DHH’s new way of writing code

How has it created Ruby on Rails changed how we build software now with AI agents? David Heinem, higher Hansen often referred to as DHH created Ruby on Rails, omachi and is the co-founder of 37 signals He bashed capabilities of AI coding tools on less reasons podcasts six months ago Then over the course of a few weeks over the winter break He did a 180 turn and went AI first on everything in today's conversation We cover how David and his team at 37 signals built software today and how AI tools are making them more ambitious than ever before Why Ruby on Rails and Lillis 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 stand out designers and engineers who care about the craft could become more in demand and many more If you're interested in what one of the most experienced builders in the tech industry thinks about the practical utility of AI tools and how these tools could Impact software engineers who care about the craft then this episode is for you This episode is presented by stat sake 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 work OS David it's awesome to have you here. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming. I should actually say you're in Copenhagen That's my city of choice at the moment. It's a beautiful city It's got so much going for it. And so what have you been up to? I'm always building stuff I have been building stuff for a good damn three decades now on the internet I got started back in 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 a match it got started as a summer Project in between racing at the 24 hours of Lamar. There's a lot of downtime in that week So I just started hacking on it and it really took off very quickly thereafter It's been a truly inspiring ride to see that even in a market as crowded as Linux distributions there's about seven thousand different distributions out there some of them with long pedigrees and Many of them even based on sort of kind of similar Vibes to some extent there's room for something new and it's a great reminder That all the ideas in the world may be taken and doesn't matter because your spin on it isn't and I put my spin on Linux build a matchy build the perfect computer system for me and Saw exactly the same thing I've ever seen whenever I build something that really just hits the spot for me personally Thousands of others just like me or close enough to what I like that they find the same pleasure enjoying it Whether it was Ruby on rails Kamal getting out of the cloud any of these things. It's the same syndrome Yeah, with rails you are literally scratching your own edge You were just building your own components and then open sourcing them. Is that how it started? basically I picked up Ruby in the early 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've 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 base camp and I was free to choose so I chose Ruby and At the time Ruby didn't have any tooling or very not very much when it came to web application So I had to build it all myself and that turned into Ruby on rails, which is still going strong I'm still very heavily involved with that. I think in some ways Ruby on rails is having a little bit of a Renaissance now that it is one of the most token efficient ways of building web apps It's ideally suited for the agent workflows. We're dealing with now We'll see how long that lasts maybe all the agents are gonna be writing machine code or assembler in about five minutes So maybe that comes to an end but for the moment token efficiency still matters and it still matters whether the agents produce code that Humans are able to read and verify that may also come to an end at some point But as it is right now, it's been a fun ride to just see these kinds of projects where I'm scratching my own itch Resonate with a much larger community of people who then show up and want to help I mean for omachi, which has only been around for what is that just over six months now We have what 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 the 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 since that they don't feel like they have to invest a hundred hours Into tweaking this system to get going. It's really fun But what's also fun, of course is that both of these things both Ruby and Rails and omachi were not just hobby projects I love hot hobby product and I will always do those But I also like to apply them to business 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 so it's a batchy on all much. I mean people can choose right 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 So you'll say I want to write this thing in Django We're gonna use Python and this other framework even if you have Ruby on rails and you're doing that So we pivoted from an early invitation to play around That was what when I first switched to Linux it said like hey if you want to check it out check it out Then when things got a little more serious with a matchi 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 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 You know like how you go around right and right now Where are you like where is the business as a whole and you know you keep you keep building you keep launching new and exciting and just cool Stuff I think fizzy was the latest one. Yes, so 30 some 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 of 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 the day before Facebook went live which is kind of a funny coincidence that we were of that same time in cohort and Within about a year. We realized this thing was taking off and we went full-time and switched from being a consultant See to being a software company awesome, and that's now 22 years ago a little more than that and In that time we've released a ton of products base 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 experienced 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 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 comm our email service back in 2020 which was a crazy mission when you think about it Yeah, here is a sector completely dominated by a single player Google with Gmail. That's a good product Yeah, 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 were 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 up in the US I think Gmail is something like 85% of all email traffic, which sounds insane. Maybe it's 80% It's incredibly high is basically Gmail and then All the rest is in this tiny little part of the graph. So we bought 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 There was a really clever launch and I use 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 And we put all those opinions into a new software product spend about almost two 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. Yeah, we finally picked a week. We went live and then we had the battle of our lives with Apple with Apple I remember that and Didn't want to prove your your app They didn't want to prove our app unless we paid the toll fee the 30% percent 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 Yes, you have to be on not just mobile phones, but specifically the iPhone This is true today the majority of a 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 two week epic struggle back and forth Thankfully time to perfection with WWDC where Apple preferably didn't want to look like the Goliath squashing a Developer a tiny developer. We ended up being allowed in and Apple sort of rewrote the rules after the fact to make it But it was a small victory not the ultimate victory but 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? like Apple refuses our app we sign up 200 people and The app is dead what instead happened was they gave us a multimillion dollar launch campaign and coverage in all major media and we signed up tens of thousands of people in those first weeks that was an insane event but 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 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 were 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 screener We have thumbs up. I will hear from this person thumbs down. I'm never here from them person again This is how I reached out. I mean we were I'm not sure we were connected on on X But I said they know because your email is out there and your screener seems to have work Is it gave me the thumbs up? It did because the screen is me. So there's not even a I trying to Suss out whether I want to hear from you or not because what turns out to be true is it's actually not that onerous to once a day go through your screener and Say thumbs up or down because there aren't that many people in the world And if you say no to the annoying pestering salespeople who within Gmail managed to read your inbox seven times Then the workload is much less and it's very satisfying I would say too because whenever she's in Gmail I would get roped into this sales tactic that they of course rely on which is that like you write back and say like no Thank you. I'm not interested and then they would respond again Yes, and now you feel like wait am I know I obligated to respond to this person I kind of feel like I am and occasionally I would end up writing and even if I wouldn't write They still have access to my inbox. So I would hear from them again next week. They have a whole drip campaign They all fucking do right that any outreach is 70 males. It's not one emails It's 70 males 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 Those things I want to read it's 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 Original premise that email is just what universities use for scientists to talk to each other and scientists have really good manners And will not pester you 52 times about some stupid app. They want to sell you. No, they're respectful and beautiful right beautiful ideal beautiful thought Beautiful protocol design for those norms and those people then you let it into the world at large and you realize that Not everyone is endowed with such norms and such politeness and especially when salespeople get involved So you need better defenses and for me and for us and for all our many customers Hey, is that defense? It is a way to love email again, and I find that it's really important actually to have a grand why This is all the way back to Victor Frankel the meaning of 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 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 a pack if you can set it up that way This is a good time to talk about our season sponsor workOS 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-grained permissions and those are not small features. They're systems Systems that can take months to build and maintain workOS gives you API set enterprise ready off and user management in days Instead of months all designed to fit cleanly into your product That's why companies like open AI and traffic and cursor run on workOS Focus on building your product let workOS handle the enterprise infrastructure With this let's get back to David and the old way of thinking versus the new way of thinking Putting our your developer hat on like can you talk talk me through on how how you built it? You said it was two years, but was it just one or two people starting to build it? I'm sure as tech you obviously must have used Ruby on Rails a lot And then 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 an imbal you're a great developer I'm you hire great developers. So this has been two years What took so long for and of course is a beautiful product, but right on the surface I think as developers we might have this this thing where I look at it as like two years With with the talented team. 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 weekend We could have at the original iPod when it launched it was like five gigabits no Wi-Fi Whatever less speed than nomad lane. So I get that because I also have that same instinct I think that is our Hooper's as developers We think right 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 a few hours. We should be able to have just kick off an agent. Yeah, but figuring out what you actually want to build takes a lot longer and Arriving at something that's worth Publishing takes longer still at least it does for us and I think it does for anyone who arrives at anything good and the original Hey construction was just me on the technical side. This is actually how we've started the majority of our major products is Either it's just me sometimes it's one additional developer But is an tiny tiny team until we have a shape Until we have 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 gonna build it for you You have to figure out what you want. We can talk about this later, but this is where AI's Very recent progress is changing things dramatically. It is now quicker to arrive at what do I want but for hey? It was me and then it was Jason and one designer two designers very very small team Trying to figure out the shape trying to figure out if you're taking on Gmail You can't just do Gmail in blue no one's gonna buy that no one's gonna be interested in that it's gotta be novel which means it 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 it's a bit of a misdirection My attention is you hate Gmail and not just Gmail But most email systems build on the old way of anyone has access to the 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 the original base camp built the same way It was just me on the technical side. Is this a shape up in psychology? There's a shape up thinking in trying to actually Endowed the designer with an intention of how should it work not just how should it look and figuring out It's also how it should look products should be beautiful and they should be unique and appealing and so forth 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 it 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 of everyone piles in so one thing that is super Interesting and you might take it for granted, but it's very different to how most startups That raise VC money, which I'm very familiar with and big companies Uber Yes, you name it the way projects will start there is you take the product manager who works with maybe Maybe half a designer and comes up with a spec and then the 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 do you think about designers even you recently hired a designer Zoltan actually who I'm chatting with Great guy, but my sense is you think of designers a little bit different than potentially the rest of the industry does we very much do designers at 37 signals are not just here to Make a spec look pretty they're here to find what the spec should be their 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 and now With agent acceleration they do the whole thing not necessarily as it will be merged But the whole thing in terms of here's the final shape and design of what it should look like But I do think we are very peculiar in this sense And we have found this when we've been trying to hire designers that many designers working other companies are not used to also wearing the product manager had figuring out what we should build and Wearing the implementation hat shaping it into CSS and HTML I found that when you combine these three hats into one you have an Individual who know the materials they're working with know how they stretch Know which way the seam is supposed to be cut and therefore works natively with the Fabric of the internet when you're working directly in CSS when you're working directly in HTML You're just much more in tune with what this medium wants And I find that that's probably quite similar if you're a jewelry designer You should know the properties of gold you should know how it bends into strength and our text you have some engineering understanding of load bearing Structures and so on not to the degree that the architect is just gonna design the whole thing and then we start pouring concrete You still have engineers helping you out But the more you understand the materials you're working with the more you're likely to come up with something that cuts along the grain and Therefore ends up feeling correct feeling good just a quick hop to Apple I think this is one of the reasons why some of the historic super fans like Daring Fireball and others Gruber have been disappointed by the new direction is that Apple used to stand for these exquisitely designed native Mac applications Which is a dying breed like they're essentially dead now We have electron which we can talk about that too 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 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 in 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 We're like, yeah, but you can't build anything real anything meaningful anything big unless you have a team That's much larger because it's just gonna be a toy product product, right? And my insight from the start was that's of course bullshit because you just haven't used Ruby on rails You just haven't used the acceleration that's possible if you use better tools now We're all realizing that we're using realizing So if you use agent acceleration a single individual actually can build something Yes, 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 Laker rhythmic curve on communication cost Starts to be relevant and this is one of the things maybe we can talk about this where agent acceleration is really changing the Bargain between junior developers and 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 your value design user experience design designing on software design like you know like building stuff that feels good May that be software hardware? You also value that as a craft and and you look for it like these two things do I sense this? usually I mean I think aesthetics This 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 shit when everything is laggy when that touch interface doesn't register When you have to restart it when you're calling a travel agent They can't do something because they're all shitty copal system won't let them right the world is full of Not just in 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 it 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 printboard 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 is Essentially no choice if you are a person who is Attracted to this aesthetics, which I think is everyone there's just varying levels of Awareness about whether you are not but that you want to make it all beautiful and for me Ruby in particular has been this seminal language because it produces the most beautiful code in my book There's barely even competition like there are other things that can be beautiful in a way Like I find looking at small talk for example very beautiful in its minimalism But not the house I want to live in Ruby is the house I want to live in because it's got that aesthetic quality While not being rigid about its ideology, which is a very rare aspect too I More often find now we can refer to I have again is that when someone is obsessed in this way They are a little narrow-minded like that's the trade-off. That's the price and I find that Ruby has somehow managed to be both broad scoped yet also Intensively focused on on this but overall we have to have beautiful things We have to work with beautiful tools. We have to produce beautiful fluid Interactions, this is how we should see ourselves as craftspeople that we care about polishing it until there are no splinters left How is AI changing how you work and How do you think it's changing your craft or just let's just talk about the craft of again You're you're hiring people in 30-some signals who similar care about design and software crafts quality How is changing what you get out of the craft or how it sounds making it better or or worse in some ways I just want to you know start with like how has your view changed because the last time you talked in length about this that was on Lex Friedman's podcast and you were still rightfully so very skeptical of AI. It was a different set of tools It didn't work as well And I think you won there bashing it pretty hard, but things have changed since this is a nuanced point and maybe it's self-serving But I don't actually think my opinions have changed what have changed is the circumstances and the facts Well, which is is something I called out on that Joe and in many other writings was Right from the get-go. I could see that we had something new and novel here that was 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 Yeah, you're like here all the important things that happened in the history of computer science or the world Yonks, there's 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 conflating just somewhat 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 editor trying to guess the next character. It would be something littering it, right? Yes I found it infuriating. I found it as we're trying to have a conversation You won't let me finish the sentence you 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 which is dreadful Annoying in fact to the point that I got a little pessimistic About the direction of the industry for a hot second because I thought this was what we were all gonna do We're all gonna sit and do tap tap tap No, thank you well cursor even have they had I've even got a one of these one of their swags was a tap key Exactly which which felt very and I haven't I got it from them. It's really cool very well designed on all that beautiful design But dystopian dystopian when I see that and I remember that was a meme for a while Just we only need three characters on the keyboard, right? I thought of that episode of the Simpsons where Homer puts a Mechanical bird on the keyboard that just dips down and hits enter because all he's been doing is hit enter except Suddenly there's a warning about the nuclear core overloading and the bird just hits enter and the whole thing burns down I'm like wow that's quite a parallel the Simpsons really does predict everything But I did not like that style of use 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 me. Here's an error message Here's our concept Maybe I find something on stag 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 Tyroler who built this really cool best-selling game I love playing it and this was during this time of the tab completion and he said that in his the way He works is he just turned off all auto completions in his ID Because he got annoyed by it and then every now night went to chat gbt 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 a specifics and I'm taking it and somehow it felt that you know like he was in the zone the whole day By controlling it and yes, and somehow those habits sounds like you know, you're saying the same thing It kind of took it away from us exactly and I did get a little worried that that was gonna be the direction that We're all gonna be the bird and I didn't want to be the bird then I was like well What should I do instead? Maybe you're like farming potatoes like that's a long tradition here in Denmark Maybe I could take that up, but then thankfully Two things happened a clot coat in was that starts in the spring? It's going sort of over the summer then by the fall has some traction on a new way of Using agents to help you code were with the agent harnesses, right? This is really where we transition from AI to agents. Yes, suddenly the AI has tools It can use bash it can use everything you got on your terminal He 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 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 gonna have on the line Where it's the first model that continuously and consistently would shock me with the quality of its output its 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 merge without very much if any Alteration and if I did want to do alteration I could tell it and it would remember and it would not make the same mistake next time That to me the combination of those two things Was the unlock and you have a high bar like I give her a high bar I as we've talked about now at length like the aesthetics of the output really matters if I'm gonna Look at it and I'm gonna review it. I'm gonna get another anecdote in a second where those things don't even play in but when I'm using Agents to work on ruby code. I want their code to look as good as mine I'm not gonna merge their stuff if it's sloppy No more than I would merge the work of a junior developer who has not yet fully internalize our style and so forth So I wanted to be on par and non parity and the early models just couldn't that didn't mean they couldn't produce working software At least some of the time they could I'm very impressive I mean, I remember when I did my first snake game and I'm like, holy smokes I've been wanting to do this since I was six years old like I've been wanting to you 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 It was done with the game of copy paste the HTML when you do your magical experience, right? So I think that ramp Was very interesting because it actually took a while Until we found the form factor of the agent harness of the terminal interface That to me was the the big unlock from this is interesting. I want to Have a conversation with it too. 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 ship and it just happened from November 27 I believe is when opus 4 5 dropped now. There are other people have different points. They felt like oh, it was opus 4 Or maybe some people talk about son in 3 7 There are other earlier checkpoints, but I do feel like there's a general consensus I can lean up against that kipathi and others have been expressed like yep It was right around end of November early december everyone who works worked at larger to companies It was the winter break because people just you know, like the whole industry shuts down for two weeks Save for a few places where you're on call, but again, no production work happens across the industry I get to play with this 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. You're done And that was just a complete Sort of break right like if this was a movie you'd hear the scratch sound like You're like wait what rewind what I feel it was the most 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's director of engineering, etc We're 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 Hand thing you need to experience it because yes, you're not going to believe it right? There's something with this as well where you really don't believe it We can talk about this and whoever's not tried or not had that aha moment. I don't think we can convince them This is another one of those cases where words just are not effective You need to sit down in front of open code or whatever harness that you use use one of the frontier models Start with that start with opus. I'd say start with opus. It's the best frontier model other models are better at other things Blah blah, but if you're just 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 want you to say in the sense I found it really off putting this trend on x where unless you've In turn like 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 progress When if we'd been having this conversation in spring of last year everyone been like mcps mcps mcps And you know what you can now manage to just have jumped over that entire things and go straight to see allies and skills That's just worth having in mind that this FOMO that unless you're up on all of it as it happens play by play Your left behind is complete and other nonsense that being said I can still appreciate that some people were early and for me Toby Ludke at Shopify is the main individual who Saw this and saw the changes that were coming from it Way earlier than I did and it really helped drag me into This by constantly sending me like hey you look at this look at this and I do think that's actually quite helpful It's quite helpful to be surrounded by people who have a higher Faith or maybe their eyes are a little further up like my eyes tend to be Relatively close to the road like right in front of me and some people have a gaze that's a little higher But 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 well, 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 inflection points And I think the industry itself didn't even predict the inflection point right you have an entire city Silicon Valley and surrounding areas of San Fran focused on making this happen But I think exactly when the hockey stick starts hockeying is very difficult But then it happened and now My daily work is very different. So what is your daily work now? My daily work is Agent first on everything Going agent first is a good time to mention our season sponsor sonar when shifting to agent first work One thing that inherently comes up is the quality of the code Sonar the makers of sonar cube is deeply rooted in the core belief that code quality and code security are Inherently linked high quality code is naturally more resilient and as agents start writing code at a massive scale that verification layer Becomes your most important security parameter This is where solutions like sonar cubit advanced security are valuable with this new malicious package detection Advanced security provides a real-time circuit breaker automatically stopping agents from pulling in unverified or risky third-party libraries Before they ever hit your pipeline the impact is measurable too developers who verify their code with sonar are 44% less likely To report experiencing outages due to AI as per sonar state of code developer survey 2026 report It's really about closing the gap between the speed of AI and the reality of production security What else is sonar doing to help reduce outages improve security and lower risk associated with AI and agenda coding? Head to sonar source.com slash pragmatic to find out with this Let's get back to david's agent first workflow So specifically cloth cloth code. Uh, I use open code open code. You use open as my main harness I also use cloth 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 Yank their subscription from open code. So if you want to use your max 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 4546 is also nice But 45 to me was the infliction point and it creates a lot of competition because everyone wants to catch up and overtake them Now and especially because you see anthropics revenues. I think started the year there are 9 billion few Weeks later. They're at like whatever 14 or something now. They're 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 Claude 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 about using opus. In fact, whenever I feel like uh, this is a really hard problem I go to opus right now, but I also use other models and one of the things I've incorporated into my flow is to kind of have two models going at the same time at different speeds so I use tmux and I have this layout thing that's built into omachi where it'll start my new vm editor on the left side and then it'll start two paints on the right side on the top Is open code running kimi k25 and on the bottom is Opus running in claude 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 neo vm first I do uh, space gg to look at the Lacy get diff on it. What's this is changing if it looks correct? I'll just come in we're done great And then sometimes it doesn't look correct and I'll go in and also to code myself But the ratio and how quickly the ratio changes is still astounding I went from early November last year I'm code first everything. I started the editor I'll spend whatever long it is and then at some point if I get stuck or if I want a second opinion I'll go ask my friend clanker to give me a second opinion. That's just not how it is anymore Now I start with the agent now. It'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 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 cl is do we even need anything? Can't the agent just figure it all out? This was when I installed open claw so I installed open claw on a vm And I thought what should I do here? Let's see how far we can push it and what it can do by itself So I thought I want this claw in base camp I want this claw in fizzy. Let me just try to invite it as it was a human So I just wrote it. Can you sign up for fizzy? I'm not giving you any tools. I'm not giving you any mcp I'm not giving you a cli. I'm just telling you it's at the fizzy.do go sign up And you see it chuck along and then yeah, I've signed up But it's asking for an email address or I'm trying to sign up. It's asking for an email address I'm like, oh, yeah, right. You need an email address and a g doesn't have an email address Hey, go sign up for hay.com. I'm like it's gonna fail this one And it's chuck chuck chuck I've signed up for hay.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 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 hay 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? Project that we have and introduce yourself to the team 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 about a while This is uh agent terms. It took I don't know seven minutes. That was like oh, it feels like an eternity but It was able to do it and that seems like the end state the end state is that Agents will not need any of our accommodations. They do not need any on-rem They're not coming on a little Wheelchair they'll be coming on bionic legs and running five times as fast as you in about two seconds Which we'll get to in a second to the speed aspect of it But then you also realize okay. Well, I can't just sit around Bittling my thumbs until a gi happens Let's build for today and that's what we've been building for base camp. We've been building a cli We're going to build it for hay. 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's 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 Put things together. That's the unix philosophy, right? It's the total unix philosophy And that is actually the magic to me about seeing Everything having a cli is not that base camp is easier to use now with the cli. No, no is that github also has a cli and Sentry, I don't know if they haven't see a lot, 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 base camp iterating? What's wrong then go and github come up with a pull request Post a comment back to base camp when you're done and now we have a central right on base camp 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 right but try it yourself with your own product with your own task and with your own prompts and You will be pilled You will be Simultaneously Incredibly excited for what we've been able to make sand do The silicon the chips the weights the whole thing How and then also a little bit anxious about where to talk 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's not 18 months from now look like like if in the last three months We've upended my entire understanding of what's possible with computers. What's the next three months look like? What the next nine months looked like yeah, this this is where like I was a little bit 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 more Moore's law broke down at some point I I lived through ever and said it'll continue forever and you know And then it broke as we all suspected it would but then found another way I think it's a good point about the Moore's law right it broke for individual course Yes, how much can you push it and then we just went well What if you just had what's the latest chip 256 on the MD send chips right and even when performance broke We we we went into power consumption and size and all of those things So yeah, like but it's it's harder for me to also just to say oh it's going to stop here because we've seen it go We we know the approaches that they're taking this is larger and larger training sets And it's been working so far and there's also the bitter lesson which I think I think is a It's such a short paper that it's just so worth reading I think it's one of probably the most popular papers outside of academic circles Yes, because it just lays out this thing that we we don't want to believe that we want to believe that our our knowledge Our understanding is superior that you know you and me knowing how to code or me putting in these 15 years or however long it's been It's special sometimes it shows that this is not as special What's interesting actually is like right this second this snapshot in time It a little bit is and this is a funny verification that's happening junior versus senior developer is that the most Successful and applicable agent acceleration that I've seen at 30 times 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 Yeah, and amazon's own internal analysis essentially pinned that we can no longer let junior programmers ship agent generated code to production without review and the problem with that is First of all, I think that's the realization most companies are now having across the industry whenever it's mission critical for something of that nature We cannot yet rely on the agents to have vetted it all And eight or and junior programmers are not capable of figuring it out. Therefore their role is suddenly more tenuous than it was Six nine months ago because a senior programmer can and this is why senior programmers are getting so much more acceleration they're able to First of all working parallel with lots of agents but critically Examine the quality of the agent output and have a high degree of confidence of whether this is going to work or not a 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 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 five x 10 x their individual productivity and now This is the second order effect if you manage to five x or 10 x a senior developer That person's value per hour just went up 10 x now Take that hour instead of that person spending them 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 miles an hour where you can dive someone makes a mistake We delegate that to an agent well They can probably figure out how to make the code work too, right? So I do think it's coming But who knows when who knows how right now We're at a stage where the bulk of the benefits are accruing to the most senior developers and also I wonder just like with self-driving like you realize There's always kvT. So for example inside companies where it matters when you're a startup you have zero customers It doesn't matter you can one shot it and it doesn't matter if it doesn't work and it you know It crashes but inside these companies at uber Um, I just got details on how they're adopting AI and and they have all these tools clot code and and all of these things But what we realize as well when you just put it in there they have all these internal and monorepos They have their ticketing systems. They have their slag They have so much they have their rfc's design documents on on how and why they have this jumble of a mess with microservices which which was a fun way that 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 defeat nct's agent harnesses and now they're working Better but you know this where we are right now is is there and this is why if you're senior engineer And 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 or as efficient for a while until you learn all the systems Right, so I I wonder if just like with self-driving, you know self-driving works great I was in sf and la and wamos. They drive so nice like My teslas is 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 waymo got stuck because uh, uh a truck was parking on on narrow street and a car had a bike shed and I I I knew that it should I should not go there, but it didn't know so human operator operator came in But anyway, but even with waymos, you know, like there's there's things like there's they drive in pretty good weather They've been mapped out. So I wonder if in software engineering I wonder if this has these parallels where we have all of you know, like these companies have their their special Specialized landscape and once you map it once you do all the tools once you figure out these things and it would 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, yes, they were not going to be steering wheels anymore, which by the way is an amazing anecdote because it just shows elan's total faith in his mission Because in 17 when he made that proclamation it was an ai it was 500,000 lines of hand-coded c++ Right like that model was never ever going to get us to The full self-driving but he had just total faith in division 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't 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 That's not always as pleasant for passengers as it is fun for me And when I let the tesla autopilot drive, it's just the best chauffeur in the world It's just perfectly better than you 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 asi like in its application within that narrow domain and of course when we get these anecdotes and these examples of holy smokes Not all it didn't take 10 years For the self-driving 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 13 1 fsd 13 1 like the first version. You're like, wow, this is pretty good But like a better presentation 13 2 14 0 14 2 over the course of 18 months we went from Yeah, it's pretty good. But like I'm gonna pay attention here to why is there steering wheel? and that Acceleration that short period of time Of course, there's something people look to 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 gonna get all your Whatever for severity eight down times at aws because some ai pushed out some nonsense What is it gonna look like when they take the jump that fsd did over the same period of time? Now, I also think you can go completely crazy trying to just sit and Soak in all of that. This is what I tried to do over the past year go I'm really excited for what 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 a gi or we don't Now there are other people do that very well. I just watched an interview with leo polled on Dworkash from last year. He's thinking like what does 2030 look like? What does the whatever 10 gigawatt data center look like? I'm like, I'm very glad we have individuals who put thought into that because that's not my Favorite spot to be and I think most people are not that good at polishing the crystal ball No, well, 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 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 37 signals With software engineers, you of course have most experienced engineers. Although you did hire junior engineers as well How is there kind of work changing? How is there? Satisfaction with with work chain because that's also a thing right we keep arguing about like is it making us more miserable? These things is it what we want to do and how's the change for you? Right? I think it's that's the biggest revelation Actually more than even the capacity of the agents is my enjoyment running them When I was on that last interview last summer, I was talking about do you know what? I don't want to be a project manager for agents because I had the mental model of a project manager of humans And I thought like that's not what I enjoy. I don't want to be that far away from the production I want to be in the mix. I want to have my hands in the code What I 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 mix 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 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 get up and we had I don't know 250 pr's pending And I kind of just sighed a little bit and like 250 pr's if I spent 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 do you know what let me try something else Let me just try to ask claud 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 pr's 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 claud's implementation the Programmer hard correctly identified an issue But hand rolled some code that I could see I didn't want to keep or sometimes I couldn't even see it I just asked claud and they said like that's not quite right and then I just asked claud Can you just clean room this? This is the right problem. Let's fix it. But let's do it right. It would do it right away In exactly the style as I would have written the rest of omachi now This is the high code of something is mostly just bash code But there's still a Shape to bash code and how you want it to look and can feel coherent with the rest of project agents Opus in this case, which is nail it and then the second half of it was split between 25 things I didn't just realize I just don't want this it shouldn't we shouldn't have it and 25 claud telling me Maybe there's something here, but it's really not a good implementation. We don't have a straight shot to make a great one 100 issues In 90 minutes and I sat back this would have been A week's worth of work Days at the very least What the heck and even more than that claud's analysis of at least half the issues Pertain to things I knew nothing about Where it was undeniably a smarter better reviewer programmer That I could ever dream to be well not dream to be but wasn't that moment No, but you would have not put in I would not have done it This was why the pr sat in the first place in many cases. I would look at it and go like I think there's something here But like then I now have to read up on this debuts 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 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 you have a team right 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 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 Our legion we had a great project where normally on performance work. You worry about 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 four milliseconds. Let's say that right Well, actually four milliseconds can add up if you have a bunch of fast requests They can still it still matters and you just went like we're gonna do p1 We're gonna optimize p1 literally the fastest 1% of requests We're gonna make them even faster He took it from I think it was four milliseconds to less than half a millisecond He 10xed 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 Chef because now he could now he could because he had a hunch. He had an intuition that there was something here he let agents run with it and The number prs that like art we fixed this we fixed this I think total the pr the p1 project Maybe misremember when 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 2,500 lines of code. You're like you've done that in a few days So I've never heard anyone do p1 because it just it feels like a vanity project. Exactly. It makes no business sense I mean, this is not true, right? Because everything adds up, but but you know what I mean, right? I know exactly what you mean And this is exactly why the explosion of the pie suddenly lets us look at problems We would never have contemplated looking before It's funny. I remember this scene from terminator 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 I just dropped by a thousand fold. 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 And then I go like, oh, yeah Delete as in revert code back to normal I feel like before I would be a little more precious about 75 lines of code because it would have taken me two hours to do him Now there's no residual value to any of this stuff and I could 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 far-fung regions. Where are we with the tax? And this boy's like, uh, this uh servant is like, yes, I shall do so and return in three weeks Except like you can just wave your hands around and agents just come back with Answers to stupid questions Terrible ideas and suddenly it wasn't so terrible. It was actually a great idea and you go like, wow I did this with um, um, I haven't even pulled the trigger on it yet But one of the things when 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, you know what I have more than one computer So when I play play games, I can just do it on the pc. It's not a me problem. Yeah, I totally get why a bunch of people wanted I'm not heavily inclined to spend four hours figuring it out and I just Uh, a little while ago went like, oh This is exactly the kind of problem like I don't have to figure it out Just make the agents figure it out. So I kicked off initially the process of just coming up with a plan This is a pretty big change, right? Like if you fuck up someone's boot records or you overwrite their petition A 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, luxe encryption on the linux petition But the linux petition doesn't own the whole drive. It's a little hairy. I didn't want to take on the criticality I'm like, this is perfect for the kind of agent stuff. So it started off basically just having opus and codex ping pong a plan Like I'll just I asked opus first like come up with a plan for this Things for a minute's a minute's a come up for a good plan and then I kick it over the codex 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 Yep, that's a good plan. We should totally do that and I can't wait to kick that one off and just go Yeah, now omachi does Do a boot not because I did it but uh, thank you're uh, you're helpful clinkers That level of ambition is still something I've yet to internalize Like even just that that like hey here these Hunches or demands projects that I would like to do and maybe someday and You could kick it up on a hunch while you go to lunch That is a new world Which is also one of the reasons I think a lot of people are thinking well the model continues to improve But even if we somehow hit a wall tomorrow The bitter lesson is no longer true. There's actually a limit. It's 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 comodo 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 amiga and other machines came out were great games I mean, I got interested in games kind of the comodo 64 Yeah, confluent all that stuff the stuff they were able to do 20 years later When someone had just noodled all the secrets and tweak the one megahertz processor when they're building games for the old Yes, yeah, or so much more technically impressive because we just know so much more about the I mean same thing with that 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 three 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 we're an existing team now that people can do more work and more ambitious work How are you thinking of of the team? Taking on more work launching more products. Are you thinking of of potentially growing the team or keeping it as is My best assessment for our setup is that the same people can do much more. 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 Two 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 mythology process like shape of was built on two month cycles That doesn't make sense in the same way at all anymore We have not fully rewritten those scripts yet because the acceleration is still So fast no company really has rewritten the script on on all of that when you're shipping that much faster You needed a way to control what goes live and measure whether it's working This is a good time to mention our presenting sponsor stat zig experimentation feature flags for teams that ship fast Stat Zig build a unified platform that enables both experimentation and continuous shipping built an experimentation means that every rule Automatically becomes a learning opportunity with proper statistical analysis showing you exactly how features impact your metrics Feature flags let you ship continuously with confidence And because it's all in one platform with the same product data teams across your organization can collaborate and make data driven decisions To learn more head to stat zig.com slash pragmatic with this Let's get back to the shift about the head developers But I still think software developers are delusional if they do not think a shift is coming were Before they were the constraint on how much could be produced and therefore could command we were the salaries that flowed 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 peep peak programmer in terms of the Learned guild of programmers who went to either school or spend 15 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 Givens paradox where as the price of something goes down you get more of it or you get more demand for it It's true But that doesn't mean that all programmers are going to get bailed out by it just because More software than ever is going to be produced. That's for sure. I by the way, I think GitHub has gotten a lot of Slack or flak lately a lot Justify up we saw 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 2000 people To get to that well not 2000 people in but yes, it took a long time, right? You look at I think the main monolith that Shopify's three million lines of code That's 20 years and if you collectively sum up all programs have worked on that probably like 20,000 people Yeah, big shifts are coming right now. Um, lots of software is being produced I could 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 like we all in our little bubble in X or like everyone's a No, they're not like most companies in the world are just not doing it notwithstanding that like I think Chatcha PT 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 Our 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 sculpted defined It's a cost center Anywhere where software development is a cost center, which is probably the majority of software development in the world They're going to face these pressures. Yeah, it 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 because if if I just look back from like the 90s, right? Like even if you look at the movies you saw the serotypes there or the nerder to didn't talk to anyone But they knew how to code they knew how to do assembly and then we went into 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 Some of the the latest VC funded companies hire 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 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 it up Like you're starting to get people. Oh and and the developers 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 have not necessarily had the highest esteem for product management as a function I thought there was a lot of bullshit and I thought it was a lot of people who maybe didn't do as much Right and one of the reason was that they couldn't because the constraint resource was the implementation Was the product manager could find out that they wanted to do something I want to do this feature and then they had to wait four weeks For some very expensive programmers to make that reality happen and in those four weeks I mean I guess they could go talk to them. They were under utilized. Yeah, they were not the constraint, right? They the constraint was on the implementation that absolutely is going to switch and now pure implementation Is going to be solved at some point I I'm not claiming it is right now and anyone who is I've not tried to just Deploy five coded 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 Again, this is just like common sense But implementation one implementation while we solve for For a general accused case for the edge cases it will take longer and for some cases That it will not make sense same thing as I don't know yourself driving is fine for like these size of cars But for like trucks it'll either take longer or if you're special as you do But the point is like there will be pockets where but those pockets will be smaller. Yes. I do think the stereotype of I just want to sit in code You have to be John karmic levels of good to retain that privilege to just I just want to sit in code and even john karmic Yeah, of course, it's also super AI appilled and leading 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 around the world people get that totally totally totally But like you need to literally be the very best and not just the very best But you need to be better than the agents right 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 of a position and this was even Well before AI I remember that you you put out a job for software engineer and a designer And actually I want I want to interview your designer who you hired and because uh, you published the salary Which is uh, 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 goes wide and you get a lot of applications and you do a pretty good job as I understand You try to be very fair you put a lot of effort into it So what did it take to get hired at 30 summit signals because now you are trying to hire some of the best and Based off of this What advice do you give to people who are like, okay? I want to be the best In in this age right now Incredibly good question. No one has figured out we haven't cracked it and I say that as someone who have Run an organization where we we must have looked at tens of thousands of now, of course if you're running google You've looked at millions But we've looked at tens of thousands of candidates the number of candidates we've hired is quite small I mean total number 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 most. I haven't Because your team right now ish We're 60 people at the entire company and we are what's that going to be like 20 programmers and like that Yeah, that's probably about right. So so What is there other other 40 folks? Uh, we have designers Uh, probably like 10 of those 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 a hundred people in total that I've worked with Or employed at the company's programmers Out of tens of thousands. Yeah, 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 it's slightly better than 50 50 So half of even those hires go through all of because you have a really long and thorough process Yes, you you put in a lot of effort, right? 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 hypotheses. Well, can we predict? employee outcomes on the basis of ivory league education background on gpa on all of these things Conclusion was basically like we know nothing We can't predict it on any of these things. We can't predict it on lead code We can't predict it on any of these metrics now What I'd say is I've clearly been spoiled by working with some very good people not just at my company But in open source in general. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and therefore I've ended up with occasionally a twisted perspective of what the average programmer Is capable of and when we do hiring rounds, I am sometimes well not sometimes every time I'm kind of surprised How poor the majority of the submissions are How little effort is put into being percentable And that can sound really boomer crudgety very quickly, but it's also just a reality of Trying to get a 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 the odds are kind of against me But it's also a trap to actually fall into Thinking of this in terms of odds because what I've seen the miscalculation happen time and again is people go like okay So you have a thousand applicants. There's only One who gets the job or maybe two who gets the job so that 0.1 percent chance No, it's not Not at all with that math you had zero percent chance. Yes zero And the very best they probably had a 10 percent chance 20 30 percent 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 two thirds 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 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 down Historically to a pool of around 20 people that we give a at-home test the at-home test is Wonderful. Some people hate it. They feel like it's free labor. I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm not going to use your submission to a code test what I'm going to deploy to production How do you think we came up with that code test because it's already exist in the system? I say that a little harshly. I also get the sympathy of like, I don't want to put six hours into making a test If it's not going to go anywhere. Okay I get it But there's no way around it because if you have in your head, did 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 that I've been in this well the only time it exists, right? is Through a very warm referral where correct where you're starting a If you're skipping the whole pipeline 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 two years. We should hire them than we have from the open calls It is actually exceptionally difficult It 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 they've got hired and how many then didn't work out like Jesus There's only like a handful left from starting that that that's kind of blackpilling But then hiring directly on the base of a warm referral as you call it Has worked very well and that the hit rate there is really high But how does that help anyone right like that's not a very actionable advice except us 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 get said 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 pairs 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 of red it all day, right? Everyone else who worked with they're gonna watch that know what that warm referral is gonna come from It's gonna come from someone who worked with someone else at a shitty job But identified that that individual still showed up and did as best as they could to learn To ship to do all of this stuff. There is no Shortcut here You simply just have to be good and you will not get good if you do not practice And if you think your place of employment is not worthy of your best You're cheating yourself if you're not helping even if it's a shitty place if you're not helping that place get better Why would a great place hire you who only harris people to further raise the bar? This is total cope and it's cope both on the side of I work at a shitty place Never 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 notification 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 home Right. 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 correct and Jason ended up realizing Okay, this punk better gets him equity. Otherwise, he's out the door Now that's a seminal story and you shouldn't extrapolate everything from that I mean all founder stories by the way of seminal stories in that regard But the fundamental principle is still the same Show up do as good as you can learn more. There also was to my Chagrin to some extent I perhaps contributed it to it a bit for a while which was this notion that You can be a great programmer and not really like programming that you don't have to ever Care about programming outside working hours. What was was this what you thought of or like? Well, I thought of it mistakenly because I was pushing back on the overwork 100 hour week 120 hour week maniacal obsession, which by the way never most my experience We did not start base camp that way. We have worked on a 40 hour 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 It's not work in the sense that I'm whatever shipping features to base camp customers Like just 24 7. 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 into 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 sought after Because programming was such a valuable activity and there were so few people who could do it that they'd take anyone Even people barely gave a shit And I think that's over if it ever was true and I think it was true the boot comes to where the perfect Like catalyst or like they were the canary when what's also by the way is how the economy is supposed to function When sellers are really high it means that there's not enough supply of labor. Therefore. We should get labor into the pool Exactly. And so I'm not I don't even have any Quams about internet. I'm just saying like that's over. No, I think looking you know We're talking about like is is the golden age of the programmer heavy-pass 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 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 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 that that's not just going to be have you worked there? Like would you I've had these calls from like Databricks is famous for reference cards They don't really check for references. They drill you Not just would you work with this person again? What were their weaknesses? Right Where would you hire them? Etc etc and no, I understand it the weird thing is Peek 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 a 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 for the most ai forward programmers that we have Maybe they also have some of these anxieties, but they're kind of pushed to decide just out of sheer enjoyment Working with the new capacities. So there is a bifurcation here where we should all feel like well We don't know what's going on and for some people that's 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. 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 So either get excited about this which I don't even take that much effort as we said if you sit down with these models You pull out one of your Hobby projects from the closet that you never finished 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've seen this with with people who are getting into it Ken's back is such a great example if he's been programming for 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 ball He's building a small talk server which which used to take forever and now 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. Ken 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 Ruby I saw Ken 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 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 of 96 is to this day my favorite book of all time on tactical programming Patterns, so it's wonderful to hear him being agent-pilled while also enjoying the birds I mean I try to do that too and this is actually there's a bit of attention 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 if you have an active dopamine lube up there that gets triggered when something is shipped It is just hyperactive right now. Yeah, and I need to go. Do you know what? This is not like a limited sale Like ai is gonna be here next month and the months after that like I cannot just Operate as though it is a limited sale and I need to get all the dopamine harvested within the next two weeks That I actually think is the main challenge right now for the people who are furthest along and most piled 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 yeah, there's this consuming is is a big deal like it was steve. Yaggy He was he looks a bit more drained than like you can see it on the video But he is he's honest like he's he's being pulled into this he's Doing he has friends who are in and when you're on the edge. You're there. You've clearly been ai piled But how are you finding of keeping a balance of like right stepping away? You know like I know you I think you previously talked about the importance of sleep apparently you don't have an alarm Correct. I don't use an alarm although my wife now does because the kids need to go to school on a regular basis But yeah for me eight hours a night is the best investment you can make in your own cognitive capacity So I just am reminded every single time I do not get eight hours That it is such a poor trade if you go from the eight to the six I go like well, I'm going to be awake for in that case 18 hours What is the Drag I'm going to carry for all those 18 hours for getting one more hour two more hours by cutting back on the sleep It is such a bad piece of math. It makes no sense now Occasionally it's involuntary. I have actually had especially around this ai stuff I've had a couple of times very rare I can count on two hands the number of times where I've been sleepless like the brain 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 three hours a week of working out to do more agent work That's a very poor trade keeping 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 a peak capacities then 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 Yeah On something that we're going to be dealing with for like load on buddy Like it's not again limited sale the next 10 years We're going to see more and more it's going to get crazy and crazier So don't squander your health. Don't squander your sleep. Don't squander your diet In the service of anything because even on the short term it does not work You cannot get more productive within Three weeks, let's say by trying to cut back two or three hours of sleep every night And then think there's anything coherent left after three weeks. You will be a hot mess So let's close we talk 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 then and write now you're doing with agents like what drives you and Looking ahead like what what are things you're excited about my drive continues to be a deep love of computers This is simply the best way the most fun way to spend my time I could spend my time on a lot of things. I do spend my time on a lot of things. I don't just do computers. I Drive race cars. I take lots of time up. I have three kids. We enjoy all of that stuff But if I'm going to fill eight hours every day with an activity My best bet is computers and it has been so since I was literally five years old Whether it's video games or what now feels a little bit like a video game actually Instrumenting all these agents and playing a little bit of starcraft with moving them around and xorio 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 is 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 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 want 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 Last few weeks. We've been working on the new cli Which also taught me like we're not quite at aji yet, right? You think like well just ask the agent to make a cli it will but like it's not Quite there, right? Like I want it to be just right and the agents still need a little bit of help I'm very happy to provide that help to these agents and we'll release a great cli for base camp very very shortly Maybe by the time this is out it'll probably be out and for the rest of them to 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 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 computer Evaporating in fact of anything right now. I'm seeing like a flourishing of it I'm liking computers more than I did five years ago and that's amazing Amazing David. This was awesome. Thanks. Thanks a bunch. All right. Thanks for having me. This is really great This was a fascinating conversation and I love the energy that David has I hope some of this energy that is obvious in person also came across to you I really appreciated that David was open that his stance did not change about ai because his philosophy changed It's just that the tools became good enough to do useful stuff ai for autocomplete was annoying for experienced developers Ai agents that can produce pretty good working code by themselves on the other hand are now pretty useful And yet David kept coming back to taste judgment and craft He wasn't just saying just let the model write whatever. It's the opposite He has a very high quality bar and he wants the output to be code that he would actually be proud to merge It feels like ai might make good judgment even more valuable than before I also realized how david thinks about the importance of design At 37 signals designers help figure out what should be built how it should work and increasingly even decide how it gets implemented I wonder if 37 signals is a step ahead of the industry in thinking about designers a bit like developers as well And developers a bit like designers as well Finally, I founds david's take that we might have hit peak software engineer an interesting argument david thinks will produce more software than ever But his observation is that we might be nearing the end of the time when developers could command high compensation Simply because they were the bottleneck my two sense is that there will surely be high demand for professionals who can build profitable software But this will mean software engineers who are not only good at coding or using ai to generate code But can oversee building complex systems have taste and business sense as well If you'd like to hear more from david check out a bonus episode with him linked in the show notes Also, check out the show notes for related the pragmatic edge during deep dives and 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 one