I feel that you very much value software

engineering as a craft

>> hugely. I mean I think aesthetics is

truth. When something is beautiful, it's

likely to be correct. I think this is

true in mathematics. This is true in

physics. This is true in a lot of

different domains.

>> I wonder if there's a part of AI about

the impact of doing work that we would

have not done before.

>> The number of projects we have tackled

internally that we would never even have

contemplated starting on or Legion.

Jeremy, one of our most agent

accelerated people, went like, "We're

going to do P1. We're going to optimize

P1." Literally the fastest 1% of

requests, we're going to make them even

faster. There's a bit of tension right

now is that most of the people I find

who are all in, they're working harder

than they ever have. And I've seen that

with myself now, too. When you can be

this effective and impactful on an hour

of supervision of these agents, it's

really intoxicating. And I need to go,

do you know what? This is not like a

limited sale. on Lex Freriedman's

podcast. You were still rightfully so

very skeptical of AI.

>> This is a nuance point and maybe it's

self- serving, but I don't actually

think my opinions have changed. What

have changed is

how has the creator of Ruby on Rails

changed how he builds software now with

AI agents? David Hayam Hire Hansen often

referred to as DHH created Ruby on Rails

Omachi and is a co-founder of 37

signals. He bashed capabilities of AI

coding tools on Lex Friezen's podcast 6

months ago. Then over the course of a

few weeks over the winter break, he did

a 180 turn and went AI first on

everything. In today's conversation, we

cover how David and his team at 37

Signals build software today and how AI

tools are making them more ambitious

than ever before. Why Ruby on Rails

Analytics could become even more popular

than they are today as they are both

well suited working with AI agents. why

taste and beautiful software are

becoming more important and why both

standout designers and engineers who

care about the craft could become more

in demand and many more. If you're

interested in what one of the most

experienced builders in the tech

industry thinks about the practical

utility of AI tools and how these tools

could impact software engineers who care

about the craft then this episode is for

you. This episode is presented by static

the unified platform for flags analytics

experiments and more. Check out the show

notes to learn more about them and our

other season sponsors sonar and works.

David, it's awesome to have you here.

>> 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

Amachi. It got started as a summer

project in between racing at the 24

hours of Lama. there's a lot of downtime

in that week. So, I just started hacking

on it and it really took off very

quickly thereafter. It's been a truly

inspiring ride to see that even in a

market as crowded as Linux

distributions, there's about 7,000

different distributions out there, some

of them with long pedigrees and many of

them even based on sort of kind of

similar vibes to some extent. There's

room for something new and it's a great

reminder that all the ideas in the world

may be taken and it doesn't matter

because your spin on it isn't. And I put

my spin on Linux. Billachi built the

perfect computer system for me and saw

exactly the same thing I've ever seen.

And whenever I build something that

really just hits the spot for me

personally, there are thousands of

others just like me or close enough to

what I like that they find the same

pleasure and joy in it. Whether it was

Ruby on Rails, Kamal, getting out of the

cloud, any of these things, it's the

same syndrome. Yeah. With with Rails,

you were literally scratching your own

itch. You were just building your own

components and then open sourcing them.

Is that how it started? Basically, I

picked up Ruby in the early 2000s and

really put it to the test in 2003 when

we started building Base Camp and I did

not have a mandate of what to use to

build it. Prior to that, I'd been

working for a lot of client projects

that would say, well, we're building

this in PHP because we have someone who

knows that. So, this is what you have to

use. And then we were building our own

system. We're building Basec Camp. And I

was free to choose. So I chose Ruby and

at the time Ruby didn't have any tooling

or ve not very much when it came to web

applications. So I had to build it all

myself and that turned into Ruby on

Rails which is still going strong. I'm

still very heavily involved with that. I

think in some ways Ruby Rails is having

a little bit of a renaissance now that

it is one of the most token efficient

ways of building web apps. It's ideally

suited for the agent workflows we're

dealing with now. We'll see how long

that lasts. Maybe all the agents are

going to be writing machine code or

assembler in about five minutes. So

maybe that comes to an end. But for the

moment, token efficiency still matters.

And it still matters whether the agents

produce code that humans are able to

read and verify. That may also come to

an end at some point. But as it is right

now, it's uh been a fun ride to just see

these kinds of projects where I'm

scratching my own itch resonate with a

much larger community of people who then

show up and want to help. I mean for

Umachi which has only been around for

what is that just over 6 months now we

have what 400 contributors who've made

code changes to the distribution and on

top of that we have tens of thousands of

people who've installed it and uses as

their daily driver. So, I always love

that discovery of something new, novel,

and inspiring like Ruby or it sounds

weird to talk about discovery of a

operating system that's been around

since what 91, but for a lot of people,

Linux now is that discovery because they

have not been using it on their personal

computer. So, they're seeing it for the

first time. And for me to help a new

cohort of Linux users and hopefully even

enthusiasts come to be because I'm

flattening the curve a little bit. I'm

making it easier to get started. I'm

making the default installation just

look amazing so that they don't feel

like they have to invest 100 hours into

tweaking the system to get going is

really fun. But what's also fun of

course is that both of these things,

both Ruby and Rails and Amachi were not

just hobby projects. I love hobby

product and I will always do those, but

I also like to apply them to business.

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 obi

people can choose, right? can they

>> well sort of kind of we started with a

with an open choice and then at some

point it just doesn't make sense anymore

in the same way it would not make sense

for someone to be at 37 single and say I

want to write this thing in Django we're

going to use Python and this other

framework even if you have Ruby and

Rails and you're doing that so we

pivoted from an early invitation to play

around that was what when I first

switched to Linux just said like hey if

you want to check it out check it out

then when things got a little more

serious with Amachi I just said let's go

all in for everyone who's on the

technical side of things, not the iOS

developers of course, but anyone who's

working with the web, who's working with

Ruby, who's doing DevOps, they should be

on Linux because first of all, that's

closer to what we deploy. We've always

deployed on Linux. We've been a Linux

shop on the server side since day one.

For developers and system operators, I

actually think it is a material

advantage to be closer to your

production environment and just be more

familiar with the tools. Then on top of

that, of course, we are building this

distribution and we should have as many

hands help out as possible. And given

the fact that I'm the CTO of this

company, I get to set the technical

direction and this is the direction

we're going. Can you just like do a like

just a very short recap of of you know

like how you right and right now where

are you like where where is the business

as a whole and you know you keep you

keep building you keep launching new and

exciting and just cool stuff. I think

Fizzy was the latest one.

>> Yes. So 37 signals was founded in 1999.

It started as a web design firm and then

I joined up in 2001, two years after and

for a couple years, collaborated with

Jason on these consulting projects and

then it was in 2003. We started work on

Base Camp, released it in 2004.

Actually, either the day after or the

day before Facebook went live, which is

kind of a funny coincidence that we were

of that same time and cohort. And within

about a year, we realized this thing was

taking off and we went full-time and

switched from being a consultancy to

being a software company.

>> Awesome.

>> And that's now 22 years ago, a little

more than that. And in that time, we've

released a ton of products. Basec camp

was the first. Remains the biggest and

most important, which is also kind of

funny because you sometimes perhaps have

this delusion that as you learn more and

as you get more experience, you'll get

smarter and you'll have better ideas.

And like, no, there's tons of people for

whom their first idea was the best idea.

And I have no shame in saying that Base

Camp was the best idea objectively in

terms of a business that we've ever had.

And I'm incredibly proud that we've been

able to keep that going and growing and

flourishing for over 20 years. Very few

software companies, let alone software

products, can boast of that longevity

and legacy. But we've tried a ton of

things over those years and had some

other great successes. We launched

hey.com our email service back in 2020

which was a crazy mission when you think

about it.

>> Here is a sector completely dominated by

a single player Google with Gmail that's

a good product.

>> It hasn't really changed in 17 years but

it was really solid and lots of people

are perfectly content with it. They

think they hold this duality in their

head where at once they both hate email

but somehow don't connect it to the fact

that they're using Gmail which I find

curious but either way we launched this

that is not only a competitor to this

very entrenched product that has

probably a greater grasp on market share

in any major category than any other

product I can come to mind of in the US

I think Gmail is something like 85% of

all email traffic, which sounds insane.

Maybe it's 80%. It's incredibly high.

It's basically Gmail and then all the

rest is in this tiny little part of the

graph. So, we thought that after using

Gmail, I used it since I don't know when

I signed up, a few weeks into it, I got

one of those invite codes. That was a

really clever launch and I used it ever

since. So, that's literally 17 years or

something of that of Gmail usage. And

over that time, I built up a lot of

opinions about things that didn't work

quite like I would prefer it to work.

And we put all those opinions into a new

software product. Spend about almost 2

years developing it. Millions of dollars

in accumulative R&D funds. And launched

it in the summer of 2020, which by the

way, time to launch a product.

2020 wasn't great for a whole host of

different reasons. We were kind of

trying to slot in a can there just be a

week where the whole world is not just

insane.

>> 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 ultimately

>> they didn't want to approve your your

app.

>> They didn't want to approve our app

unless we paid the toll fee, the 30%.

>> 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 hey

paying customers are iPhone users

because that's the largest most affluent

market in the US and the US is the most

affluent and market software market in

the world. So for that business to work

we needed to be on the iPhone. After a

twow weekek epic struggle back and

forth, thankfully time to perfection

with WWDC where Apple preferably didn't

want to look like the Goliath squashing

a

>> developer, tiny developer, we ended up

being allowed in and Apple sort of

rewrote the rules after the fact to make

it fit. Um, it was a small victory, not

the ultimate victory, but at least it

allowed us to to be there. And hey,

ended up being an enormous success. In

part, ironically, because Apple gave us

wall-to-wall coverage for two weeks.

When I look back upon that, I think I

wouldn't have gambled like that because

the outcome would have been zero, right?

Like, uh, Apple refuses our app.

>> We sign up 200 people and the app is

dead. What instead happened was they

gave us a multi-million dollar launch

campaign and coverage in all major media

and we signed up tens of thousands of

people in those first weeks. That was uh

an insane event but uh also very

satisfying. And the other satisfying

thing was I just love 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

where total strangers around the world

can just make your pocket buzz if you

have notifications turned on which they

are by default. Just seems insane to me.

Right. this idea that there's direct

access to one of my most important daily

priority lists like anyone can put

something on that insane. Anyway, hey

doesn't do that. We have the screener

and no one gets to reach your inbox

before you've said I want to hear from

this person. And most of the time I say

no to most people, right? Like things

end up in the in the screener and we

have thumbs up. I will hear from this

person, thumbs down, I'll never hear

from that person again.

>> This this is how I reached out. I mean,

we were I'm not sure we were connected

on on X, but I I sent an email cuz your

email is out there and your screener

seems to have worked cuz it gave me the

thumbs up.

>> It did because the screener is me. So,

there's not even AI trying to sus out

whether I want to hear from you or not.

Because what turns out to be true is

it's actually not that ownorous to once

a day go through your screener and say

thumbs up or down because there aren't

that many people in the world. And if

you say no to the annoying pestering

salespeople who within Gmail managed to

read your inbox seven times, then the

workload is much less. And it's very

satisfying, I will say too, because when

I was using Gmail, I would get roped

into this sales tactic that they of

course rely on, which is that like you

write back and say like, "No, thank you.

I'm not interested." And then they would

respond again. And now you feel like,

"Wait, am I now obligated to respond to

this person? I kind of feel like I am."

And occasionally I would end up writing

and even if I wouldn't write, they still

have access to my inbox. So I would hear

from them again next week. They have a

whole drip campaign. They all [ __ ]

do, right? That any outreach is seven

emails. It's not one emails. It's seven

emails. And if you show any sign of

life, it's probably 52. That's just not

how it works. And hey, I say thumbs down

one time, never hear from that person

again. It's actually amazing how quickly

you can curate your garden from that

weed. And then suddenly there's just

beautiful flowers. Suddenly email is not

a chore. So you want to go smell the

roses. Suddenly the majority of things

that end up in my email or things I want

to read is from people I want to hear

from. And that was really the

fundamental mission for us with hey can

we make email lovable again? Email is so

hated by so many people because the

systems are so poor because they're

based on the original premise that email

is just what universities use for

scientists to talk to each other and

scientists have really good manners and

will not pester you 52 times about some

stupid app they want to sell you. No,

they're respectful and beautiful, right?

beautiful ideal, beautiful thought,

beautiful protocol designed for those

norms and those people then you let it

into the world at large and you realize

ah not everyone is endowed with such

norms and such politeness and especially

when sales people get involved. you need

better defenses and for me and for us

and for all our many customers hey is

that defense it is a way to love email

again and I find that it's really

important actually to have a grand why

this is all the way back to Victor

Frankle the meaning of uh of man finding

a why allows you to walk through the

snow when it's cold and uncomfortable

and annoying which many things are when

you're building with computers they are

cold and uncomfortable and annoying.

Now, it shouldn't be that most of the

time, but occasionally that will be

there. And if you have a really strong

why, why are we building this? Who is it

for? What are we trying to do to improve

the world? Even if that's not more grand

than just letting people love email,

it's a lot easier and it's a lot more

enjoyable to then carry whatever burdens

you got to pack if you can set it up

that way.

>> This is a good time to talk about our

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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. Uh, and then I I don't

probably some some native stuff as well,

but the two years seems a lot especially

because you know you're you're a small

company. You're a nimble. You're a great

developer. I'm you hire great

developers. Suddenly it's been two

years. What what took so long for and of

course it's beautiful product. But right

on the surface I think as developers we

might have this this thing where I look

at it as like two years with with a

talented team.

>> That's the hacker news quip to basically

everything, right? Like I could have

built that in a weekend. I mean famously

stated with Dropbox that I could have

built that in a weekend. We could have

at the original iPod when it launched.

It was like 5 GB bits uh no Wi-Fi uh

whatever less speed than Nomat lane. So

I get that because I also have that same

instinct. I think that is our hoopers as

developers. We think we are gods and we

can make anything happen in no time at

all. And you totally could. You can make

a prototype happen in these days faster

than faster than a weekend, right? like

in in in a few hours we should be able

to have

>> 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 majority of our major

products is either it's just me

sometimes it's one additional developer

but is in a tiny tiny team until we have

a shape until we have a an architecture

and we have a direction of where the

product is going to go. I've found that

you actually go slower if you pour a

bunch of people into a direction that is

uncertain. If you don't know what you

want a million people is not going to

build it for you. You have to figure out

what you want. We can talk about this

later, but this is where AI's very

recent progress is changing things

dramatically. It is now quicker to

arrive at what do I want? But for hey,

it was me and then it was Jason and uh

one designer, two designers, very very

small team trying to figure out the

shape, trying to figure out if you're

taking on Gmail, you can't just do Gmail

in blue. No one's going to buy that. No

one's going to be interested in that.

It's got to be novel, which means it's

well, not just novel, it's got to be

good. It's got to solve problems that

people haven't even articulated they

have with Gmail because the articulation

people have of their problems with Gmail

is I hate email, which as we talked

about is a bit of a misdirection. My

contention is you hate Gmail. And not

just Gmail, but most email systems built

on the old way of anyone has access to

your inbox and all that stuff. But

figuring that out, figuring the shape

out takes a while and it's also fun to

do in this way where you noodle with it

and you don't have infinite capacity.

The original base camp is built the same

way. It was just me on the technical

side. Is this a shape uplogy? There's

shape up thinking in trying to actually

endow the designer with an intention of

how should it work not just how should

it look and figuring out it's also how

it should look product should be

beautiful and they should be unique and

appealing and so forth. So that also

takes time. But figuring out how it

should work is primary. Figuring out

where's the epicenter, what's the most

important part and teasing all that

apart. But with Hey, as with all the

major products we've done, we start with

an absolutely tiny team, often just one

individual on the programming side and

then one or two individuals on the

design side. And then we go, we go, we

go, we go. Suddenly something clicks and

we go like, this is good. There's

something here. And then there's a bit

of a ramp. we take on a few more people

and then when we get within maybe the

last 20% we go okay now we know what the

terrain looks like we can go way faster

if everyone piles in. So one thing that

is super interesting and you might take

it for granted but it's very different

to how most startups uh that raise VC

money which I'm very familiar with uh

and and big companies Uber Facebook you

name it the way projects would start

there is you take the product manager

>> who works with maybe maybe half a

designer

>> and comes up with a spec and then

developers get involved later and what

I'm hearing what is very novel to me is

you take one or two designers and a

developer how you think about designers

Even you recently hired a designer,

Zultan actually, who I'm I'm chatting

with on the side. A great guy.

>> But my sense is you think of designers a

little bit different than potentially

the rest of the industry does.

>> We very much do. Designers at 37 Signals

are not just here to make a spec look

pretty. They're here to find what the

spec should be. They're product managers

in many ways. They are the finders of

the how and the why in many cases

deducing in some cases customer feedback

in other cases just pure intuition and

distilling that into what should we

build and how should it work and then on

top of that they're also responsible for

building it they're responsible for

doing the CSS they're responsible for

doing the HTML they're quite often

responsible at least dabbling in the

JavaScript and the Ruby code to get to

something functional now with agent

acceleration. They do the whole thing,

not necessarily as it will be merged,

but the whole thing in terms of here's

the final shape and design of what it

should look like. But I do think we are

very peculiar in this sense. And we have

found this when we've been trying to

hire designers that many designers

working other companies are not used to

also wearing the product manager hat,

figuring out what we should build and

wearing the implementation hat, shaping

it into CSS and HTML. I found that when

you combine these three hats into one,

you have an individual who know the

materials they're working with, know how

they stretch, know which way the seam is

supposed to be cut, and therefore works

natively with the fabric of the

internet. When you're working directly

in CSS, when you're working directly in

HTML, you're just much more in tune with

what this medium wants. And I find that

that's probably quite similar if you're

a jewelry designer. You should know the

properties of gold. You should know how

it bends and the strength. An architect

should have some engineering

understanding of loadbearing structures

and so on. Not to the degree that the

architect is just going to design the

whole thing and then we start pouring

concrete. you still have uh engineers

helping you out, but the more you

understand the materials you're working

with, the more you're likely to come up

with something that cuts along the grain

and therefore ends up feeling correct,

feeling good. Just a quick hop to Apple.

I think this is one of the reasons why

some of the historic super fans like

Daring Fireball and others uh Gruber

have been disappointed by the new

direction is that Apple used to stand

for these exquisitly designed native Mac

applications which is an dying breed

like they're essentially dead. Now we

have Electron which we can talk about

that too gets way too much hate in my

book. There's crappy implementation of

that, but it's just a web in a box. But

the disappointment with losing that

sense, and I think it's about the same

thing that the Mac, its native

feel has a stretch to it. Like the

button placements, everything you would

call a native application either feels

synthetic or it feels authentic. And

today, it's all synthetic. There's no

nothing authentic about it left. And I

think for the web it's the same thing.

Now the web is a much much larger

platform and therefore it's gotten much

more attention. So there are way more

people working on that quality of it.

But at the large companies it's

exceptionally rare to non-existent to

have that kind of dynamic. I think some

of that is going to change. Agent

acceleration is going to empower

designers to be more capable in these

ways. So the industry is coming a little

towards our fundamental stance which is

funny too because the same is true on

the programming side. When I talked

about base camp being a product of just

me on the programming side for launch

that for so long sounded unambitious or

even wrong or even to the point of lying

from some quarters of the internet like

yeah but you can't build anything real

anything meaningful anything big unless

you have a team that's much larger

because it's just going to be a toy

product right and my insight from the

start was that's of course [ __ ]

because you just haven't used Ruby on

Rails you just haven't used the

acceleration that's possible if you use

better tools. Now we're all realizing

that we're using realizing oh so if you

use agent acceleration a single

individual actually can build something

highly valuable team.

>> 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 logarithmic

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 you're

valuing design, user experience, design,

designing on software design, like you

know, like building stuff that feels

good. May that be software, hardware,

you also value that as a craft and and

you look for it like the these two

things. Do I sense this correctly?

>> Hugely. I mean, I think aesthetics

is truth. When something is beautiful,

it's likely to be correct. I think this

is true in mathematics. This is true in

physics. This is true in a lot of

different domains that when you arrive

at something that has the correct

aesthetic quality. It's like we have an

intuition that guides us towards that

level of beauty because it also happens

to be correct and noble and something to

aspire for. I also happen to believe

it's what makes people happy. Being

surrounded by beautiful, well functioned

objects is a key part of happiness. In

fact, I'll put it in a negative way,

too. One of the great sources of anxiety

and frustration is when everything is

[ __ ] When everything is laggy, when

that touch interface doesn't register,

when you have to restart it, when you're

calling a travel agent, they can't do

something because their old shitty

cobalt system won't let them. Right? The

world is full of not just in

shitification. That is things that went

from being good to being bad to just

plain bad, just plain awful. And I think

it is a serious source of malaise for

civilization. that we could literally

raise the bar of human happiness if we

were surrounded by more beautiful items,

more beautiful systems. Both in the

sense of its aesthetic exterior

qualities, but just as much in terms of

its aesthetic interior qualities,

because I find those two things are

usually in perfect harmony. The reason

why Steve Jobs cared about the inside of

the box was because he intuitively knew

that the kind of people who care about

the layout of the print board will be

the kind of people who sweat the details

on the user interface will be the kind

of people who sweat the ergonomics of

opening the case. So I think there's

essentially no choice if you are a

person who is attracted to these

aesthetics which I think is everyone.

there's just varying levels of u

awareness about whether you are or not

but that you want to make it all

beautiful and for me Ruby in particular

has been this seinal language because it

produces the most beautiful code in my

book there's barely even competition

like there are other things that can be

beautiful in a way like I find looking

at small talk for example very beautiful

in its minimalism but not the house I

want to live in Ruby is the house I want

to live in because it's got that

aesthetic equality while not being rigid

about its ideology which is a very rare

aspect too. I more often find now we can

refer to IV again is that when someone

is obsessed in this way they are a

little narrow-minded like that's the

trade-off that's the price and I find

that Ruby has somehow managed to be both

broadscoped yet also intensely focused

on on this but overall we have to have

beautiful things we have to work with

beautiful tools we have to produce

beautiful fluid interactions this is how

we should see ourselves as crafts people

that we care about polishing it until

there are no splinters left. How is AI

changing how you work and how do you

think it's changing your craft or just

let's just talk about the craft of again

you're you're hiring people in 37

signals who similarly care about design

and and software craft's quality how

it's changing what you get out of the

craft or how it's how it's making it

better or or worse in some ways I I I

just want to you know start with like

how has your view changed because the

last time you you talked in in length

about this that was on Lex Freriedman's

cast and you were still rightfully so

very skeptical of of AI. It was a

different set of tools. It didn't work

as well and I think you you went there

bashing it pretty hard but things have

changed since.

>> This is a nuance point and maybe it's

self- serving but I don't actually think

my opinions have changed. What have

changed is the circumstances and the

facts which uh is is something I called

out on that show and in many other

writings was right from the get-go I

could see that we had something new and

novel here that was going to change

things. Chat GBT its launch what three

years ago was clearly and obviously even

at the time something you would mark on

a timeline. You're like here are all the

important things that happened in the

history of computer science or the

world. Yoinks, there is the launch of

Chat GBT and interacting with computers

in this way and seeing them reason, even

if that's still a disputed term perhaps,

but to me it seemed obvious that these

things were freaking smart, smarter than

me in many ways, whether those smarts

came from parenting

weights and data.

So what? We don't know how human

consciousness works. We don't know how

human wisdom or intelligence works.

barely. So, let's not be so categorical

about what constitutes consciousness or

intelligence. At least, I find no

utility in that distinction, even if

it's fun to ponder. But what I found

with the early models and the early

ergonomics where it was autocomplete,

where it was co-pilot and cursor in your

editor trying to guess the next

character,

>> it it would be sometimes 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 a sentence.

You're constantly trying. Was this what

you meant? Was this what you meant?

You're like, shut the hell up. Can I

just finish a thought? And I thought,

even if it is capable of occasionally

accelerating, it's also wrong so often

that that acceleration feels like a

nuisance, even if it's somehow net

positive, which it wasn't for me. Or

maybe I gave up too soon. But I just did

not enjoy that. I didn't think the

models were good enough. I thought the

way of using the models with

autocomplete versus agent harnesses was

just dreadful, annoying. In fact, to the

point that I got a little pessimistic

about the direction of the industry for

a hot second because I thought this was

what we were all going to do. We're all

going to sit and do tap tap tap.

No, thank you.

>> Well, cursor even have they had I even

got one of these one of their swags was

a tap key.

>> Exactly. which which felt very and I I

haven't I I got it from them. It's

really cool, very well designed and all

that beautiful design, but

>> 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 uh The

Simpsons where Homer puts a mechanical

bird on the keyboard that just dips down

and hits enter because all he's been

doing is hit enter. Except suddenly

there's a warning about the nuclear core

overloading and the bird just hits enter

and the whole thing burns down. I'm

like, "Wow, that's quite a parallel."

The Simpsons really does predict

everything. But I did not like that

style of using it. As much as I retained

my enthusiasm for the general direction

of travel because it truly is amazing

and the amazement to me I tried to

embrace as a tutor model as a pair

programmer who doesn't drive it was

amazing to have chat GBT and the other

model just be there for like I don't

understand this fully here's a piece of

code here's a question can you tell me

why it works like that can you tell me

what's wrong with it because that's how

I've been using the internet since day

one right that's what Google was for

here's an error message. Here's a

concept. Maybe I find something on Stack

Overflow with some passive aggressive

nerd telling everyone why he's so smart

and then at the bottom there's the

solution I'm looking for. Or I don't

find it at all and that's just kind of

frustrating. With the chat GBT model, I

very often got a really good

explanation. Yeah, this was actually I

talked with a game developer Jonas

Tyroller who who built this really cool

bestselling game. I loved playing it and

this was during this time of of the tab

completion and he said that in his the

way he works is he just turned off all

auto completions in his ID uh because he

got annoyed by it and then every now and

then he went to chat GPT to ask

something or have a longer thing and

then he had the mode of like I'm

thinking and I'm doing this stuff oh I

need some help okay here's the specifics

and I'm taking and somehow it felt that

you know like he just he was in the zone

the whole day by controlling it and and

somehow those habits sounds like You

know, you're saying the same thing. It

kind of took it away from you. Us.

>> Exly. Exactly. And I did get a little

worried that that was going to be the

direction that we were all going to be

the bird and I didn't want to be the

bird. Then I was like, well, what should

I do instead? Maybe like farming

potatoes. Like that's a long tradition

here in Denmark. Maybe I could take that

up.

>> But then thankfully two things happened.

A clot code in what is that? starts in

the spring, gets going sort of over the

summer, then by the fall has some

traction on a new way of using agents to

help you code where with the agent

harnesses, right? This is really where

we transition from AI to agents.

Suddenly the AI has tools. It can use

bash. It can use everything you got on

your terminal. It can call the internet

in for appropriate information. it it

just is capable of doing more than just

reasoning about a thing you gave it uh

or input from a source context file. And

then the models opus 45 to me is the

other one of the other points we're

going to have on the line where it's the

first model that continuously and

consistently would shock me with the

quality of its output. it quality of its

analysis on the basis of vague inputs

and even more importantly the quality of

its output. It produced code I wanted to

merge without

very much if any alteration and if I did

want to do alteration I could tell it

and it would remember and it would not

make the same mistake next time. that to

me the combination of those two things

was the unlock

>> and and you have a high bar like you

have a really high bar

>> incredibly high bar I as we've talked

about now at length like the aesthetics

of the output really matters if I'm

going to look at it and I'm going to

review it I'm going to give you another

anecdote in a second where those things

don't even play in but when I'm using

agents to work on Ruby code I want their

code to look as good as mine I'm not

going to merge their stuff if it's

sloppy no more than I would merge the

work of a junior developer who has not

yet fully internalized our style and so

forth. So I wanted to be on par and on

parody and the early models just

couldn't. That didn't mean they couldn't

produce working software. At least some

of the time they could. I'm very

impressive. I mean I remember when I did

my first snake game and I'm like holy

smokes. I've been wanting to do this

since I was 6 years old. Like I've been

wanting to I have this idea. I want to

get it into a game and I was able to see

that in I don't know a few 30 seconds.

It was done with the game. copy paste

the HTML magical experience, right?

>> So, I think that ramp was very

interesting because it actually took a

while until we found this form factor of

the agent harness of the terminal

interface.

That to me was the the big unlock from

this is interesting. I want to have a

conversation with it to I wanted to

write my code. I will now start any

project I'm starting with. I'm starting

agent first and that's a massive shift

and it just happened from November 27th

I believe is when Opus 45 dropped. Now

there are other people who have

different points they felt like oh is

Opus 40 or

>> maybe some people talk about Sonic 37.

There are other earlier checkpoints but

there I do feel like there's a general

consensus I can lean up against that

capy and others have expressed like yep

it was right around end of November

early December. Everyone who works

worked at larger tech companies, it was

the winter break because people just you

know like like the whole industry shuts

down for 2 weeks say for a few places

where you're on call but again no

production work happens across the

>> industry 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.

>> Yeah.

>> You're done and that was just a complete

sort of break, right? Right? Like if

this was a movie, you'd hear the scratch

sound like you're like, "Wait, what?

Revine, what happened?"

>> I feel it was the most collective shock

which happened individually and then

people came back in January and everyone

especially because a lot of the decision

makers who are you know like CTO

engineers etc were not as hands-on but

they were hands-on and a lot of them

it's this weird thing where they came

back and they start to mandate or like

say all right you guys need to use this

because I've seen the future. I've

literally used it you need to see it.

So, it's we're going back to a little

bit of hardware like people were trying

to give, you know, like the the new

hardware into people's hands saying you

need to experience it cuz you're you're

not going to believe it, right? There's

something with this as well where you

you really don't believe it. We can talk

about this and whoever's not tried it or

not had that aha moment. I don't think

we can convince them.

>> This is another one of those cases where

words just are not effective. You need

to sit down in front of Open Code or

whatever harness that you use, use one

of the frontier models, start with that.

Start with Opus. I'd say start with

Opus. It's the best frontier model.

Other models are better at other things,

blah blah. But if you're just going to

work on a piece of code and you want to

see what the current frontier is and if

you I mean I'd be shocked if any of your

listeners haven't done it already, but

if there should be some left, now is the

time. And I don't even want to say in

the sense I I found it really offputting

this trend on X where unless you've

internalized everything there is about

AI, like you've been left behind. Shut

up. First of all, patently not true. you

could literally pick up everything in

the next three weeks. This is the other

magical thing about this kind of

project, right? Like or or progress when

if we had been having this conversation

in spring of last year, everyone been

like MCPs, MCPS, MCPS. And do you know

what? You can now manage to just have

jumped over that entire things and go

straight to CLI and skills. That's just

worth having in mind that this FOMO that

unless you're up on all of it as it

happens play by play, you're left behind

is complete and utter nonsense. That

being said, I can still appreciate that

some people were early. And for me, Toby

Lutki at Shopify is the main individual

who saw this and saw the changes that

were coming from it way earlier than I

did and have really helped drag me into

this by constantly sending me like,

"Hey, you look at this, look at this."

And I do think that's actually quite

helpful. It's quite helpful to be

surrounded by people who have a higher

faith or maybe their eyes are a little

further up. Like my eyes tend to be

relatively close to the road like right

in front of me and some people have a

gaze that a little higher up and

sometimes they see things that don't

come to pass. In this case, Toby saw

exactly where we were going two years

ago. And I finally saw it because the

road came to me in December. And it's

funny because along the way I kept

saying like, "Yep, when the models get

good enough, when they can do all this

thing, it's going to be amazing." and

thinking wow it's going to be I don't

know 18 months two years maybe it's five

years it's very hard to predict these

infliction points and I think the

industry itself didn't even predict the

infliction point right you have an

entire city Silicon Valley and

surrounding areas San Fran focused on

making this happen but predicting

exactly when the hockey stick starts

hockeying is very difficult but then it

happened and now my daily work is very

different

>> so so what is your daily work. Now,

>> my daily work is

agent first on everything.

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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

code.

>> That's my main harness. I also use cloud

code a little bit. They unfortunately

got that early lead. Opus is currently

the best model. So then they started

thinking a little bit in that like the

game is single match instead of thinking

it's multiple rounds and yanked their

subscription from open code. So if you

want to use your Mac subscription, you

kind of have to use their harness, which

I don't love it. I think it's a mistake.

But leave that be for a second and let's

just celebrate the fact that they have

the best model and Opus for 45 46 is

also nice but 45 to me was the

inflection point

>> and it creates a lot of competition

because everyone wants to catch up and

overtake them now

>> of course and especially because you see

Anthropic's revenues I think start of

the year they're at 9 billion few weeks

later they're at like whatever 14 now

they're at 19 or something it's just the

craziest rocket ship you could possibly

imagine which is inspiring all this

capital to be deployed for competitors

and so forth which is wonderful great to

see so even if I don't love everything

that they do and cloud code is not my

preferred harness manage to hold two

things in your head at the same time

this is what I also try to do even with

Apple which I have serious griefs about

how they operate and act as the

gatekeeper and all the other nonsense

we've talked about and then I also keep

my I just love computers hat on and go I

like the new Neo I might even buy a new

Neo and just see what is possible at

$500 for Opus I have no qualms s about

using Opus. In fact, whenever I feel

like uh this is a really hard problem, I

go to Opus right now, but I also use

other models. And one of the things I've

incorporated into my flow is to kind of

have two models going at the same time

at different speeds. So, I use T-Max and

I have this layout thing that's built

into Amachi where it'll start my new Vim

editor on the left side and then it'll

start two panes on the right side. On

the top is open code running Kimmy K25

and on the bottom is Opus running in

cloud code and then at the very bottom I

have a strip of terminal and almost

everything I started in one of the

agents and I tell them what I want. Then

I hop over to Neoim. First I do uh space

gg to look at the um lacy git diff on

it. Once this is changing if it looks

correct I'll just commit. We're we're

done. Great. and then sometimes it

doesn't. It'll correct and I'll I'll go

in and alter the code myself. But the

ratio and how quickly the ratio changes

is still astounding. I went from early

November last year, I'm code first

everything. I started the editor,

I'll spend whatever long it is and then

at some point if I get stuck or if I

want a second opinion, I'll go ask my

friendly clanker to give me a second

opinion. That's just not how it is

anymore. Now I start with the agent. Now

he'll give me the draft. I'll review the

draft and I'll make alterations if need

be. And then just recently I flipped it

even further. So we're working on a CLI

for Base Camp so we can get full agent

accessibility for Base Camp. It's

astounding. First, actually, let me

rewind. As soon as I got pilled on how

good the agents were and how capable

they were, I immediately tried to raise

my gaze up towards the end of the road

and think, do we even need MCP? Do we

even need CLI? Do we even need anything?

Can't the agent just figure it all out?

This was when I installed OpenClaw. So,

I installed OpenClaw on a VM and I

thought, what should I do here? Let's

see how far we can push it and what it

can do by itself. So I thought I want

this claw in base camp. I want this claw

in Fizzy. Let me just try to invite it

as it was a human. So I just wrote it.

Can you sign up for Fizzy? I'm not

giving you any tools. I'm not giving you

any MCP. I'm not giving you CLI. I'm

just telling you it's at fizzy.do. Go

sign up. And you see it. Chuck along.

And then yeah, I've signed up, but it's

asking for an email address or I'm

trying to sign up. It's asking for an

email address. I'm like, oh yeah, right.

You need an email address. An agent

doesn't have an email address. Hey, go

sign up for hey.com. I'm like, it's

going to fail this one. And it's Chuck,

Chuck, Chuck. Uh, I've signed up for

Hey.com. Here's the password. Write it

down somewhere safe. I'm now also signed

up for Fizzy. I got the confirmation

email in my inbox. We're all good. What

do you want me to do? I'm like, what?

Are you telling me that you could

one-shot signing up through a browser to

these things? Now, maybe that shouldn't

be surprising. Maybe that was already

possible with Sonnet 3 or one of the

early models. I don't know. But when you

experience it yourself on your own damn

claw that you're just telling over

Telegram to do something and it's

signing up for products autonomously,

that's pretty startling. It was for me.

And then the next step I went like,

well, if it can sign up for Hey, and can

sign up for Fizzy, let me invite it to

Base Camp. So, I send it an invitation

to its own email address. Here's the

invitation link to Base Camp. Can you

just jump into the AI labs lab uh

project that we have and introduce

yourself to the team? go, "Hey, I'm

David's assistant. It's very nice to

meet you all. I've read back the

transcript a little bit. I see you're

all excited about these things." And you

just go again, "What? What?" And that

was fun because it showed me that even

if it was going to take a while, it did

take a while. It took a while. This is

um agent terms. It took I don't know,

seven minutes. That was like, "Oh, it

feels like eternity." But it was able to

do it. And that seems like the end

state. The end state is that agents will

not need any of our accommodations. They

do not need any on-ramp. They're not

coming on a little uh wheelchair.

They'll be coming on bionic legs and

running five times as fast as you in

about 2 seconds, which we'll get to in a

second to the speed aspect of it. But

then you also realize, okay, well, I

can't just sit around fiddling my thumbs

until AGI happens. Let's build for

today. And that's what we've been

building for Basecam. We've been

building CLI. We're going to build it

for Hey, we're going to build it for

Fizzy. We're going to build for

everything, even probably some of the

legacy products. And what I love about

the CLI, as much as I also love it about

these harnesses, is that they validated

the fundamental Unix philosophy from

like whatever 71. You should just build

small tools that can interoperate with

pipes and you can

>> that's philosophy, right?

>> It's the total Unix philosophy. And that

is actually the magic to me about seeing

everything having a CLI. It's not that

Base Camp is easier to use now with a

CLI. No, no, is that GitHub also has a

CLI and Sentry, I don't know if they

have an CLI, but they have an MCP that

you can tie all these things together

and now you can tell an agent, hey, we

have some errors in Sentry. Can you go

check them out? Then post a write up to

Basecam iterating what's wrong. Then go

in GitHub, come up with a pull request,

post a comment back to Base Camp when

you're done. And now we have a central

right base cam where we're following the

work as it's going on while we have an

agent doing work looking things up. And

again, when we try to talk about it and

relay it, I guess some people can see

it. And now OpenClaw has enough videos

on YouTube and so forth so you can get

at least a passenger ride. But try it

yourself with your own product, with

your own tasks and with your own prompts

and you will be pilled. You will be

simultaneously

incredibly excited for what we've been

able to make sand do. The silicon, the

chips, the weights, the whole thing.

And then also a little bit anxious about

where it's all going to go. And it's in

that tension that I and probably anyone

else who's been pilled on this live,

right? Wait a minute. If we're already

here, what does n 18 months from now

look like? Like if at the last 3 months

we've upended my entire understanding of

what's possible with computers, what's

the next 3 months look like? What the

next nine months look like?

>> Yeah. This this this is where like I I

was a little bit on on your end for a

long time and I think I still am where I

believe what works and I'm always

skeptical of projections. Mo Moore's law

broke down at some point. I I live

through everyone said it will continue

forever and you know and then it broke

as we all suspected it would

>> but then it found another way. I think

it's the good point about the Moors law,

right? It broke for individual cores.

Yes. How much can you push that? And

then we just went, well, what if you

just had what's the latest chip? 256 on

the AMD 10 chips, right?

>> And even when performance broke, we we

we went into power consumption and size

and all of those things. So, yeah, like

but it's it's harder for me to also just

to say, oh, it's going to stop here

because we've seen it grow. We we know

the approaches that they're taking this

larger and larger training sets and it's

been working so far. And there's also

the bitter lesson which I think I I

think is a it's it's such a short paper

that it's just so worth reading. I think

it's one of probably the most popular

papers outside of academic circles.

>> Yes.

>> Because it just lays out this thing that

we we don't want to believe that. We

want to believe that our knowledge our

understanding is superior that you know

you and me knowing how to code or me

putting in these 15 years or however

long it's been it's special. Sometimes

it shows that it's it's not as special.

What's interesting actually is like

right this second this snapshot in time

it a little bit is and this is a funny

bification that's happening junior

versus senior developer is that the most

successful and applicable agent

acceleration that I've seen at 37 signal

has been from the most senior people the

people who are able to validate whether

what the agent produces is suitable to

be deployed to millions of people. There

was just this story yesterday about some

of the major outages at Amazon.

>> 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 abet it at all and a and

junior programmers are not capable of

figuring it out. Therefore, their role

is suddenly more tenuous than it was 6 n

months ago because a senior programmer

can and this is why senior programmers

are getting so much more acceleration.

They're able to first of all work in

parallel with lots of agents but

critically examine the quality of the

agent output and have a high degree of

confidence of whether this is going to

work or not and redirect them if not

because this is what made them senior in

the first place. This was the role that

they had that they had the uh long

insight and history and overview of the

architecture. How does it all fit in? Is

this going to work? Is this not going to

work? This was the role they played to

junior programmers. But now they can

play that role to agents and agents are

faster at following instructions and

redirections. And suddenly you have

senior developers who can 5x 10x their

individual productivity. And now this is

the second order effect. If you manage

to 5x or 10x a senior developer, that

person's value per hour just went up

10x. Now take that hour instead of that

person spending it with the agents just

shipping stuff and making things better.

They spend that hour as they would

before teaching a junior human how to do

things better. There's something in that

equation that's in play right now and

it's not clear how it's going to map

out. Now one way it could map out is

that the agents will get so good that

they stop making mistakes. They become

senior in their capacity to ship working

code. This is what my bet would be if we

look x amount of time forward because

this is what just happened with cars. So

self-driving Teslas now drive better

than humans do. Not all humans, not in

all circumstances, but on average. It's

very possible that if we're able to

delegate the mortal risk, the highest

criticality we basically deal with on a

daily basis sitting in a metal tube

along other metal tubes that go 60 m

hour where you can die if someone makes

a mistake, we delegate that to an agent.

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 acrewing to the most senior

developers. And also I wonder just like

with self-driving like you realize

there's always KV. So, for example,

inside companies where it matters. When

you're a startup, you have zero

customers. It doesn't matter. You can

oneshot it and it doesn't matter if it

doesn't work and it, you know, it

crashes. But inside these companies, uh,

at Uber, um, I just got details on how

they're adopting AI and and they have

all these tools, cloud code and and all

these things. But what we realize as

well when you just put it in there, they

have all these internal monor repos.

They have their ticketing systems. They

have their slack. They have so much.

They have their RFC's design documents

on on how and why they have this jumble

of a mess uh with microservices which

which was fun way that we we originally

connected like many many years ago. But

what they found is they built a bunch of

internal systems, a lot of it to help to

feed NCD's agent harnesses and now

they're working better. But you know

this where we are right now is is

there's and this is why if you're a

senior engineer in one of these

companies or a staff engineer at like

Uber and you move to Google suddenly

you're not going to be as valuable as

efficient for a while until you learn

all the systems. So I I wonder if just

like with self-driving, you know,

self-driving works great as well. I was

in SFN and LA and way most they they

drive so nice. Like

>> my Teslas was driving in LA driving us

to the airport every time. The whole

family I sit peacefully watch the road

but do not steer at all on that entire

journey. Well, except my my weimo got

stuck because a a truck was parking on

on a narrow street and a car had a bike

shed and I I I I knew that it should I

should not go there, but it didn't know.

So, human oper operator came in. But

anyway, but even with Whimos, you know,

like there's there's things like there's

they drive in pretty good weather.

They've been mapped out. So I wonder if

in software engineering I I wonder if

this has these parallels where we have

all of you know like these companies

have their their specialized

landscape and once you map it once you

do all the tools once you figure out

these things and with self-driving it

took it took 10 years right like I was

at Uber when they bought the

self-driving thing and we were hearing

in the news that you know next year it's

all going to be over for drivers and no

>> yes there are not going to be steering

wheels anymore which by the way is an

amazing anecdote because it just shows

Elon 's total faith in his mission

because in 17 when he made that

proclamation, it was an AI. It was

500,000 lines of handcoded C++,

>> right?

>> Like that model was never ever going to

get us to the full self-driving. But he

had just total faith in the vision. And

then eventually, hey, here come along

comes AI and it's so good. And if you

train it on billions of hours of road

use, it actually can do it. And it can

do it better than most humans. In fact,

I'm a pretty good driver. I'd like to

say I'm not the best chauffeur because

my I don't know impatience have a

tendency to provoke the throttle. Uh

that's not always as pleasant for

passengers as it is fun for me. And when

I let uh the Tesla autopilot drive, it's

just the best chauffeur in the world.

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 as like in its

application within that narrow domain.

And of course, when we get these

anecdotes and these examples of holy

smokes, not it didn't take 10 years for

the self. It took 10 years from the

proclamation, but what they were doing

for seven of those years had nothing to

do with what they're doing with FSD now

because the FSD that's based on AI

hadn't been running for that long. But

the inflection point of I think it was

131, FSD 131, like the first version,

you're like, "Wow, this is pretty good,

but like I better pay attention." 132

140 142

over the course of 18 months we went

from yeah it's pretty good but like I'm

going to pay attention here to why is

there steering wheel and that

acceleration that short period of time

of course is something people look to

when it comes to programming go like

well if we're here now and senior

programmers still have to review it

because otherwise you're going to get

all your whatever four severity eight

down times at AWS because some AI pushed

out some nonsense. What is it going to

look like when they take the jump that

FSD did over the same period of time?

Now, I also think you can go completely

crazy trying to just sit and soak in all

of that. This is what I tried to do over

the past year. Go, I'm really excited

for where this is going, but I'm also

going to deal with what's possible today

and what's enjoyable today and what we

do right now. I'm not going to try to

plan what my life looks like 12 months

from now when maybe we do have AGI or we

don't. Now, there are other people who

do that very well. I just watched an

interview with Leopold on Drakesh from

last year. He's thinking like what does

2030 look like? What does the whatever

10 gawatt data center look like? I'm

like I I'm very glad we have individuals

who put thought into that because that's

not my favorite spot to be and I think

most people are not that good at

polishing the crystal ball.

>> No. Well, I I mean this is a little bit

unsettling as a software engineer in the

sense of like clearly this is where the

industry wants to go. This is where a

lot of effort will be put. There will be

a lot of businesses, software businesses

built on this. A lot of VC money raised

on this by the way who are going to

tackle this and they will either like

succeed or die. That's what that's what

these companies do. But today, what do

you see at at 37 signals uh with

software engineers? You you of course

have mostly experienced engineers,

although you did hire junior engineers

as well. How is their kind of work

changing? How is their satisfaction with

with work change? Because that's also a

thing, right? We keep arguing about like

is is it making us more miserable at

these things? Is it what we want to do?

And how's it changing 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 leg interview last

summer, I was talking about you know

what I don't want to be a project

manager for agents because I had the

mental model of a project manager of

humans and I thought like that's not

what I enjoy. I don't want to be that

far away from the production. I want to

be in the mix. I want to have my hands

in the code. What I failed to realize at

the time was that running a bunch of

agents feels less like being a project

manager for agents and more like

stepping into this super mech suit where

suddenly I don't just have two arms. I

have 12 and I can now look at seven

screens at the same time running five

keyboards. I'm still the one doing it

even if I'm not typing this as a keyword

in a program. I have been hyper

accelerated as a programmer. It's a

different kind of programmer, but it

still has the same affinity to

aesthetics, at least when I'm producing

Ruby code. And I'm able to combine that

while being vastly more productive on a

bunch of things. It's also like getting

an incredible brain upgrade on even

assessing issues. One of the pilling

moments I had was before the release of

Omachi 3.4.

I went into GitHub and we had I don't

know 250 PRs pending and I kind of just

sighed a little bit and like 250 PRs if

I spend I don't know 15 minutes on each

PR like how long is it going to take

before I get to the end of it and I

thought you know what let me try

something else let me just try to ask

Claude to I'm not even doing anything

with a system I just do review URL and

the URL is the issue or is the PR are

shocked In

90 minutes, I think it was, I processed

100 PRs. And it wasn't that I merged all

of them. In fact, I'd say I merged a

small minority. Maybe 10% got merged as

is. Then maybe 20% got merged. But with

Claude's implementation,

>> the programmer had correctly identified

an issue

>> but hand rolled some code that I could

see I didn't want to keep or sometimes I

couldn't even see it. I just asked

Claude and they say like ah it's not

quite right. And then I just asked

Claude, can you just clean room this?

>> This is the right problem. Let's fix it

but let's do it right. It would do it

right away in exactly the style as I

would have written the rest of Amachi.

Now this isn't the high code of

something. It's mostly just bash code,

but there's still a shape to bash code

and how you want it to look and can it

feel coherent with the rest of project.

Agents opus in this case would just nail

it. And then the second half of it was

split between 25% thinks I then just

realized I just don't want this. It

shouldn't we shouldn't have it. And 25%

claude telling me maybe there's

something here, but it's really not a

good implementation. We don't have a

straight shot to making a great one. 100

issues in 90 minutes. And I sat back.

This would have been a week's worth of

work, days at the very least. What the

heck? And even more than that, Claude's

analysis of at least half the issues

pertained to things I knew nothing about

where it was undeniably

a smarter, better reviewer, programmer

that I could ever dream to be. Well, not

dreamed to be, but wasn't that

>> moment? No, but you would have not put

in the effort. This was why the PR sat

in the first place. In many cases, I

would look at it and go that

>> I think there's something here, but like

then I now have to read up on this debug

thing. I have to figure out is this the

right way of doing it. I don't want to

just merge something that then has other

issues. And to be able to do that agent

accelerated was one of top 20

programming moments. I I like how you

put agent accelerated and it sounds like

it's especially efficient for work that

is waiting on you but you don't want to

do it or you're not as skilled of doing

it but it's a hassle to delegate because

again like you have a team right like

like like you but you probably didn't

delegate it because you probably knew

that it wouldn't make it faster or

better. So I I I wonder if there's a

part of AI that because we talk a lot

about like you know like companies love

to measure especially larger ones like

efficiency PRs and they want to see

impact but about the impact of doing

work that we would have not done before.

>> That's the kicker for me. That's the

fact that the pie is just exploding

right now. It's not growing. It's

exploding. The number of projects we

have tackled internally that we would

never even have contemplated starting on

are legion. We had a great project where

normally on performance work you worry

about uh P50, P95, P99. Jeremy, one of

our most agent accelerated people went

like what about P1? What about the

floor? Can we fix the floor? What is the

floor? And he went like well right now

our floor is I forget what it was 4

milliseconds. Let's say that, right?

Well, actually 4 milliseconds can add up

if you have a bunch of fast requests.

They can still it still matters. and he

just went like, "We're gonna do P1.

We're gonna optimize P1 literally the

fastest 1% of requests. We're going to

make them even faster." He took it from,

I think it was four milliseconds to less

than half a milliseconds. He 10x the

performance that I was like, I would

never have signed up on this and he did

the P1 project over a couple of days as

like a side gef because now he could.

>> Now he could because he had a hunch. He

had an intuition that there was

something here. He let agents run with

it and the number of PRs that like all

right we fixed this we fixed this I

think total the PR the P1 project I

maybe misremember but I think it was

like 12 PRs like just fixing all sorts

of things where I look at the single PRs

I'm like yeah actually okay yeah makes

sense I look at the total sum of it

you've changed 2500 lines of code you're

like you've done that in a few days

>> it's so I've never heard anyone do P1

because it just it feels like a vanity

experience it makes no business sense I

I This is not true, right? Cuz

everything adds up. But but you know

what I mean, right?

>> I know exactly what you mean. And this

is exactly why the explosion of the pie

suddenly lets us look at problems we

would never have contemplated looking

before. It's funny. I remember this

scene from Terminator 2 where they found

this chip from the Terminator in the

first movie and he goes like, "This

thing gave us ideas we would never have

investigated before." And like there's

some beautiful parallels here about like

maybe we're about to build the

Terminator, the cliche, but also we're

getting ideas, we're getting ambitions

we would never have looked at before

because suddenly the cost of exploring a

hunch has just dropped by a

thousandfold. I do this all the time

now, too. I'll give it some vague crappy

instructions just because like I have

this fleety idea. I haven't even

crystallized it into a neat prompt. I

just want to see something. It'll And

then I go like, oh yeah, delete as in

revert code back to normal. I like

before I would be a little more precious

about 75 lines of code because it would

have taken me two hours to do him. Now

there's no residual value to any of this

stuff and I can just go like show me a

draft. I feel like a little bit like a

king where you just go like show me the

the analysis of the farrung regions.

Where are we with the tax recip? And

this boy is like, "All right, this uh

servant is like, "Yes, I I shall do so

and return in 3 weeks." Except like you

can just wave your hands around. And

agents just come back with answers to

stupid questions, terrible ideas. Then

suddenly it wasn't so terrible. It was

actually a great idea. And you go like,

"Wha, I did this with I haven't even

pulled the trigger on it yet." But one

of the things with the Machi people have

been asking for since the beginning is

dual boot. being able to install Linux

next to the Windows installation so that

they can still play all their games. And

I just went like, do you know what? I

have more than one computer so when I

play play games, I can just do it on the

PC. It's not a me problem.

>> Yeah,

>> I totally get why a bunch of people

wanted. I'm not heavily inclined to