it. Peak programmer sounds like This is something that affects all programmers. It does not. The best programmers are not even the best, as in like it's 10 people around the world. Really good programmers. are currently more valuable than ever because they're the ones who are able to get the most out of the AI acceleration. And this was the kicker for me in changing my perspective on this is that I've also found

And maybe it's not universally true, but certainly within thirty-seven seconds in my own experience, I'm enjoying my time as a programmer more than any time since early two thousands when I just discovered Ruby. This has the I just discovered Ruby. feel to it, that it is so satisfying to be able to move this fast.

on so many levels at the same time to be able to explore the P ones, to be able to think about dual booting Amachi, to do all of that stuff that the work itself has gotten vastly more enjoyable. And I've seen the same thing for the most AI forward programmers that we have, maybe they also have some of these anxieties.

But they're kind of pushed to the side just out of sheer enjoyment working with the new capacities. So there is a bifurcation here where we should all feel like, well, we don't know what's going on and for some people that's gonna produce some degree of

Anxiety, I understand that, especially when it's your livelihood and you're like, well, I'd also like to be able to pay for my kids' college in seven years. What does that look like? I get it. You're not going to be able to manifest that anxiety into anything productive unless you just plow it into leaning. Right? Because if you just sit and spin around and try to think about what the world's gonna look like seven years from now, you're wasting your time.

So that's the only path. The only path is So either get excited about this, which I don't even think takes that much effort. As we said, if you sit down with these models, you pull out one of your hobby projects from the closet. Because you never finished and you just give it a try. I don't see how you really like computers and not find that experiment. Enjoy.

And I I've seen this with with people who are getting into it. Uh, Ken Debeck is such a great example of he's been programmer for fifty two years and he is saying like he i He loves doing it and he found this balance between using the agents to build something ambitious that he always wanted to ball. He's building a small talk server, which

Which used to take forever and now it's is getting closer and it's still taking a long time. And then in between he's chilling at his he has his house on on the lake and he just goes and like just looks at the birds for two hours and then gets back to it. Beautiful. Kent is by the way one of my all time heroes. This was right when I got started in programming.

Right when I before I was picking up uh Ruby, I saw Kent speak at a Danish conference in two thousand and one on stage and I was completely mesmerized by his command of both the material, how bold he was, and how

great of a speaker he was. And this was after having read Extreme Programming and many of these other things, small talk best practices is My number one recommendation for any programmer who wanna learn the nitty-gritty of how to structure a method and a class and the rest of it, small talk best practices, which is Kent's book from ninety-five, I think, or ninety six. is to this day my favorite book of all time on tactical programming.

uh patterns. So it's wonderful to hear him being agent pilled while also enjoying the birds. I mean I try to do that too and this is actually there's a bit of a tension right now is that most of the people I find who are all in, they're working harder than they ever have. And I've seen that with myself now too. When you can be dis

effective and impactful on an hour of supervision of these agents, it's really intoxicating. If you have an active uh dopamine loop up there that gets triggered when something is shipped, it is just hyperactive right now. Yeah. And I need to go, do you know what? This is not like a limited sale. Like AI's gonna be here next month and the months after that, like I cannot just operate as though it is a limited sale and I need to get all the dopamine harvested within the next two weeks.

That I actually think is the main challenge right now for the people who are furthest along and most pilled on it is like, remember that this is as bad as they're ever gonna be, as the cliche goes, right? You damn well better find a way not to get consumed entirely about it as exciting as it is.

And and then yeah, there there's this this consuming is is is a big deal. Like it with Steve Yage, he was he looks a bit more drained than like you can see it on on the video, but he he has he's honest, like he's he's being pulled into this, he's

uh doing it he has friends who are in it when when you're on the edge you're there. You've clearly been AI pilled, but how are you finding of keeping a balance of like all right stepping away, you know, like I I know you've you I think you previously talked about the importance of sleep. Apparently you don't have an alarm.

Correct. I don't use an alarm, although my wife now does because the kids need to go to school on a regular basis. But yeah, for me, eight hours a night is the best investment you can make in your own cognitive capacity. So I just am reminded every single time I do not get eight hours. that it is such a poor trade. If you go from the eight to the six, I go like, well, I'm gonna be awake for in that case, eighteen hours.

What is the drag I'm gonna carry for all those eighteen hours for getting one more hour, two more hours by cutting back on the sleep? It is such a bad piece of math. It makes no sense. Now Occasionally it's involuntary. I have actually had, especially around this AI stuff, I've had a couple of times. It was very rare. I can count on two hands the number of times where I've been sleepless, like the rain the brain racing a little too much.

That's not typical for me and it's still not typical. But I have had a couple of them, right? So I get where some of that excitement comes from. But I'd also say the last thing you should trait is sleep and then you should not trait your health.

You should not try to save the three hours a week of working out to do more agent work. That's a very poor trade. Keep in good condition. Like there's nothing It's gonna be more important if you wanna keep like sharp up there that like the rest of the system is operating if not a peak. capacities than at uh at a good sustainable level, right? And I do think there are some individuals right now who are at fear of running ragged on something that we're gonna be dealing with for like

Slow down, buddy. Like it's not again, limited sale. The next 10 years, we're gonna see more and more. It's gonna get crazier and crazier. So don't squander your health, don't squander your sleep, don't squander your diet.

in the service of anything because even on the short term, it does not work. You cannot get more productive within Three weeks, let's say, by trying to cut back two or three hours of sleep every night and then think there's anything coherent left after three weeks, you will be a hot mess. So let's close we talked about the stuff that we don't know. You do know So y you you could have retired a long time ago and just, you know, kick back and and like listen to birds. What is it that

keeps you doing, keeps you building, keeping getting up every day and before AI you would open your terminal. I think you you shared like like you would go and then and write. Now you're doing with agents. Like what drives you and and and looking ahead, like what what are things you're excited about? My drive continues to be a deep love of computers. This is simply the best way, the most fun way to spend my time.

I could spend my time on a lot of things. I do spend my time on a lot of things. I don't just do computers. I drive race cars. I take lots of time up. I have three kids. We enjoy all of that stuff. But If I'm gonna fill eight hours every day with an activity, my best bet is computers. And it has been so since I was literally five years old.

Whether it's video games or what now feels a little bit like a video game actually, instrumenting all these agents and uh playing a little bit of StarCraft with uh moving them around and There you go. Yes, exactly. So I just really like computers. So whether I need to do so for economic reasons or not, I will continue to play with computers.

See what makes them tick and make things. I think that's the other big misconception that some people have about wealth is that They conceive of it as some sort of checkpoint. Like once you've made it, then you can just kick back in leisure as though that was happiness. We'd simply have a hundred years of psychological studies telling us, no, that's misery. if you have all the time in the world and no purpose, no mission

Leisure's not gonna cut it. It's not gonna be fulfilling way. And this should be obvious by example. Of literally every entrepreneur who sells their business, they sit on the beach for three weeks and then they're back into the game, right? Because this is actually not just something they do in pursuit of a goal. It's the goal itself. It is The mission itself, it is the satisfaction, it is the affirmation of being a human that I'm not just a blob laying around. I am a useful individual.

who put my skills to the best use possible. So I'm gonna continue to do that and I'm gonna continue to do it whether I'm sitting typing at the keyboard, whether I'm instrumenting these agents, whether they're teaching me, however which way it is. I wanna play with computers, I'm gonna tend to do that. And then m even more specifically.

After the last three months I'm leaning in hard now with agent accessibility, for example. This is what I've been doing the last few weeks. We've been working on the new CLI, which also taught me like we're not quite an AGI yet, right? You think like, well, just ask the agent to make a CLI. It will. But like it's not quite there, right? Like I want it to be just right and the agents still need a little bit of help.

I'm very happy to provide that help to these agents and we'll release a great CLI for Basecamp very, very shortly. Maybe by the time this is out, it'll probably be out and for the rest of them too. And I wanna lean into all of this. How can we use this as much as we possibly can? And then right now I'm also just an incredibly cu curious person. I wake up every morning

I have a new ritual, which is not to pull my phone up and start hopping on X, like right when I wake up. I don't think actually that is great. But it takes a tremendous willpower to not do so because I'm just so curious about what happened. There's so much happening right now. I wanna know. I wanna know. I wanna be enjoying it, be a part of it.

So I don't foresee that ending. I don't foresee a love of computers evaporating. In fact, if anything, right now I'm seeing like a a flourishing of it. I'm liking computers more than I did five years ago. And that's amazing. Amazing. David, this was awesome. Thanks thanks a bunch. All right. Thanks for having me. This was really great. This was a fascinating conversation and I love the energy that David has. I hope

Some of this energy that is obvious in person also came across to you. I really appreciated that David was open that his stance did not change about AI because his philosophy changed. It's just that the tools became good enough to do useful stuff. AI for Autocomplete was annoying for experienced developers. AI agents that can produce pretty good working code by themselves, on the other hand, are now pretty useful. And yet David kept coming back to taste, judgment, and craft.

He wasn't just saying, just let the model write whatever. It's the opposite. He has a very high quality bar and he wants the output to be code that he would actually be proud to merge. it feels like AI might make good judgment even more valuable than before. I also really liked how David thinks about the importance of design. At 37 Signals, designers help figure out what should be built, how it should work, and increasingly even decide how it gets implemented.

I wonder if 37 Signals is a step ahead of the industry in thinking about designers a bit like developers as well, and developers a bit like designers as well. Finally, I found David's take that we might have hit peak software engineer.

An interesting argument. David thinks we'll produce more software than ever, but his observation is that we might be nearing the end of the time when developers could command high compensation simply because they were the bottleneck. My two sense is that there will surely be high demand for professionals who can build profitable software. But this will mean software engineers who are not only good at coding or using AI to generate code, but can oversee building complex systems.

Have taste and business sense as well. If you'd like to hear more from David, check out a bonus episode with him linked in the show notes. Also check out the show notes for related to pragmatic engineering deep dives on software craftsmanship and practical ways of building software. If you enjoyed this video, Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and And a special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks. And see you in the next one.