DHH’s new way of writing code

21,268 words · about 85 min to read

AI acceleration drives ambitious engineering projects

0:00 I feel that you very much value software engineering as a craft

0:04 hugely. I mean I think aesthetics is 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.

0:15 I wonder if there's a part of AI about the impact of doing work that we would have not done before.

0:20 The number of projects we have tackled internally that we would never even have contemplated starting on or Legion. Jeremy, one of our most agent accelerated people, went like, "We're going to do P1. We're going to optimize P1." Literally the fastest 1% of requests, we're going to make them even faster. There's a bit of 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 this effective and impactful on an hour of supervision of these agents, it's really intoxicating. And I need to go, do you know what? This is not like a limited sale. on Lex Freriedman's podcast. You were still rightfully so very skeptical of AI.

0:57 This is a nuance point and maybe it's self- serving, but I don't actually think my opinions have changed. What have changed is how has the creator of Ruby on Rails changed how he builds software now with AI agents? David Hayam Hire Hansen often referred to as DHH created Ruby on Rails Omachi and is a co-founder of 37 signals. He bashed capabilities of AI coding tools on Lex Friezen's podcast 6 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 build software today and how AI tools are making them more ambitious than ever before. Why Ruby on Rails Analytics 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

1:57 could impact software engineers who care about the craft then this episode is for you. This episode is presented by static 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 works. David, it's awesome to have you here.

2:13 Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming.

Scratching your own itch drives product creation

2:15 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?

2:24 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 94, 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 Amachi. It got started as a summer project in between racing at the 24 hours of Lama. 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 7,000 different distributions out there, some of them with long pedigrees and many of

3:26 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. Billachi built the perfect computer system for me and saw exactly the same thing I've ever seen. And 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.

4:14 Is that how it started? Basically, I picked up Ruby in the early 2000s and really put it to the test in 2003 when we started building Base Camp 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 Basec Camp. And I was free to choose. So I chose Ruby and

1 Highlight · Why Ruby on Rails excels with AI agents

4:46 at the time Ruby didn't have any tooling or ve not very much when it came to web applications. 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 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 going to be writing machine code or assembler in about five minutes. So maybe that comes to an end. But for the moment, token efficiency still matters.

5:22 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

5:42 show up and want to help. I mean for Umachi which has only been around for what is that just over 6 months now we have what 400 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 uses 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 system that's been around since what 91, 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 100 hours into tweaking the system to get going is

6:43 really fun. But what's also fun of course is that both of these things, both Ruby and Rails and Amachi were not just hobby projects. I love hobby product and I will always do those, but I also like to apply them to business.

Aligning developer workstations with production

6:55 So at 37 Signals, we built an entire business for 20 plus years on top of Ruby and Rails. We're now running Linux on the majority of developer machines because we now have our own distro.

7:09 So it's obi people can choose, right? can they

7:13 well sort of kind of we started with a 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 37 single and say I want to write this thing in Django we're going to use Python and this other framework even if you have Ruby and 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 just said like hey if you want to 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 DevOps, 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.

8:02 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 right and right now where are you like where where is the business

Launching disruptive products against entrenched monopolies

8:31 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.

8:38 Yes. So 37 signals was founded in 1999. It started as a web design firm and then I joined up in 2001, two years after and for a couple years, collaborated with Jason on these consulting projects and then it was in 2003. We started work on Base Camp, released it in 2004. 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.

9:16 Awesome.

9:17 And that's now 22 years ago, a little more than that. And in that time, we've released a ton of products. Basec camp 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 experience, you'll get smarter and you'll have better ideas. And like, no, there's tons of people for whom their first idea was the best idea.

9:46 And I have no shame in saying that Base Camp 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 20 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 hey.com our email service back in 2020 which was a crazy mission when you think about it.

10:19 Here is a sector completely dominated by a single player Google with Gmail that's a good product.

10:26 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 grasp 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 85% of all email traffic, which sounds insane.

11:03 Maybe it's 80%. 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 17 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.

11:32 And we put all those opinions into a new software product. Spend about almost 2 years developing it. Millions of dollars in accumulative R&D funds. And launched it in the summer of 2020, which by the way, time to launch a product. 2020 wasn't great for a 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.

11:57 Yeah.

11:57 We finally picked a week. We went live and then we had the battle of our lives with Apple.

12:02 With Apple. I remember that.

12:04 And ultimately

12:06 they didn't want to approve your your app.

12:07 They didn't want to approve our app unless we paid the toll fee, the 30%.

12:12 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.

12:18 Yes. you have to be on not just mobile phones but specifically the iPhone. This is true today. The majority of hey paying customers are 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 twow weekek epic struggle back and forth, thankfully time to perfection with WWDC where Apple preferably didn't want to look like the Goliath squashing a

12:55 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 victory, but at least it allowed us to to be there. And hey, 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?

13:23 Like, uh, Apple refuses our app.

13:25 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 Hey. I use it every day. I basically use base camp 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 hey because I just do all my stuff in email. I am constantly communicating with people.

14:03 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.

14:48 This this is how I reached out. I mean, we were I'm not sure we were connected on on X, but I I sent an email cuz your email is out there and your screener seems to have worked cuz it gave me the thumbs up.

14:58 It did because the screener is me. So, there's not even AI trying to sus out whether I want to hear from you or not. Because what turns out to be true is it's actually not that ownorous 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.

15:35 I'm not interested." And then they would respond again. 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 [ __ ] do, right? That any outreach is seven emails. It's not one emails. It's seven emails. And if you show any sign of life, it's probably 52. 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. So you want to go smell the roses. Suddenly the majority of things that end up in my email or things I want to read is from people I want to hear from. And that was really the fundamental mission for us with hey 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

16:36 scientists have really good manners and will not pester you 52 times about some stupid app they want to sell you. No, they're respectful and beautiful, right? beautiful ideal, beautiful thought, beautiful protocol designed 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 sales people get involved. 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 Frankle the meaning of uh of man finding a why allows you to walk through the snow when it's cold and uncomfortable and annoying which many things are when you're building with computers they are cold and uncomfortable and annoying.

17:33 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 got to pack if you can set it up that way.

17:55 This is a good time to talk about our season sponsor, Work OS. Having a strong why is what gets you to building something great. But after you build it and start selling it to enterprise customers, they expect things like SAML, SSO, directory sync, audit logs, and fine grain permissions. And those are not small features. They're systems. Systems that can take months to build and maintain. Works gives you APIs, enterprise ready off, and user management in days instead of months.

18:22 All designed to fit cleanly into your product. That's why companies like OpenAI and Traffic and Cursor run on work OS. Focus on building your product. Let Work OS handle the enterprise infrastructure. With this, let's get back to David and the old way of

Small teams and multi-hat designers accelerate discovery

18:35 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 because you know you're you're a small company. You're a nimble. You're a great developer. I'm you hire great developers. Suddenly it's been two years. What what took so long for and of course it's 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.

19:13 That's the hacker news quip 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 5 GB bits uh no Wi-Fi uh whatever less speed than Nomat 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 in a few hours we should be able to have

19:50 kick off an agent. Yeah.

19:51 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 hey construction was just me on the technical side. This is actually how we've started 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 is not going to 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 for hey, it was me and then it was Jason and uh

20:52 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 going to buy that. No one's going to be interested in that. It's got to be novel, which means it's well, not just novel, it's got to be good. It's got to 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 built on the old way of anyone has access to your inbox and all that stuff. But figuring that out, figuring the shape out takes a while and it's also fun to do in this way where you noodle with it and you don't have infinite capacity.

21:44 The original base camp is built the same way. It was just me on the technical side. Is this a shape uplogy? There's 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 product 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 Hey, 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 20% we go okay now we know what the terrain looks like we can go way faster if everyone piles in. So one thing that

22:46 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

23:02 who works with maybe maybe half a designer

23:05 and comes up with a spec and then developers 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 you think about designers Even you recently hired a designer, Zultan actually, who I'm I'm chatting

2 Highlight · Expanding the role of product designers

23:19 with on the side. A great guy.

23:22 But my sense is you think of designers a little bit different than potentially the rest of the industry does.

23:27 We very much do. Designers at 37 Signals 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 to something functional 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

24:28 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 and the strength. An architect should have some engineering understanding of loadbearing structures and so on. Not to the degree that the architect is just going to 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

25:29 with something that cuts along the grain

25:32 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 exquisitly designed native Mac applications which is an dying breed like they're essentially dead. Now we have Electron which we can talk about that too gets way too much hate in my book. There's crappy implementation of that, but it's just a web in 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.

26:33 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 going to change. Agent acceleration is going to empower designers to be more capable in these ways. So the industry is coming a little towards our fundamental stance which is funny too because the same is true on the programming side. When I talked about base camp being a product of just me on the programming side for launch that for so long sounded unambitious or even wrong or even to the point of lying from some quarters of the internet 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 going to be a toy product right and my insight from the start was that's of course [ __ ] because you just haven't used Ruby on Rails you just haven't used the

27:33 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 team.

27:46 Yes.

27:47 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 cost starts to be relevant. And this is one of the things maybe we can talk about this where agent

Aesthetics and correctness are fundamentally linked

28:02 acceleration is really changing the bargain between junior developers and senior developers. Let's talk about this. 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 the these two things. Do I sense this correctly?

28:33 Hugely. I mean, I think aesthetics is 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 objects 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 [ __ ] 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 cobalt system won't let them. Right? The world is full of not just in

29:36 shitification. 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

30:38 aesthetics which I think is everyone. there's just varying levels of u awareness about whether you are or not but that you want to make it all beautiful and for me Ruby in particular has been this seinal 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 equality while not being rigid about its ideology which is a very rare aspect too. I more often find now we can refer to IV 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 broadscoped yet also intensely focused on on this but overall we have to have beautiful things we have to work with

31:38 beautiful tools we have to produce beautiful fluid interactions this is how

Chat models outperform intrusive inline autocomplete

31:45 we should see ourselves as crafts people 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 37 signals who similarly care about design and and software craft's quality how it's 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 want to 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 Freriedman's cast 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 went there bashing it pretty hard but things have changed since.

32:31 This is a nuance 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 which uh is is something I called out on that show and in many other writings was right from the get-go I could see that we had something new and novel here that was going to change things. Chat GBT its launch what three years ago was clearly and obviously even at the time something you would mark on a timeline. You're like here are all the important things that happened in the history of computer science or the world. Yoinks, there is the launch of Chat GBT and interacting with computers in this way and seeing them reason, even if that's still a disputed term perhaps, but 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.

33:27 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 co-pilot and cursor in your

3 Highlight · Why inline autocomplete tools feel dystopian

33:55 editor trying to guess the next character,

33:58 it it would be sometimes littering it. Right.

34:00 Yes. 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. Was 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 was just 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.

34:50 No, thank you.

34:50 Well, cursor even have they had I even got one of these one of their swags was a tap key.

34:56 Exactly. which which felt very and I I haven't I I got it from them. It's really cool, very well designed and all that beautiful design, but

35:03 but dystopian

35:04 dystopian

35:05 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."

35:33 The Simpsons really does predict everything. But I did not like that style of using it. As much as I 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 chat GBT and the other model 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 here's an error message. Here's a 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 GBT model, I very often got a really good explanation. Yeah, this was actually I talked with a game developer Jonas Tyroller who who built this really cool bestselling game. I loved playing it and this was during this time of of the tab

36:33 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 this stuff oh I need some help okay here's the specifics and I'm taking and somehow it felt that you know like he just he was in the zone the whole day by controlling it and and somehow those habits sounds like You know, you're saying the same thing. It kind of took it away from you. Us.

37:02 Exly. Exactly. And I did get a little

The inflection point of agent harnesses and Opus

37:04 worried that that was going to be the direction that we were all going to 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.

37:16 But then thankfully two things happened. A clot code in what is that? starts in

4 Highlight · Agent harnesses and frontier models as the true unlock

37:22 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 where 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 45 to me is the other one of the other points we're going to have on the line where it's the first model that continuously and consistently would shock me with the quality of its output. it quality of its analysis on the basis of vague inputs and even more importantly the quality of its output. It produced code I wanted to

38:22 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

38:35 me the combination of those two things was the unlock

38:38 and and you have a high bar like you have a really high bar

38:40 incredibly high bar I as we've talked about now at length like the aesthetics of the output really matters if I'm going to look at it and I'm going to review it I'm going to 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 going to 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 wanted to be on par and on parody 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 6 years old. Like I've been wanting to I have this idea. I want to get it into a game and I was able to see that in I don't know a few 30 seconds.

39:31 It was done with the game. copy paste the HTML magical experience, right?

39:37 So, I think that ramp was very interesting because it actually took a while until we found this form factor of the agent harness of the terminal interface. That to me was the the big unlock from this is interesting. I want to have a conversation with it to I wanted to write my code. I will now start any project I'm starting with. I'm starting agent first and that's a massive shift and it just happened from November 27th I believe is when Opus 45 dropped. Now there are other people who have different points they felt like oh is Opus 40 or

40:16 maybe some people talk about Sonic 37. There are other earlier checkpoints but there I do feel like there's a general consensus I can lean up against that capy and others have expressed like yep it was right around end of November early December. Everyone who works worked at larger tech companies, it was the winter break because people just you know like like the whole industry shuts down for 2 weeks say for a few places where you're on call but again no production work happens across the

40:41 industry to play with this.

40:43 My sense was that people were playing with it because you give it your side project you never finish expecting not to finish and then they also got shocked.

40:49 Yeah.

40:50 You're done and that was just a complete sort of break, right? Right? Like if this was a movie, you'd hear the scratch sound like you're like, "Wait, what? Revine, what happened?"

41:00 I feel it was the most collective shock which happened individually and then people came back in January and everyone especially because a lot of the decision makers who are you know like CTO engineers etc 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 hardware like people were trying to give, you know, like the the new hardware into people's hands saying you need to experience it cuz you're you're not going to 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.

41:40 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 going to work on a piece of code and you want to 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 offputting this trend on X where unless you've internalized everything there is about 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 or progress when if we had been having this conversation in spring of last year, everyone been like MCPs, MCPS, MCPS. And do you know what? You can now manage to just have jumped over that entire things and go straight to CLI and skills. That's just

42:42 worth having in mind that this 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 Lutki 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, you look at this, look at this."

43:15 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. Like my eyes tend to be relatively close to the road like right in front of me and some people have a gaze that a little higher up and sometimes they see things that don't come to pass. In this case, Toby 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 going to be amazing." and thinking wow it's going to be I don't know 18 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 San Fran focused on making this happen but predicting exactly when the hockey stick starts hockeying is very difficult but then it

Adopting an agent-first daily development workflow

44:16 happened and now my daily work is very different

44:20 so so what is your daily work. Now,

44:22 my daily work is agent first on everything.

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45:29 sonarsource.com/pragmatic to find out. With this, let's get back to David's agent first workflow.

45:35 So, specifically cloth cloth code. Uh I use open code open code. You use open code.

45:40 That's my main harness. I also use cloud code 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 want to use your Mac subscription, you kind of 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 for 45 46 is also nice but 45 to me was the inflection point

46:11 and it creates a lot of competition because everyone wants to catch up and overtake them now

46:14 of course and especially because you see Anthropic's revenues I think start of the year they're at 9 billion few weeks later they're at like whatever 14 now they're at 19 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 cloud code is not my preferred harness manage to hold two things in your head at the same time this is what I also try to do even with Apple which 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 s 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

47:15 at different speeds. So, I use T-Max and I have this layout thing that's built into Amachi where it'll start my new Vim 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 them what I want. Then I hop over to Neoim. First I do uh space gg to look at the um lacy git diff on it. Once this is changing if it looks correct I'll just commit. We're we're done. Great. and then sometimes it doesn't. It'll correct and I'll I'll go in and alter 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

48:16 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 Base Camp so we can get full agent accessibility for Base Camp. It's

Pushing autonomy toward browser-based agents

48:40 astounding. First, actually, let me rewind. As soon as I got pilled on how good the agents were and how capable they were, I immediately tried to raise my gaze up towards the end of the road and think, do we even need MCP? Do we even need CLI? 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.

49:20 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 CLI. I'm just telling you it's at 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. An agent doesn't have an email address. Hey, go sign up for hey.com. I'm like, it's going to fail this one. 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? I'm like, what?

49:58 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 3 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, if it can sign up for Hey, and can sign up for Fizzy, let me invite it to Base Camp. So, I send it an invitation to its own email address. Here's the invitation link to Base Camp. Can you just jump into the AI labs lab uh project that we have and introduce yourself to the team? go, "Hey, I'm David's assistant. 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 going to take a while, it did take a while. It took a while. This is

51:01 um agent terms. It took I don't know, seven minutes. That was like, "Oh, it feels like eternity." But it was able to do it. And that seems like the end state. The end 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 2 seconds, which we'll get to in a second to the speed 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 Basecam. We've been building CLI. We're going to build it for Hey, we're going to build it for Fizzy. We're going to build for everything, even probably some of the legacy products. And what I love about the CLI, as much as I also love it about these harnesses, is that they validated the fundamental Unix philosophy from like whatever 71. You should just build small tools that can interoperate with pipes and you can

51:53 that's philosophy, right?

51:54 It's the total Unix philosophy. And that is actually the magic to me about seeing everything having a CLI. It's not that Base Camp is easier to use now with a CLI. No, no, is 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 together and now you can tell an agent, hey, we have some errors in Sentry. Can you go check them out? Then post a write up to Basecam iterating what's wrong. Then go in GitHub, come up with a pull request, post a comment back to Base Camp when you're done. And now we have a central right base cam 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 prompts and you will be pilled. You will be

52:54 simultaneously incredibly excited for what we've been able to make sand do. The silicon, the chips, the weights, the whole thing.

Senior developers gain massive individual leverage

53:06 And then also a little bit anxious about where it's all going to 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 does n 18 months from now look like? Like if at the last 3 months we've upended my entire understanding of what's possible with computers, what's the next 3 months look like? What the next nine months look like?

53:28 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. Mo Moore's law broke down at some point. I I live through everyone said it will continue forever and you know and then it broke as we all suspected it would

53:45 but then it found another way. I think it's the good point about the Moors 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? 256 on the AMD 10 chips, right?

53:57 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 know the approaches that they're taking this 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 is a it's 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.

54:25 Yes.

54:25 Because it just lays out this thing that we we don't want to believe that. We want to believe that our knowledge our understanding is superior that you know you and me knowing how to code or me putting in these 15 years or however long it's been it's special. Sometimes it shows that it's it's not as special. What's interesting actually is like

5 Highlight · Senior developers multiply output through code review

54:42 right this second this snapshot in time it a little bit is and this is a funny bification that's happening junior versus senior developer is that the most successful and applicable agent acceleration that I've seen at 37 signal 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.

55:12 Yeah.

55:12 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 abet it at all and a and junior programmers are not capable of figuring it out. Therefore, their role is suddenly more tenuous than it was 6 n months ago because a senior programmer can and this is why senior programmers are getting so much more acceleration.

55:55 They're able to first of all work in 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 going to work or not and 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 going to work? Is this not going to 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 5x 10x their individual productivity. And now this is the second order effect. If you manage to 5x or 10x a senior developer, that person's value per hour just went up 10x. Now take that hour instead of that

56:51 person spending it 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 going to 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 working 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 60 m hour where you can die if someone makes a mistake, we delegate that to an agent.

57:44 Well, they can probably figure out how to make the code work too, right? So, I do think it's coming, but who knows

Parallels to self-driving car capability breakthroughs

57:49 when, who knows how. Right now, we're at a stage where the bulk of the benefits are acrewing to the most senior developers. And also I wonder just like with self-driving like you realize 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 oneshot 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, I just got details on how they're adopting AI and and they have all these tools, cloud code and and all these things. But what we realize as well when you just put it in there, they have all these internal monor repos.

58:24 They have their ticketing systems. They have their slack. They have so much. They have their RFC's design documents on on how and why they have this jumble of a mess uh with microservices which which was 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 NCD's agent harnesses and now they're working better. But 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 suddenly you're not going to be as valuable as efficient for a while until you learn all the systems. So I I wonder if just like with self-driving, you know, self-driving works great as well. I was in SFN and LA and way most they they drive so nice. Like

59:10 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 my my weimo got stuck because a a truck was parking on on a narrow street and a car had a bike shed and I I I I knew that it should I should not go there, but it didn't know. So, human oper operator came in. But anyway, but even with Whimos, you know, like there's there's things like there's they drive in pretty good weather.

59:39 They've been mapped out. So I wonder if in software engineering I I wonder if this has these parallels where we have all of you know like these companies have their their 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 10 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 going to be over for drivers and no

1:00:04 yes there are not going to 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 17 when he made that proclamation, it was an AI. It was 500,000 lines of handcoded C++,

1:00:20 right?

1:00:20 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 come 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, I'm 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.

1:00:58 It's just perfectly

1:00:59 better than you.

1:01:00 Better than me, better than the queen's chauffeur, I think. like it's throttle actuation and deceleration is godlike. It's actually agi like or as like in its application within that narrow domain. And of course, when we get these anecdotes and these examples of holy smokes, not it didn't take 10 years for the self. It took 10 years from the proclamation, 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 inflection point of I think it was 131, FSD 131, like the first version, you're like, "Wow, this is pretty good, but like I better pay attention." 132 140 142 over the course of 18 months we went from yeah it's pretty good but like I'm going to pay attention here to why is there steering wheel and that acceleration that short period of time of course is something people look to

1:02:01 when it comes to programming go like well if we're here now and senior programmers still have to review it because otherwise you're going to get all your whatever four severity eight down times at AWS because some AI pushed out some nonsense. What is it going to 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 going to deal with what's possible today and what's enjoyable today and what we do right now. I'm not going to try to plan what my life looks like 12 months from now when maybe we do have AGI or we don't. Now, there are other people who do that very well. I just watched an interview with Leopold on Drakesh from last year. He's thinking like what does 2030 look like? What does the whatever 10 gawatt 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

1:03:01 polishing the crystal ball.

1:03:02 No. Well, I I mean this 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

Reviewing one hundred pull requests in ninety minutes

1:03:09 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's what that's what these companies do. But today, what do you see at at 37 signals uh with software engineers? You you of course have mostly experienced engineers, although you did hire junior engineers as well. How is their kind of work changing? How is their satisfaction with with work change? Because that's also a thing, right? We keep arguing about like is is it making us more miserable at these things? Is it what we want to do?

1:03:42 And how's it changing for you? Right. I think it's

1:03:45 that's the biggest revelation actually more than even the capacity of the agents is my enjoyment running them. When I was on that leg interview last summer, I was talking about 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 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 12 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

1:04:46 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 release of Omachi 3.4. I went into GitHub and we had I don't

6 Highlight · Processing a massive pull request backlog with AI

1:05:06 know 250 PRs pending and I kind of just sighed a little bit and like 250 PRs if I spend I don't know 15 minutes on each PR like how long is it going to take before I get to the end of it and I thought 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 or is the PR are shocked In 90 minutes, I think it was, I processed 100 PRs. And it wasn't that I merged all of them. In fact, I'd say I merged a small minority. Maybe 10% got merged as is. Then maybe 20% got merged. But with Claude's implementation,

1:05:54 the programmer had correctly identified an issue

1:05:57 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?

1:06:08 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 it feel coherent with the rest of project. Agents opus in this case would just nail it. And then the second half of it was split between 25% thinks I then just realized I just don't want this. It shouldn't we shouldn't have it. And 25% claude telling me maybe there's something here, but it's really not a good implementation. We don't have a straight shot to making a great one. 100 issues in 90 minutes. And I sat back.

1:06:47 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 issues

1:07:00 pertained 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 wasn't that

1:07:14 moment? No, but you would have not put in the effort. This was why the PR sat in the first place. In many cases, I would look at it and go that

1:07:23 I think there's something here, but like then I now have to read up on this debug 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 was one of top 20 programming moments. 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 because again like 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 because we talk a lot about like you know like 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.

Exploring low-priority hunches and complex edge cases

7 Highlight · Exploding the project pie with agentic acceleration

1:08:14 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 would never even have contemplated starting on are legion. We had a great project where normally on performance work you worry about uh P50, P95, P99. Jeremy, one of our most agent accelerated people went like what about P1? 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 4 milliseconds. Let's say that, right?

1:08:50 Well, actually 4 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 going to make them even faster." He took it from, I think it was four milliseconds to less than half a milliseconds. He 10x the 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 gef because now he could.

1:09:17 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 all right we fixed this we fixed this I think total the PR the P1 project I maybe misremember but I think it was like 12 PRs like just fixing all sorts of things where I look at the single PRs I'm like yeah actually okay yeah makes sense I look at the total sum of it you've changed 2500 lines of code you're like you've done that in a few days

1:09:46 it's so I've never heard anyone do P1 because it just it feels like a vanity experience it makes no business sense I I This is not true, right? Cuz everything adds up. But but you know what I mean, right?

1:09:56 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 2 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 And then I go like, oh yeah, delete as in revert code back to normal. I like before I would be a little more precious about 75 lines of code because it would

1:10:59 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 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 farrung regions. Where are we with the tax recip? And this boy is like, "All right, this uh servant is like, "Yes, I I shall do so and return in 3 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, "Wha, I did this with I haven't even pulled the trigger on it yet." But one of the things with the Machi 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.

1:11:52 Yeah,

1:11:52 I totally get why a bunch of people wanted. I'm not heavily inclined to spend four hours figuring it out. And I

8 Highlight · Delegating high-risk tasks to AI agents

1:11:59 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 made the agents figure it out. So I kicked off initially the process of just coming up with a plan. This is a pretty good big change, right? Like if you [ __ ] 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.

1:12:28 I'm like, this is perfect for the kind of agent stuff. So it started off basically just having Opus and Codeex pingpong a plan. Like I'll just I asked Opus first like come up with a plan for this it thinks for minutes and minutes and come up with a good plan and then I kick it over to Codeex and like critique the plan and then I had him ping pong back and forth a couple times and at the end looking at the plan going like yep that's a good plan we should totally do that and I can't wait to kick that one

Mastering existing tooling resembles vintage computer mastery

1:12:52 off and just go yeah now does dual boot not because I did it but uh thank your uh your helpful clinkers. 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.

1:13:18 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 19 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 64 when that was released back in 81 to 85 I think was the main run. I know they made it a little longer, but then the AmIgga and other machines came out. Were great games. I mean, I got interested in games of the Commodore 64, Yung Fu, and all that stuff. The stuff they were able to do 20 years later when someone had just noodled all the secrets and tweaked the one MHz processor

1:14:12 when they're building games for the old old

1:14:14 Yeah.

1:14:15 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 2, they look from they're like from different generations. We could totally continue to do that with the models, but we're not going to have that particular enjoyment because there's a new model dropping in 3 months. But this is interesting because if we just run with this thought like of course we know new new things are going to 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 project 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?

1:14:59 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.

1:15:07 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. So all this extra productivity we're getting out of the team allows us now to do things like P1 and these other projects that are awesome and they're going to improve the product faster too. Of course they are. The old way of thinking like it's going to take 2 months to deliver a major feature. I mean that's out the door. Of course there's going to be rapid acceleration that's going to filter all the way into our software methodology process like shape of was built on two-month cycles.

1:15:44 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 scripts on on all that. When you're shipping that much faster, you need a way to control what goes live and measure whether it's working. This is a good time to mention our presenting sponsor stats. Experimentation feature flags for teams that ship fast. Static build a unified platform that enables both experimentation and continuous shipping.

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Peak programmer and the shift in developer constraints

1:16:34 stats.com/pragmatic. With this, let's get back to the shift about to hit developers. 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

1:16:52 the salaries that flow to the constraints. 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 going to change. I do actually think if I was going to bet we've seen peak programmer in terms of the learned guilt of programmers who went to either school or spend hours getting really good at it. we're not going to 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. By the way, I think

1:17:47 GitHub has gotten a lot of slack or flak lately.

1:17:50 A lot

1:17:51 justifiably so. I saw a chart saying they had a 92% 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 rocket ship. We are producing as a civilization globally way more software than we've ever done before. I mean, open claw itself, I thought um he said it was 400,000 lines of code. That used to take 10 years and 2,000 people. Yeah.

1:18:25 To get to that.

1:18:26 Well, not 2,000 in and but yes, it it took a long time.

1:18:29 I mean, a long time, right? Like you look at uh I think uh the main monolith at Shopify is 3 million lines of code. That's 20 years. And if you collectively sum up all programmers who've worked on that, probably like 20,000 people. Yeah. Big shifts are coming right now. Um lots of software is being produced. I can see why it's it's creaking a little bit over there because like the pushes are just going to accelerate, right? And we haven't even seen anything yet. If you look at AI adoption curves, basically no one's using it.

1:18:55 Like we all in our little bubble in X are like, oh, everyone's no they're not like most companies in the world are just not doing it. Notwithstanding that like I think uh chatt got to 800 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 days. 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.

1:19:53 Anywhere where software development is a cost center, which is actually probably the majority of software development in the world,

1:19:59 they're going to face these pressures.

1:20:00 Yeah. Sounds like if I'm a software engineer right now and I'm worried about like well, you know, like just want to make sure that I'm I'm at a place where things are going to be better. You want to be at a place where you want to 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 cuz if if if I just look back from like the '9s right like even if you look at the movies you you saw the stereotypes they were the nerd who didn't talk to anyone but they knew how to code they knew how to do assembly and then we went in the 2000s it was still based on languages and over time I think in the 2010s startups 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 the 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 wonder if I'm just looking at just just this curve, right? If I'm just painting

1:21:00 it up like you're starting to get people Oh, 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 with customers, most of them just it's it's not even a drag. It's like and 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 [ __ ] and I thought it was a lot of people who maybe didn't do as much right and one of the reason was that they couldn't because the constraint resource was the implementation was the product manager could find out that they want 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 underutilized they were not the constraint right they the constraint was on the implementation

1:22:02 that absolutely absolutely is going to switch

1:22:05 and now pure implementation is going to be solved at some point. I I'm not claiming it is right now and anyone who is have not tried to just deploy bipoded stuff with no review to major code bases but as the lesson of last summer on Lex I'm not going to put my heart on the block and saying that's not going to happen before next summer

1:22:27 again this is just like common sense but implementation one implementation will be solved for for a general use case for the edge cases it will take longer and for some cases it will not make sense same thing as I know self-driving is fine for like these size of cars but for like trucks it'll either take longer or if you're specializ you do but the point is like there will be pockets where but those pockets will be smaller. Yes, I do think the stereotype of 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 code.

1:22:59 And even John Karmak is also super AI appeal and lead.

1:23:03 Well, 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.

1:23:17 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 both software engineer and a designer. And actually I want I'm I want to interview your designer who you hired and because uh you published the salary which is a San Francisco salary. You put the exact number you can check it for it. You have a social media presence so it's kind of go 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

Hiring rigor and the myth of easy recruitment

1:24:02 it. So, what did it take to get hired at 37 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.

1:24:17 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 going to be like I don't know 100 150 at the most? I haven't even

1:24:41 How big is your team right now is?

1:24:43 Uh we're 60 people at the entire company and we are what is that going to be like 20 programmers something like that.

1:24:49 Yeah, that's probably about right.

1:24:50 Oh, so so who what is the other other 40 folks?

1:24:53 Uh we have designers

1:24:56 uh probably like 10 of those.

1:24:58 Wow. 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 10 folks managing all our servers. And yeah, that's about it. But yeah, I probably it's probably about 100 people in total that I've worked with uh or employed at the company's programmers

1:25:21 out of tens of thousands

1:25:23 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 50/50. So half of even those hires

1:25:38 you go through all of because you have a really long and thorough process. You you you put in a lot of effort, right?

1:25:43 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 it all sorts of different hypothesis. Well, can we predict employee outcomes on the basis of Ivory League education background on GPA on all of these things? And the conclusion was basically like we know nothing.

1:26:10 We can't predict it on any of these things. We can't predict it on lead code. We can't predict it on any of these metrics. 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.

1:26:24 Yeah. Oh, yeah.

1:26:24 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 mean, 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 boomery very quickly, but it's also just the reality of trying to get a

9 Highlight · The reality of hiring pipelines and application filtering

1:26:54 job. Like, you got to stand out. And I understand that that's uncomfortable, right? like who 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 happened 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 0.1% chance no it's not not at all with that math you had 0% chance

1:27:27 yes

1:27:28 zero and the very 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 going to 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 twothirds 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 some other smells. Then there's like perhaps a third left and then we start looking at some of the submissions. Then we narrow it down historically to a pool of around 20 people that we give a at home test.

1:28:13 The at home test is wonderful. Some people hate it. They feel like it's free labor. I'm like, what the [ __ ] are you talking about? I'm not going to use your submission to a code test. What? I'm going to deploy it 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

1:28:29 the sympathy of like I don't want to put six hours into making a test if it's not going to go anywhere. Okay, I get it. But there's no way around it because if you have it in your head that you just send in a resume, someone's going to call you up on the phone, have a 30-minute conversation with you and go, you've hired sir. I don't know if that ever existed, but certainly does not exist today. It never existed in the lifetime I've been in this. Well, the only time it exists, right, is

1:28:54 through a very warm referral where correct

1:28:57 where you're starting a typing if you're skipping the whole pipeline.

1:29:01 And when you skip the whole pipeline, it 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 2 years, we should hire them than 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 call. It has happened. We have hired people that way and I continue to want to 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 with that that that's kind of blackmailing but then hiring directly on the base of warm referral as you call it

1:30:01 um has worked very well and that the hit rate there is really high but how does

Showing up matters regardless of the workplace quality

1:30:05 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?

1:30:41 Everyone else you work with, they're going to watch that. You know where that warm refo is going to come from? It's going to 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 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.

1:31:10 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 bar?

1:31:18 This is total cope. And it's cope both on the side of I work at a shitty place if 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. Right. Well, well, was this not how you ended up at 37 Signals where it was just a contract job or something and you know like on a contract job you have no ownership and correct but you showed up and

1:31:56 correct and Jason ended up realizing

1:32:00 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 siminal stories in that regard but the fundamental principle is still the same show up do as good as you can learn

A deep love for computers drives lasting longevity

1:32:16 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 programming. That you don't have to ever care about programming outside working hours. Was was this what you thought of or like

1:32:37 Well, I thought of it mistakenly because I was pushing back on the overwork 100hour week, 120 hour week maniacal obsession, which by the way never was my experience. We did not start base camp that way. We have worked on a 40hour week rolling average over those 25 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.

1:33:04 It's not work in the sense that I'm whatever shipping features to basec camp customers like just 247. 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 2010s 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 soughta 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 [ __ ] and I think that's over if it ever was true and I think it was true

1:33:42 the boot camps were the perfect uh like catalyst or or like they were the canary when

1:33:48 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.

1:33:57 Exactly.

1:33:57 And so, I'm not I don't even have any qualms about internet. I'm just saying like that's over.

1:34:02 No, I I think looking, you know, we're talking about like is it is the golden age of the programmer? Have you passed peep 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 a boot camp or put in the hours and you could get hired at a place because the interviews were the 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 our thing and it's not just going to be have you worked there like would you I I've had these calls from like data bricks is 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,

1:34:49 right?

1:34:50 Where would you hire them, etc., etc. And

1:34:52 no, I understand it. The weird thing is 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 37 signals in my own experience, I'm enjoying my time as a programmer more than any time since early 2000s 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 P1s to be able to think about dual booting omachi to do all of that stuff that the work itself has gotten vastly more enjoyable and I've seen the same thing

1:35:52 for the most AI forward programmers that we have maybe 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 bifocation here where we should all feel like well we don't know what's going on and for some people that's going to 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.

1:36:19 You're not going to be able to manifest that anxiety into anything productive unless you just plow it into leaning in. Right? Because if you just sit and spin around, try to think about what the world's going to look like seven years from now, you're wasting your time. So that's the only path. The only path is to 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

1:36:43 that you never finished,

1:36:44 that you never finished, and you just give it a try, I don't see how you really like computers and not find that experiment enjoyable. And I I've seen this with with people who are getting into it. Kent Beck is such a great example. He's been programmer 52 years and he is saying like he he loves doing it and he found this balance between using the agents to build something ambitious that he always wanted to b he's building his small talk server which which used to take forever and now it's it's 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. It's 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 2001 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

1:37:45 having read Extreme Programming and many of these other things. Small Talk Best Practices is my number one recommendation for any programmer who want to 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 95, I think, or 96, is to this day my favorite book of all time on tactical programming uh patterns. So, it's wonderful to hear him being agent pilt while also enjoying the birds. I mean, I try to do that, too. And this is actually there's a bit

10 Highlight · Avoiding burnout amidst extreme AI productivity

1:38:16 of attention right now is that most of the people I find who are allin, they're working harder than they ever have. And I've seen that with myself now too. When you can be this 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. And I need to go, do you know what?

1:38:41 This is not like a limited sale. like AI is going to 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 in 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 pled on it is like remember that this is as bad as they're ever going to 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 consuming is is is a big deal. Like with Steve Yaggi, he

Protecting sleep and health against AI-induced burnout

1:39:13 was he looks a bit more drained than like you can see it on the video, but he he has he's honest like he's he's being pulled into this. He's doing he has friends who are and when when you're on the edge, you're there. You've clearly been AI pill, but how are you finding of keeping a balance of like all right, stepping away, you know, like I I know you've I think you previously talked about the importance of sleep. Apparently you don't have an alarm.

1:39:34 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 going to be awake for in that case 18 hours. What is the drag I'm gonna carry for all those 18 hours for getting one more hour, two more hours by cutting back on the sleep?

1:40:09 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, very rare, I can count on two hands the number of times where I've been sleepless, like the ra 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 trade is sleep and then you should not trade your health. You should not try to save the 3 hours a week of working out to do more agent work. That's a very poor trade.

1:40:47 Keep in good condition. like there's nothing this can be more important if you want to keep like sharp up there that like the rest of the system is operating if not at 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

1:41:06 on something that we're going to be dealing with for like slow down buddy like it's not again a limited sale the next 10 years we're going to see more and more it's going to 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

Intrinsic motivation and the true purpose of building

1:41:25 within 3 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 3 weeks. You will be a hot mess. So, let's close. We talked about the stuff that we don't know. A lot of things we don't know, but let's close with what you do know. So 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 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?

1:42:03 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 going to fill eight hours every day with an activity, my best bet is computers. And it has been so since I was literally 5 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 moving them around and

1:42:42 Toro.

1:42:42 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 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 is not going to cut it. It's not going to 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.

1:43:37 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 going to continue to do that. And I'm going to 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 want to play with computers, I'm going continue to do that. And then 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 at AGI yet, right? You think like, well, just ask your agent to make a CLI.

1:44:19 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 Base Camp very very shortly. Maybe by the time this is out it'll probably be out and for the rest of them too and I want to 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 cur 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 want to know. I want to know. I want to 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.

1:45:21 This was awesome. Thanks. Thanks a bunch.

1:45:23 All right. Thanks for having me. This is really great.

1:45:25 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 agent 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

1:46:26 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 cents 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.

1:47:00 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 podcast, please do subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and on YouTube. And a special thank you if you also leave a rating on the show. Thanks and see you in the next