Lex Fridman Podcast - _501 _ DHH_ Future of Programming_ AI_ Agentic Engineering_ Vibe Coding _ Linux

0:00Lex FridmanThe following is a conversation with David Heinemeyer Hansen, also known as DHH. Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37 Signals, creator of the new Amachi Linux operating system, best-selling author, racecar driver, and one of the most outspoken and prolific programmers in the world. For the past 20 plus years, for him, programming meant meticulously hand-crafting beautiful Ruby code, But recently, since late 2025, GHH has embraced the AI revolution and has openly transformed himself into, once again, one of the most outspoken and prolific agentic engineers, even though he hates that term. So let's say practitioners of whatever programming is becoming where AI is doing most of the actual programming and the human steers the ship with high-level design, vision, and taste.

0:58Lex FridmanYes, it's true. DHH is at times controversial, but he's always fearless, brilliant, and fun to talk to. This was, once again, an intense eye-opening and a wild roller coaster ride of a conversation. And now, a quick few second mention of his sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfreedman.com slash sponsors. It is, in fact, the best way to support this podcast. We've got WhisperFlow for voice to text writing.

1:28Lex FridmanBlitzy for code generation and large code bases. NetSuite for business management software. Shopify for selling stuff online. Element for electrolytes. Plot for AI powered note taking. Higgs Field for video generation and Proplexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely my friends. And now onto the full ad reads for some of these. A bunch of sponsors on this episode. They are all in their own right. Truly incredible companies.

1:58Lex Fridmanincredible services, products. I know a lot of the people involved and there are just so many brilliant people there from the leadership to the individual engineers. It really is amazing to be sponsored by these folks. Anyway, if you don't want to listen to me ramble about the awesomeness of these companies, you can just skip. I make it easy, but please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. Also, to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreedmen.com slash contact.

2:28Lex FridmanAll right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by WhisperFlow, an incredible AI voice dictation app. I've been using it for a long, long time across all my devices. I actually talked to DHH in this conversation about the fact that I was surprised with myself that voice-based interaction with AI systems and with the computer in general is something that I was hesitant about and then I completely switched over.

2:57Lex Fridmanto where a lot of the really difficult things I have to do that require a lot of thinking and deliberation, I actually will do with voice. And we talk about the challenges of that. And I believe, if I remember correctly, I don't remember if it was on mic or off mic, but I sang praises to whisper flow because it's been with me for a long time as a tool I use across the different operating system. I use it on all my devices.

3:25Lex Fridmanit's very accurate as accurate as you would think we should be able to do in this day and age and before whisper flow that wasn't done so anyway go to whisper flow that ai slash lex to get one month of whisper flow pro free that's w i s p r flow dot ai slash lex this episode is brought to you by blitzy an AI-powered autonomous software development platform. It's built, designed, customized for large complex code bases, works with large companies to ship software much faster via a lot of agents working together. The very kind of process that DHH and I talk endlessly about in all kinds of different ways that we're all trying to figure out how to do at the small individual scale of one developer and obviously companies like Blitzia trying to figure out how to do this at the large large complex code base scale of companies. They focus on delivering a large percentage over 80% of the work autonomously and also importantly do it fast. Again, DHH

4:36Lex Fridmanquotes Nietzsche with Amor Fati accepting the rapidly evolving times. And it is true that we are evolving towards the case where most of programming is autonomous programming, meaning most of the actual co-writing is done by AI. If not 100%, it certainly is heading that way. Learn more or speak to a member of the team at blitzy.com slash lex. That's blitzy.com slash lex.

5:06Lex FridmanThis episode is also brought to you by our old friend Netsuit and all in one AI powered business management system Speaking of businesses. They specialize in businesses. They know what it's like to work with companies that have real work to do and have to do it at scale and those companies is a machine It is a hierarchical machine. It's a modular machine with the different modules have to operate within themselves and then communicate effectively. And you have to manage both the modules and the glue. I'm going too far with this metaphor. NetSuite helps you manage financials, HR, inventory supply, e-commerce, if that's your thing and everything else. All the messy stuff that it takes to run a business. For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite for free.

5:58Lex FridmanGo to net suite dot AI slash Lex That's net suite dot AI slash Lex This episode is also brought to you by Shopify a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking online store in this conversation with GHH rightfully so as I often do we saying Toby the CEO praises For being a great engineer and leader of engineers and somebody who's hyped about the future and being part about building that future I know I should probably be talking about what the service is for the Shopify thing, but I always end up talking about the incredible engineering teams behind Shopify and Actually the thing they stand for the thing they represent as a team and Toby as a leader It's constantly trying to innovate

6:54Lex Fridmanbefore it was creating beautiful, scalable, fast, reliable code bases. Now it's how to do that increasingly with AI. From a user perspective, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash Lux. That's all over the case. Got to Shopify.com slash Lux to take your business to the next level today. This episode is brought to you by Element. I made myself an element drink and I forgot it in the other room.

7:23Lex Fridmanand so now I'm thirsty. It is over 100 degrees in Texas. I do run 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, sometimes 15 miles in that heat and I just wouldn't feel very good if I didn't get electrolyzed before and after actually and it's always watermelon salt is the flavor. I have not tried another element flavor in years.

7:50Lex FridmanI should probably come back and reconsider my life, but watermelon salt is just so damn delicious. I keep going with that. It is the best way I've found to get the sodium, the potassium and the magnesium into my system. It's delicious, portable, I travel with it, makes me feel like home, puts a smile on my face. Life is amazing. I am so, so effing grateful to be alive, friends. Anyway.

8:17Lex FridmanGet a free 8-con sample pack with any purchase, try it at www.drinkelement.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback and so on. And now, dear friends, here's DHH. 13 months ago we sat down right here to talk about programming and then everything changed.

9:03Lex FridmanAt that time you were a bit skeptical about the role of AI in the process of programming. And then we went through this rapid evolution of agentic engineering. So, simple question to start. How has your view on AI's role in programming changed? Are you excited? Are you terrified? Are you on an emotional roller coaster ride? I am incredibly excited. You've been talking about fun a lot. There is...

9:32David Heinemeier HanssonNone of the existential dread that doesn't exist for me as an emotional component It is only there as an intellectual component and the emotional component for me is 100% pure unadultered joy and optimism and Amazement that we've made computers do this and I find it so interesting that we talked just 13 months ago because It's like we talked in different universes different eras. I love this quote. I think it's Lenin there are Decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen and we have seen Decades of progress happen in the last nine months. I mean imagine you're there when the Wright brothers take flight yesterday

10:23David Heinemeier HanssonThe New York Times would write, it's gonna be 10,000 years before we fly. And then the day after, we're up in the skies and just a few years after that, they're cross-Atlantic planes. The whole world has completely changed. What a blessing to be there in that moment. If you zoom out and look at all the human history, how many humans got to live within the same epoch that they were born in? They never saw that complete change of...

10:52Lex Fridmanthe world, enough society. And to have been blessed with two of those feels just such a privilege. I got to see the internet from pre-internet to post-internet. And then now, pre-AI, post-AI, what an amazing run. How fortunate. Yeah, but the thing is this feels like a thing that happened faster than anything else in human history. So I would say somewhere around December, maybe late November. November 24. That's the exact moment. When one nation invades another in a world war, something like this, this is how we talk about AI changing everything. Yeah, and it really just shifted from many great developers. It shifted to where AI is doing some basic autocomplete, maybe writing 5, 10, 15, 20 percent of code to writing 80 percent of code. Or 100.

11:51David Heinemeier HanssonOr 100, yeah, especially if it's not a public-facing product. To me, that's why even when I look back upon our conversation a year ago, I don't actually have different opinions. I have the same opinions. A year ago, I did not like the mode of AI we were offered. It was the autocomplete mode, or it was the AI chatbot mode. Now, the chatbot I actually liked as we talked about, great tutor.

12:18David Heinemeier Hanssonright from the get go, great way of looking things up on the internet. Not what was going to replace me chiseling code. But then we get the agents. And the agents start out being curiosities for about five minutes. And then they get amazing. And then they get, oh my god, is this HAI? And all of that happened since last year, even.

12:46David Heinemeier Hanssonjust within the last nine months. We have basically these few faces here. We have AI in the pre-agentic era. I was excited about that, but it was not fundamentally rewriting the rules of the game for me. It was not completely changing how I worked. I was still chiseling code. I just had a little helper, a little sidekick who could bounce ideas off and I could look up this...

13:14David Heinemeier Hanssoninformation online and so forth in a more efficient way. It was just a more efficient way to do what I was already doing. And it didn't change the emotional connection I had to the computer. Then we get to November 24th, 2025. Opus 4.5 to me was the dividing line where suddenly I didn't even try it on the 24th. I think I tried it on the 26th. I give it a couple of tasks. And I realized that the quality of the out put is uncannily close to what I would have written. And I remember just leaning back and thinking, what just happened? How did we go from this autocomplete mess that I was talking to you about in the summer to this just a few short months later? How did we get both the increase in intelligence and then also the increase in usability? This agent harness.

14:13David Heinemeier Hanssonquestion where I don't know if Opus 4.5 was that much smarter than Opus 4, which is what we had in the summer, but its ability to instrument your computer, to use tools, to check its own work, to apply its intelligence in such a way that you could get real meaningful work out of it was completely different. And I think this is then the big change that happens for almost anyone who paid attention and started playing with it.

14:43David Heinemeier Hanssonover the Christmas break. This is what I heard from Shopify and other places with lots of employees who suddenly had a breather, suddenly had a couple of weeks to lean back and just look at what was going on, gave it a try and had the same mind-blowing experience that these agents were of a different genre than what we had before. And then what we get to is I'm already excited at this point. By December, I'm already revisiting sort of all my priors and going like, wow, if it can do this, can it also do that? Oh, yeah, it can. And again, Opus 4.5 now looks like a retarded model. And this is the magic of this progress is you think you've reached something. I remember thinking at the moment, if this is the last model we get, I'll be set.

15:39David Heinemeier Hanssoni'll be happy i could live with opus 4.5 for the next 20 years and you would hear no complaints from me because it was just so incredibly amazing to see an agent do all this work in the way that i wanted it done because it was not just about it being able to solve a task it was also that i could look at its path there and go yep Yep, maybe not there, but almost. And if I give you two notes, you'll get to where I wanted to go in the way I wanted to go there. You could produce code I wanted to merge. You could produce code that actually looked beautiful if it was written in Ruby. Rust, different question. But this ability for the agents to truly become an extension of how I wanted to work was very novel.

16:31David Heinemeier HanssonWe wait just until early spring and suddenly we get sub agents we get harnesses that can subdivide the task and Something that would take opus quite a while Suddenly took a fifth at the time a tenth of the time because it could get chopped up and suddenly you got eight sub agents working for you But both of those two first phases of the agentic age to me still felt like I had to drive. I could tell it what I wanted, where to look for it, and steered it a little bit when it went off, and then we'll get there, and I would go much faster, but I had to be in the driver's seat. I had to tell it what I wanted, and I had to be the reviewer, the auditor of what was coming out. And then finally now, this summer, with Opus V, Fable, and Soul, GPT Soul,

17:29David Heinemeier HanssonAnd to a lesser extent, some of the open-weight models, we've arrived at a new era where I'm not telling it where we're going. I'm telling it the problem I have. I'm telling it the fuzzy, vague idea I have. It tells me where we're going. It tells me which path to take. And I will still look at it because I'm a curious person and I like computers and I like the outcome of it. But I really kind of don't have to.

17:58David Heinemeier HanssonI've become optional in the part that produces the code that picks the route. Remember when early GPS systems came out? They were amazing compared to looking at a map. But you still want to pay attention. Is it going to drive you in the harbor? I remember these newspaper articles, GPS, they're terrible because people don't pay attention and they drive in the harbor. When was the last time GPS drove anyone in the harbor? Like that just doesn't happen anymore. In fact, the cars now just drive themselves, right?

18:28David Heinemeier HanssonAnd this is where we've arrived at now that I can trust. For the domain I'm working in right now, I can trust it and feel completely confident that it's going to have my back. It's not going to do something stupid. And if it does something stupid, it's going to be able to recover. We should mention that there's all kinds of domains that programmers operate in. I actually don't know, but I think the most common domain and development is like...

18:57Lex Fridmanweb dev, crud, you have a database, you have a user facing interface, and it does something back and forth, and it could be internal to just one person, to multiple people, to a small number of people or to the world. And I think for that, it's, I mean, you could really get to the 100% of code written by AI and really, if you're a good programmer and you have a good intuition about what's happening behind the scenes, you can legitimately not look at the code. At least that's been my experience. I don't know how much prior experience with programming you need to have to kind of know that things are working correctly behind the scenes like intuitively by observing the ripple effects symptoms of the system. But I think for that domain,

19:49Lex Fridmanit's close to 100%, then there's domains like you're also operating in, which is writing Linux distribution. There maybe there's more because you're obsessed with speed and all that kind of stuff. There maybe you need to look at the code a little bit more. Then there's maybe safety critical systems all the way down to operating a nuclear power plant or a self-driving car. Maybe you need to look at the code more carefully. Yes, but that said, AI is insanely capable at both finding and fixing

20:19David Heinemeier HanssonSecurity vulnerabilities this was the whole blow up about fable this model was so capable of finding holes that a Attacker could exploit that was simply not safe to release so the irony here is that when you look at that field it seems like we've reached levels of intelligence that Virtually no human can match because many of these security holes are about stringing combo moves together. You find one little vulnerability here that by itself might not be the worst thing in the world, but then you combine it with four others and suddenly you have RCE, Remote Command Execution. Humans who are able to do that are very rare. They usually work inside state-sponsored organizations or other clandestine operations. They're not just

21:12David Heinemeier Hanssonout and about finding things. So they've gotten so good at that. The Linux distribution is why I've gotten 100% AI Pilled. Because I've been working on Umachi for the last three months, this version that just dropped a few days ago called Quattro. And almost right from the beginning of working on that version, the agent acceleration neared 100%. And in the last two months, it has been 100%.

21:42David Heinemeier HanssonI have not written any of the code that's shipped in Quattro by hand. I've reviewed the shape of all of it. I've reviewed the individual lines of anything that's critical in the model layer of the system. And I've not looked at the bunch of the UI code. I have not looked at the bunch of the auxiliary code. And I have not written any of the new functionality entirely by hand.

22:12David Heinemeier HanssonBut then the web part actually evolving Basecamp and Hay, our professional products that have lots of users and our relatively large code bases have proven surprisingly tricky to fully accelerate with agents. We just released Basecamp 5 not too long ago. That was the first product at 37 signals that was really agent accelerated because we were in this final sprint phase from around February.

22:42David Heinemeier HanssonBy then, agents were already good. And we had this early surge of it's solved. We could just have the designers do the programming. They know what features they want. They know what shape they wanted to take. Let them vibe. And we let them vibe. And we ended up with...

23:01David Heinemeier HanssonA lot of PRs that individually, perhaps, could have been justified for a hot moment, taken altogether, destroyed the architecture of the system. And we actually had to clean up manually, mop it up by hand, by human hand, to get back to an architecture that felt cohesive and coherent. So we still have a bit of that. That was February, by the way. Things are quite different now. Well, hold on a second. What's the lesson from that? Is one of the lessons from that that you have to be a programmer at this stage?

23:31David Heinemeier Hanssonto be able to vibe code? To be able to vibe code on existing substantial code bases, even if they're crud, if you want to retain the elements of architecture that got that system to where it was. Now, that's also a point where I've stressed many times that when people accuse vibe coders of being slob generators, I go right back at them and say, have you looked at the average programmer's output? That is

24:01Lex Fridmansome other slob too. If you've looked at behind the scenes of many great companies and what their code bases look like after there's been 3,000 humans through them, they're awful. Absolutely awful. Can you tell me the intuition you have? I seem to just stepping back and observing the different apps that we all rely on. I don't know. Adobe Photoshop, all this kind of stuff. This seems to be the progress on development there has not accelerated. So why is it...

24:30David Heinemeier HanssonWhat lessons can you draw from base camp, well-established, huge user base? Why aren't we seeing super rapid increase in new updates, features, all this kind of stuff in these well-established apps? Multiple reasons. I'll start with the first one that's the most critical. As soon as you're having human teams work together on something, the bottleneck is rarely implementation. It's human bandwidth and communication.

24:59David Heinemeier HanssonWhen you have a product manager and a couple of designers and a VP above them and a CTO above them and everyone wants to be part of the shaping process because we're all justifying why we're here, that's where all the productivity goes to die. The revelation I've had working on Amachi the last three months is that to get that magical 10x, A hundred X in a few rare cases, a thousand X productivity boost, you have to interact with the agents directly. And you cannot intermediate that bandwidth with another human because it's simply too slow. And on the one hand, that's a bit of a bummer. I mean, I like humans and it's great to work together.

25:56David Heinemeier HanssonBut it also means we need to temper our expectations with what these agents can do if it's humans driving it and you have three layers of approval and all the other machinery of a large corporation. The implementation part is only a small segment of it. The other thing I'd say is that most organizations don't know what they want. They don't know how to make it better. They're not bottlenecked.

26:25David Heinemeier Hanssonon implementation, they're bottlenecked on ideas, they're bottlenecked on vision, they're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those elements in excess of your implementational capacity, it doesn't help. So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true. Then what? Are you going to ship that? That sounds like, I don't know, something coming out of Microsoft. That's not what we're trying to replicate here. That process is not actually, because we already had this.

26:55David Heinemeier HanssonIf you step back for a moment and think of the towering organizations we have who have had tens of thousands of programmers at their disposal. I mean, I'm picking Microsoft here. I love Microsoft some of the time. But I'll pick on them in this case because they have had endless resources, endless programming capacity for decades, right? This is what's showing us that just being able to write a lot of code does not produce great compelling software. Now, the other thing is we've had this capacity for about six months. That's not very long in human lifecycle capacity of internalizing what's going on. And I think it's actually funny that the critique of AI is, why isn't it going faster?

27:47Lex FridmanWhat he's talking about? We've not had any other form of progress that has moved us fast as AI and you're impatient because in the last three months we haven't rewritten the whole world and made it a utopia of software goodness. You're basically saying everybody should be switching to Linux now. One of the arguments is like we can rewrite all the software that's not available in Linux in Linux. Linux has been the love of my life for many years, but one of the reasons I'm still attached to Windows and now Mac is because of video editing premiere. We're going to fix that.

28:17Lex FridmanSo the question is, who's gonna build Premiere and Photoshop for Linux? And it feels like one person can now. 100% one person can. And so, I'm allowed to be impatient. In fact, me or anyone else, impatience is the first step of doing it yourself, right? Correct. And there's a community.

28:42Lex Fridmanhave tens of thousands of people that use Adobe Premiere or DaVinci, all these non-linear video editors that know the frustrations. Everybody shares them. You can look at Reddit. You can look at the forums. Everybody knows it. I don't know what it is. It may be the management. It may be the meetings. All the things you've always discussed is the bureaucracy that's inside companies that's slowing everything down in the development of features. But it feels like if you just let some of the developers loose, with a bunch of agents, you can fix all that. But again, based on everything you're saying, maybe the way to do that is to start over from scratch, maybe through open source or somebody launches a new company that within large companies now it's hard to really accelerate into the agentic era by letting developers just build. This is the classic innovators dilemma. These companies have gotten so good.

29:39David Heinemeier Hanssonso established at the old way. And therefore their entire structure, management layers, processes are tuned for a time that no longer exists. But you can't pivot that. These are super tankers. It just doesn't happen. This is why we're finally getting this upset into the technology industry. For a while I was very upset about the...

30:08David Heinemeier Hanssonduopoly between Apple and Google on mobile because it felt like mobile was the most important computing platform that we had. And I could not see a path to unseat either Google or Apple sitting on top of that, controlling everything, taking their toll booth money. But the game has changed. This is no longer the most important platform. Mobile phones are important, but there's also a lot of other form factors coming.

30:36David Heinemeier Hanssonwhether it's glasses or it's earpieces or whatever else have you. It's all in play now, but the computing platforms themselves are in play for the first time in probably 40 years, if you look at the desktop. Linux has been around since 91. It's not taken off or taken over on the desktop. It's taken over everything else.

31:00David Heinemeier HanssonAll the devices you have on your desk, your fridge, your toaster, everything runs Linux except for your computer. Now, funnily enough, your Android is actually Linux, but wrapped so sufficiently that you can't really recognize it. But now there's an opening, and the opening is exactly as you say it. If there's a piece of software you depend it on that bound you to Windows, it is completely within reach.

31:30David Heinemeier Hanssonfor you personally to start rewriting it. Maybe you won't get to 100 percent coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. I only use 5 percent. Yeah, well, we all use a different 5 percent. Well, what if we all just build our own 5 percent? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now today. I've done it a lot of times over.

32:00David Heinemeier HanssonSo one of the amazing things I've found with the latest agenda gauge is I have become a polygot programmer Something I was absolutely not before I was a Ruby programmer first and foremost and then I dabbled a little bit in bash Yeah, when I had to and in the last two months I've ridden C++ I've written three applications that have shipped in omachi quattro. I wrote a writing app, I was using this app called Topora, which is a very nice app, which in itself is based on another app called IA Writer, which was my real love on the Mac for a clean, simple, marked-down writing environment. That's where I write all my essays. Then I moved to Linux and I couldn't get AI Writer, so I moved over to this other tool called Topora. It was a piece of shearware and it had a lot of features I just didn't need.

32:58David Heinemeier HanssonSix weeks, seven weeks ago, I thought, do you know what? I only need 5% of Topora, which is already a basic app. I literally told the agent to get going, that I wanted it written in C++ and QT, because that would fit well with the aesthetic of what I was building with Quattro. And in, I think, about 20 minutes, it had the first version I started using, and it wasn't quite right. Within two days, I'd given up Topora, and I wrote...

33:25Lex Fridmanand have written all of my essays since that moment in Amarite. Can I ask for your advice and your vision about something? So, what I find with agents, you can actually write something like a replacement for Tapora that is perfectly customized to you, to your needs. Correct. With just one user in mind. And then there is a version of that that is...

33:50Lex Fridmanstarts with one user in mind but expands to a larger audience. So I've actually written a large number of software just for me. And I find it easier to do and better to get my situation done. For example, I have a video editor I've written, which is very easy to do just for me. I've never, unlike you, built something that's used by a large number of people. And I find that a bit scary and intimidating. So like at this, with this agentic age, how do you take a step to actually build something that solves your problem, which I think is a beautiful way to build, but also expand it to actually useful for other people. Is there advice you can give? And do you also see the problem of how easy it is to just build a tool for yourself? Yes, but it is simpler than you think. By the time you're done building the tool for yourself, you simply tell your agent to put it on get up. Yeah.

34:44David Heinemeier HanssonYou don't even have to do anything else. It will figure out how to put that repo on give up. It'll write a nice read me. It'll start using GitHub releases as that you can track things. It'll actually be a better software maintainer than you could ever be because it is far more patient. It is far more diligent in doing the drudgery of managing open source software than you are. And you can simply get on with the joy.

35:09David Heinemeier Hanssonof using the software that you built and evolving it as you see fit. Now, this gets into the big argument we've been having in open source for a while. Is AI contributions good or bad for the maintainer? There's a lot of maintainers right now who are quite upset about the fact that they're suddenly getting a huge influx of pull requests, of contributions from people who may not be the best programmers or programmers at all towards their software. I look at that argument and go, are you kidding me? Here is a vein of free contributions that you can take or don't take, but you're complaining about the fact that they're there. It sounds straight out of my steak is too juicy and my lobster too buttery.

36:06David Heinemeier HanssonWhat are you complaining about? This is the most amazing thing. This is what we proclamated for so long was going to be the magic of open source that we could all contribute to it. But of course, never true. There was only a small subset of people who contributed to open source. And that was the very highly skilled wizards. So this is a bit of a reformation moment. We had this disintermediation between us and the computer. And it was this class of clerics and priests called programmers.

36:35David Heinemeier HanssonAnd suddenly they're being disintermediated here by, was it the 95 theses by Luther in 1500s, nailing them to the door? And one of those was very clearly about the intermediation, that you should have direct access to the higher intelligence. But don't you need the wizards to keep a high bar of excellence in the code base? 100% you do, which is also something that's always been true about open source, which is the second argument that really Grimes me I've been running open source projects for 25 years. I have literally looked at the output of thousands if not tens of thousands of programmers I feel like I have the statistical basis to assert that most programmers They suck

37:21David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I don't mean that in the way it sounds. That was why I paused for a second here. I mean, they suck in the sense that they don't write the code I want to have written. They don't prepare their bug reports with all the relevant information. They don't detail their pull requests with the why. They don't bother to fill in needed code comments. They don't double check their work. They don't write...

37:47David Heinemeier HanssonUnit tests they don't do all of these things it takes to create good software But you know who'll do all that stuff agents if you tell them to they're very diligent at following your instructions most at the time sometimes to a fault But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open-source project They're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent written pull request to one of my projects, then I'd get one written by a human. And it's not just because the quality is better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it. You didn't even write it. So I could simply look at what your agent wrote on your behalf and go, eh, don't want it. That's always been true in open source. And in fact, I think this is one of the problems with open source maintainers. They have way too much

38:44David Heinemeier Hanssonball of neuroticism and anxiety that requires them to look upon any contribution as an obligation on their part to do everything to get that to land in the code base. That's not true at all. You can simply say no, or even better, you can say no thank you. And if you get into the mode of realizing that your project is allowed to exist and evolve according to your vision, according to your roadmap. It becomes so much easier in the agentic age to decline the contributions you don't want because you don't even in convenience or hurt the feelings of a human. It's just a clenker. And the clenker won't mind. In fact, the producers of clenkers, the labs, love when you spend tokens in vain. They get paid just the same. So in my opinion, this is the absolute best time.

39:43David Heinemeier Hanssonto ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before. I've been running the Zomachi project now for a little over a year. And in the last three months working on Quattro, I have merged over a 1000 pull requests quite a lot of those pull requests were written by people who were not classical programmers or were programmers in other domains not Linux operating system or distribution development They were able to contribute their good ideas because of agents and I got to cherry-pick the very best of that Because it was there otherwise those ideas would just have lived inside their heads

40:39David Heinemeier HanssonAgain, is this not the purpose of open source? That we tap into the collective intelligence and creativity of the whole goddamn planet. And we channel that towards a comments where we all benefit from the combined efforts of everyone. Now, there's currently, I think, about 400 unmerged pull requests on Omachi, about double what it was a week ago. So the acceleration is real, but so are the tools.

41:08David Heinemeier HanssonI'm not reviewing every pull request anymore. I haven't been reviewing them for quite some time now. I have the agents review them for me and then they will give me a summary about whether something is ready for the decision, the human decision. Should we merge or should we not merge? I don't need to look at all the pull requests that are either wrong, duplicated, bad, an agent can sort that chaff away from me. I just get to look at the pearls.

41:36David Heinemeier HanssonThe good ideas that are ready to go. The bug fixes that the agent has validated in a VM on my behalf. All the drudgery of replicating and managing open source projects is evaporating at lightning speed. And we are left with the golden juicy parts, the bone marrow of software development, deciding what should this thing do and where should it go. Do you think the good ideas

42:05Lex FridmanUltimately the kernel of the good ideas are originated in the human mind. So the individual contributors, like can it be done by agents or is the PR ultimately requires a human idea? Like how to improve a machi? All those incoming or can it all just be a pool of agents? That was the mode and the way I was thinking about agents in the first agenda gauge from November 24 to

42:34David Heinemeier HanssonFebruary 28. I thought all the ideas would originate with the humans. They would tell their agents what to build and off they went. I don't think that's true anymore at all. I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Ideas coming out of models, so great that it makes me humble as a person who otherwise prides himself on having good ideas. The agents are incredibly capable of creative thought.

43:04David Heinemeier HanssonAnd folks who are still stuck in the analysis that agents are parrots, just regurgitating the ideas that are already there are delusional about the progress that's been made in the last six to nine months. So some people listening to you right now will say DHH is suffering from the old case of AI psychosis.

43:28David Heinemeier HanssonYeah, can you still man the case that you are in fact experiencing in a state of delusion like one flew over the cuckoo's nest and can you argue against it? I'm in a state of delirium. That's what the state I'm in. Because I have been working with computers for 40 years and I've never seen the things that I've seen in just the last two months. Yeah. A whole career, a whole life, dedicating.

43:58David Heinemeier Hanssonto the love of computers as my main focus for the working hours and then some suddenly completely upended, suddenly completely rewritten. Of course I'm delirious. Who looking at this reality is not? If you are not delirious or at the very least very excited, actually I guess that's not even true. If you're not recognizing the gravity of the moment, that's the delusion.

44:28David Heinemeier HanssonThat's the psychosis. The psychosis is believing that the world is barely different. We just have some electronic parrots reciting things to us. Now, in my opinion, the reason this argument is actually brought up is because people are not able to see the fruits of the progress. That goes to your point earlier. Where is the amazing software? Why isn't American GDP running a 12% year over year? First of all, Give it a minute. It hasn't even been a year. God damn it But second of all I feel on my own account. I Have actually brought the pudding Umachi quattro launched on Friday. It's been downloaded by tens of thousands of people and they like it

45:16Lex FridmanThey like it a lot. We should mention that going to perplexity here. Umachi is a highly opinionated Arch Linux based desktop distribution centered on the Hyperland Wayland Tiling compositor. It was created by David Heinemeyer Hansen, DHH as a polished developer workstation set up with a cohesive visual style and many everyday tools already configured. Let me put it. Umachi is a beautiful

45:43David Heinemeier Hanssonmodern and opinionated Linux system. It's an alternative operating system to Mac OS and Windows, and it's freaking amazing. And the quadruple thing is you're pushing towards the age of agents. That's right. That's the latest version that we just dropped out, which is also funny. The Umachi project is only a year old and a little bit. I started it last summer in between sessions at the 24th of Le Mans, where I watched...

46:10David Heinemeier HanssonI went to many YouTube videos on Linux Rising and got bitten by that bug, started working on this second iteration of my attempt at creating a better Linux operating system. The first iteration we talked about last time was called Amacoup, was built on top of an existing system called Ubuntu, and it was fine. But the ambition I was able to pour into the new version, Omachi, because I started seven layers deeper down the stack.

46:38David Heinemeier Hanssonwas completely different, but it was still done in a pre-agentic world. I wrote all those bath scripts by hand in the beginning. And then I got to see the midway point where things changed over. I did a couple of versions of omachi that had partial agent acceleration. And then three months ago, it was full throttle, 100%. Everything is written by agents, but steered by me. And that just ended up being a very different experience and a very different operating system because I was suddenly granted a limitless ceiling on my ambition. I could look at any feature in Windows on Mac, on other Linux systems, and say, I want that and the agents would deliver. So everything I wanted was suddenly within reach, which meant that I got a little delirious.

47:36David Heinemeier HanssonWho would not get delirious if suddenly a genie pops out of the bottle and says, you can have whatever you want. Every feature you've ever dreamed of in an operating system, I can deliver them to you. Most of them in five minutes, a few in 20. And if we really go hog wild, it's going to take me two hours. Have you seen a requiem for a dream, the movie? So there's a drug-like effect here. Yes. I find it personal. We'll talk about many levels of this.

48:05Lex FridmanBut it is overwhelming how much power is placed in our hands so suddenly. And it's very hard to know with the hobbit or something. What to do with it. And I find myself truly overwhelmed with the multitasking on the verge of almost burnt out. Super excited about so many things. But ultimately looking back, you want to focus on one thing and really ship. I don't have that sense.

48:33David Heinemeier HanssonI don't have the sense of overwhelm. I don't have the sense of dread. I don't have the sense of distortion because I have a mission. I'm going somewhere and therefore I can channel all this new power towards a singular goal and outcome creating the perfect computer and therefore all my investigations with AI are focused towards that end. Now, I also have a day job.

49:02David Heinemeier HanssonAnd we also use agents there. And that's also targeted towards sort of specific outcomes. But with the Umachi experience, I got to tab in straight in the back of my head and increase the bandwidth between ideas arriving in my brain and software emerging on the screen. It was like going from dial-up to fiber. I think on your podcast...

49:32David Heinemeier HanssonElon talked about the actual human bandwidth that Neuralink and other projects are trying to accelerate. The bandwidth we're communicating over right now is quite low because we're limited by our cognition. We're limited by the rate of speech. You're not limited by those things when you're working with a swarm of agents. Now, let me caveat this by saying if I'd heard myself talk, like this nine months ago. I would probably use the label AI psychosis. I think it would be fitting because nine months ago when people were talking like this, they weren't shipping. And I think that's the ultimate difference, that there were people who saw this early. I was not actually that early. As we've talked about, I was rather skeptical and I was using AI in certain ways, but I was not the first person who downloaded Claude Code. I think Boris released that in the end of February.

50:32David Heinemeier HanssonI don't think I installed Claude Cote until September. So it was about six months there where pioneers saw these glimmers of what the future was going to look like. It wasn't there yet because the intelligence wasn't there. The harnesses weren't there, but they could see the glimmers. I couldn't. Toby, Toby Lutke, the CEO of Shopify and now my partner in crime on this Umachi project in part. He's gotten killed with Umachi as well. He saw these things very early.

51:02David Heinemeier Hanssontried to tell me and I Wasn't seeing it. I was not seeing what he was seeing. You were a hater. Yes, I was I was still on earth. Okay, and he was he had already boarded the rocket and was heading towards space. I remember actually reading his Memo to the company the AI memo and thinking seems a lot much like you're making a big deal out of something that I cannot yet Feel is a tangible thing because where's the output of this? I try using it. It writes code. I don't like it wants to interrupt me all the time. Where are you getting this from? So I get it. I totally get it if you not seeing What the current quality of intelligence can produce Of course you're gonna look at someone and go like they sounded a little nutty because all your experience up until this point would tell you that they are nutty

51:59David Heinemeier HanssonBecause if you look at the history of computer programming, for the last 40, 50 years, people have been promising that regular people could write code. Just by talking, we're gonna have fourth generation languages. Lisp was once upon a time, small talk was presented as these environments that would let regular people write their own applications. And none of it came true in the sense beyond like Microsoft Access databases or Excel spreadsheets. Those are end-user programming environments, but it's nothing like what we're able to do now. Then, I mean, I'm not even talking about end-user. I'm talking as me, someone who's been programming for 25 years, seeing the output and the acceleration and the quality and then shipping it. I think that's what's going to change the entire conversation quite quickly. The few laggards who

52:52David Heinemeier Hanssonare still on defense about whether this is actually useful, who are still trapped in a meme from early 25 about mechanical parrots, they're simply going to be overwhelmed by the evidence that's about to flood over them. So I hope to see projects like Omachi, several of them that really show agent first. It's coming. It's all of it is coming. In the spaces...

53:19David Heinemeier Hanssonin the silly spaces that I already mentioned, like video editing, all these kinds of apps that rely, like Taipura, this kind of stuff. It's going to come. And I've already seen the early inklings of this. One of the really neat features about Umachi is that it has a far more robust plugin system that allows you to extend your operating system and rewrite it really in terms of its user interface and its panel and its features.

53:48David Heinemeier Hanssonby creating your own plugins that can be cloned off of tools with ship in the box. For example, say you want a different calendar. Umachi ships with a calendar. You click the little clock, it pops up a calendar, and it doesn't have iCal support, for example. It doesn't consume your appointments. There's about 17 implementations of that already. And in three days, we had 330 plugins on the Umachi plugin.

54:17David Heinemeier Hanssonmarketplace. I have never seen growth like that with any project I've ever been involved in. I've never seen participation that broadly. I've never seen that many people be able to create software that's meaningful for them, also be usable for others so quickly. All of it is driven by the fact that Omachi ships a set of skills that tells any agent you bring to it how to create extensions To the operating system and therefore affording you the vision of the true malleable I was about to say a genetic I hate that word and the reason the part I hate that word is first of all is become marketing and slob speak at this point like it's just slapped on to everything I Wish it we had a different word that just meant AI doing stuff vibe coding feels wrong, too It does because vibe coding to me smells exactly like script

55:14David Heinemeier Hanssonkitties did in the early 2000s. People applying PHP scripts, they just downloaded it offline, they don't understand anything of. And while, I mean, that's true in the sense that much of the vibe coding, including my own vibe coded projects. And as I just mentioned, I have several. I've written things in C++. I've written things in Rust. Rust. I hate Rust.

55:37David Heinemeier HanssonPassion rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to wait, why do why do you hear rust? It is in my opinion the ugliest programming language has been invented in probably the last 40 years. So it's the opposite of rails. It's the opposite. But you've written it. I've written applications and rust because the output of rust is actually amazing.

55:59David Heinemeier Hanssonthe memory safety, the fact it's the system language, the fact it's highly efficient and so forth is incredible. So Rust, to me, can both be the most repugnant programming language ever devised for human consumption and a wonderful platform for agentic engineering. These two truths can coexist easily in my head. Do you think that there can be a point at which we can just call agentic engineering programming?

56:29David Heinemeier HanssonCan we just change what programming means? Because who's actually going to be programming the old-schooled way in a few months? I don't think we should reuse the term. Because for me, programming implies an understanding of certain primitives, loops, conditions, variables. All the constructs of programming languages are what constitutes programming itself, not the creation of programs. Because you could say in the pre-agentic era, Well, your CEO is programming. He's hiring a bunch of programmers. Is he telling them what to do and outcome software that he can sell? I don't think most people would call that CEO a programmer. And I don't think we should call the vibe coder a programmer either. And vibe coding, if we define it here, is you tell an agent to build software for you. You do not look at the implementation. That to me is what separates vibe coding from...

57:23Lex FridmanProgramming or let's say agent accelerated development, but don't you think sort of push back a little bit? Don't you think a programmer old-school programmer you doing agentic engineering is a different kind of agentic engineering than a non programmer doing agentic engineering what I mean is if you know What a for loop is if you know what function programming is if you know some of the basic good principles of software engineering The way you do natural language based Agenta engineering will be different and more systematic and this the the the scale and the variety of things you can actually build this Much bigger than a vibe coder. I'm just gonna extend the pro case here a little bit just for the sake of the argument I actually think for a while it was to my

58:12David Heinemeier Hanssondeficit to know as much as I know about programming because I was instructing the agents to do things as I prescribed them to do. And they were very good at that. And in the first agentic moment, let's not call it an era. It was something that lasted three months. Moment. In the first agentic moment, that felt very productive.

58:36David Heinemeier HanssonI could get more productivity out of telling the agents what to do in the way I would have done it. And I used all of my experience as a programmer to do just that. Then I was a little late on the next moment. And the next moment allowed me, allowed anyone to describe outcomes, to describe problems to the agents and get better solutions.

59:03Lex Fridmanthen if you had a programmer prescribe the path. See, okay, so we're having fun arguing here. Are you suggesting that there's problems for which programmers are worse than non-programmers at AT&T? 100%. And the reason I say that, let's define it here. The reason I say that is there's a lot of programmers who are not very good product managers. Software is product management. What should it do?

59:32David Heinemeier HanssonWho should it do it for? How should it do it? How should it look? What's our priorities? What do we start with first? What does version one include? All of those skills are not easily or equally distributed across all programmers. In the agentic era, where you are letting agent and AI do the implementation, these are the skills you need. I happen to sit in both camps, and this is why I love this moment.

59:59David Heinemeier HanssonI still get to live a little bit in the old world where I look at the full implementation, because there are domains and areas where I feel that still brings value. And then I also live in the future. And as I said, when I created on my right, I've not looked at a single line of that C++.

1:00:17David Heinemeier HanssonI actually made it a point to myself that I was going to treat it as an experiment. This is 100% a black box. I will treat it as though I was any other user who had opinions about how their digital typewriter should work. And therefore felt like it was a fair experiment as if a writer of any other sort.

1:00:37David Heinemeier Hanssonwho had opinions about how software should be done and how it should work. As you mentioned, video editors who know exactly where they don't like what Adobe Premiere is doing and how it could be better, but don't have the capacities to improve it. How that could be. The pushback though, I think what programmers do well, good programmers do well, is systematic design, like thinking in terms of systems and rigor. And I think still and probably for a long time to come,

1:01:05Lex Fridmaneven natural language-based control of agentic systems will require a certain kind of rigor, not overly structured rigor, but really explain very specifically the goals of the system, how to do the verification, what kind of security testing you want to do, all those kinds of things. Although then to push back on that, the system should be smart.

1:01:29David Heinemeier HanssonI would have said the same thing six months ago. Yeah. And I think the same thing would have been true six months ago. What I have found since, especially even just the last few weeks of the agentically accelerated development of Machi, is that more often than not, I have the humility to recognize that the agent knows best. You can legitimately say make sure it's secure. Correct. And it would know more about what that entails. Now...

1:01:59David Heinemeier HanssonYou're laughing, but it's true. And in fact, a good parallel to this is the agents MD slash Claude MD files. There was a hot moment where it was all the rage about micro optimizing that. Oh, you tell your agent this, you tell your agent that. And you ended up with this huge file of instructions for your agent. One of the things that Boris working on.

1:02:23David Heinemeier HanssonClaude Code shared in an interview recently about opus 5 was that the system prompt that they shipped for opus 5 and presumably also fable shrunk by 80% because the agent not only needed far less human instruction it was actually being damaged by overly prescriptive humans and any programmer who's had a pointy haired boss knows exactly what that is like when the boss walks into the room

1:02:53Lex FridmanDoesn't know anything starts telling you how to program how to code What do you do? You sulk you write shittier code if you're mandated to do things that are against your better judgment Yeah, why would an agent not be the same actually to push back against myself? I do find the actual skill. I'm currently developing which I Along those lines is probably what everybody's trying to develop is not to over specify things just to get out of the systems way just to specify enough to

1:03:23David Heinemeier HanssonProvide a kind of high-level vision and guidance. It's even better because you don't even need that the fundamental insight of modern software development came from the agile software development movement in the late 90s early 2000s a group of Smart honest and brave people came together and said the way we've been trying to do software development for the last 40 to 50 years Have not worked will not work. We've been trying to specify upfront what software should look like. We thought that we could ask humans what they wanted, write it all down, apply our systems thinking and our rigor to a spec sheet. Hand that spec sheet over to a group of programmers who would then implement just that and everyone would be happy. Well, guess what? No one was happy because no one knows what they want until they receive it. You don't know what a program should do until you play with it.

1:04:18David Heinemeier HanssonIn the agenda gauge, you should resist the temptation to be overly specific up front. Be as vague as you can to manifest something, then interact with the something. The way you arrive at good software is you write a little bit of software and then you try to use it. It is in the process of using software that you discover what you really want. It's where you discover what's important and what's not important. And agents are incredible at allowing you to

1:04:47Lex FridmanBumble into this experience of realizing what you want because you don't know what you want. And I've actually done something similar to what you suggested which is implement different designs and totally different implementations and then I create HTML pages for myself, PHP pages where I vote on what I like more and so on and does this iterative thing and it's very nice and fun. The interaction with the the agentic system, if you create a nice interface for yourself, it can be super fun.

1:05:14David Heinemeier HanssonAnd you're focusing on the design part and the most fun parts of the design part. Correct. And this is what humans are really good at. Yeah, taste. Differential evaluation. You give me three options, I pick one of them. Now, humans actually fall off a cliff if you give them 22 options. That's the paradox of choice. But you give them three options, they very quickly within a split second will tell you what they like. There are all these ways that exploit the fact that humans will make these snap judgments that are actually pre-intellectual, right? Like, they're coming from the gut, and then they arrive up in the brain, and the brain tries to rationalize why the gut said what it said. And if you're willing to let go of some of that intellectual pre-processing rationalization, simply let your gut drive.

1:06:04Lex Fridmanthe agentigate is a revelation. So this is a fascinating thing to ask you because you have sort of famously for a long time talked about like detailed chiseling of beautiful rails Ruby code. And now you have switched in a matter of months.

1:06:23Lex Fridmanto not doing that. So what is your current setup look like? Because I assume you're still looking for the beauty, for the chiseling, for the crafting, but you're just crafting in a different medium. And at different levels of abstraction. When I'm working in Ruby code, and we have a lot of Ruby code because it's in our entire business, and I'm asking agents to make changes to that code, I still sweat the details. What I'm coming to realize is that the economic...

1:06:54David Heinemeier Hanssonpayoff of that sweat is diminishing rapidly. The reason why I for 25 years was sweating every line of code so judiciously was because I knew the payoff of keeping an architecture coherent and malleable was software that could change and evolve quickly with a small team and not exorbitant cost and not introducing a bunch of bugs when you change one thing over the other. That was the driving economic argument for why you should write beautiful code. Because beautiful code is easier to understand. It is simpler. It is more malleable. That was premised on humans doing the modifications. I think it is an open question. To which degree this still matters. Now, it does matter. And the reason I say that

1:07:49David Heinemeier Hanssonat least for the moment, is the tokens are still scarce. At this moment in time, we are all token limited. Well, not all, but anyone who doesn't have endless budgets are token limited. So therefore, there is great payoff to writing systems that agents have an easier time dealing with and evolving without having to relearn the entire context, just like humans, if they can make iterations and changes to the code base without wrecking the architecture, they can make the next change just as cheap as the last one. And this is the classic ball of mud where you end up with a system that's a ball of mud because it's just put together in a way where nothing is connected and it's just a real mess, right? I've seen that with agents.

1:08:39David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I've seen it in our own code bases where, again, the first PR is like mediocre of quality. And then if you add another PR on top of that and then five more down the line, it's not very good, right? So there's still payoff to that. But that payoff is premised on our current moment. I am now able to, and this is, by the way, where the AI psychosis really comes in when you try to extrapolate what nine months from now is going to look like, when two years from now is going to look like. But as an intellectual experiment, I think The first computer I used was a Commodore 64. Me too. Cool. It had 1 MHz CPU and 64K of memory. Everyone who wrote software for that machine internalized certain constraints. Well, all the constraints. That machine was nothing but constraints. If you put that programmer in a time machine and teleported them or her to 2026 and gave them a modern computer today and said, now write me a piece of software,

1:09:38David Heinemeier Hanssonthey'd be lost for a little bit because all their techniques and all their heuristics would simply be wrong. Or not wrong because efficient software is still beautiful. They would be out of date with the value that they could create. The amount of optimization you have to apply for a 1MHz computer to produce video game is just very different from what you have to apply today. Just imagine that guy that was programming back then. Remember all those...

1:10:05David Heinemeier HanssonLike what programming felt like and what it meant, highly constrained resources, how slow everything is. Beautiful in many ways. Beautiful. It's chiseling. But imagine that person coming now. It's romantic too though. Let's also imagine that. This is one of the things whenever we bemoan modern car culture, for example, right? And then we think like, oh, wasn't it better when we all had the horse drawn carriages and so on? No, it wasn't. Do you know what New York smelled like?

1:10:33Lex Fridmanwhen we used horses for transportation. Yeah. It was an open sewer. They just shat everywhere. Yeah, but have you played Red Dead Redemption? You know how cool those cowboys were on the horse? That is the way to experience the nostalgic past when you don't get the olfactory impulses and senses. So basically, programming, old school programming by hand is kind of like the cowboy culture the romanticize make movies about. It's already happening. The romanticization of handwritten code. And I have some of it.

1:11:03David Heinemeier Hanssonbecause it was a very romantic era. I'm grateful to have been alive for 20 years of economically valuable handwritten code. That was a good time. Where handwritten beautiful code was also valuable. Correct. Because handwritten beautiful code exists as much today as it is yesterday. There are people who willfully write new video games for the Commodore 64.

1:11:32David Heinemeier Hanssonor for the second Mega Drive, or for other vintage consoles. In fact, one of my favorite video games of late is Mod Retros, you know, Palma Lucky's side-geschäft, which is recreating old consoles. So he's recreated the Game Boy. It's amazing. Look it up. It's really cool. But what's even cooler than the fact that he recreated this hardware and the original chunkiness, but brought it up today with Sort of modern screens and so on. Now they just put out the Nintendo 64 2 Incredible super cool Wild attention to detail input lag and all the other things but what's also very cool That one I have the wave that one right there and hover over it because then you get to see what I'm talking about That is the chromatic Tetris re-implementation. I played a lot of Tetris on the original Game Boy probably one of my top three favorite games of all time. Yeah and

1:12:32David Heinemeier HanssonThey rewrote it with one change if you hit up the brick slams. And that speeds up the game by about 400%. It is an incredible game and it's a new Game Boy game. I think the Game Boy came out in 89 or 88. It's a very old machine. The fact that there's still people writing new old games.

1:12:57David Heinemeier Hanssonis awesome and the reason they do it in part now here they're doing because they want tetris but there are people who do it just for the love of the constraints for the love of the romantic notion of rhyming that just like there are people still riding around on horses not to get places fast but because they like the mode of transportation where it's a literal biological being below you propelling you forward and also should say that that beautiful code is a great training data So in some sense, the beauty that we've built over a few decades continues. We gave birth to this moment. What a privilege. And I feel that very personally because almost all of the code I've ever written is public code. The vast majority of my career has been dedicated to writing open source code. And therefore, some of that code, some of those beautiful lines are in the training set. And in fact, I've

1:13:55David Heinemeier Hanssonhurt people do this when they write Ruby code. They ask the agent, write it like DHH would. And they're pleased with the result. And that does warm our heart a little bit that I helped give birth to this moment in my tiny little small part and anyone else who contributed open source code or any code at all that the agents have access to over the last, well, entire time programming has been around as a discipline is now part of these new age and overlords. So you, you don't have a little bit of sadness. The writing beautiful code by hand is now less and less useful. Am I sad that if I had to get a job tomorrow, it's unlikely that I could apply my skills in such a way that I would be paid to write these manual lines of code. No. I did it for 25 years. Like I want to see something new here.

1:14:46David Heinemeier HanssonEspecially if we're all going to live forever, which I hope we don't. Maybe we get to that. But like, I've done that. That's enough. That's fine. I don't feel any more nostalgic about that than I do about the fact that I don't have to spend my time in the field with a hoe or at the assembly line. Well, hold on a second. You are one of the best programmers in the world at writing Handcraft, a beautiful code, appreciators of beauty with great taste. Correct. That has been replaced. I say humbly. Yeah.

1:15:15Lex FridmanThat has been replaced. Like you have now, you're just fast evolving and you're able to, one of your really great qualities is you're able to change your mind and evolve very quickly. But like, you had to kill that other person. I am grateful for every moment that brought me to where I am right now. And therefore, I have all so tried. And maybe this did take some practice. I will concede that. Maybe I wasn't always like this, but...

1:15:44David Heinemeier HanssonStoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate is an incredibly liberating way to live. And you could attack that and say, well, that's a point of privilege. True. But also I had the same directional point when I didn't have all this quote unquote privilege. So I think there's a way to live and interact with the world.

1:16:09Lex Fridmanwhere you accept the things you can change and the things you cannot change and fall in love with all of it. Fall in love with the fact that the world today has jumped two decades forward in the technology industry from where it was last year. So can we talk about the general anxiety that programmers feel going through the same transformation that may be gone to university major in computer science?

1:16:38Lex Fridmandreamed of being programmers and building stuff, high salary, and now everything's changing and there's deep anxiety about what do I do with my life. Can you empathize with that and what the hell are they supposed to do? Hugely. Because just because I have this disposition, I'm keenly aware that that's not evenly distributed, that not everyone sits with this position and this optimism for the future. But I do think I want to separate things a little bit.

1:17:08David Heinemeier HanssonI think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if the only thing you loved about programming was the mechanical bits of putting the right logical constructs together to produce something other people told you to produce. Because that mechanical process is under threat. If you are, as you just mentioned, excited about building things, I don't think you're on the thread at all. In fact, I think there's a great argument for us needing far more builders than what we have now. And if you look at the employment stats, it's fuzzy. It's not clear what's going to happen at all. Some stats actually show an increase in openings because the advent of AI is so dramatically lowering the price.

1:18:04David Heinemeier Hanssonof programs that people want a lot more programs. This is the classic, the Jevons paradox that says when the price of something goes down, there's going to be more demand for it. And this is the sample of the ATMs too. When the ATM originally came, a lot of bank tellers were very afraid for their job because suddenly there was a machine that could dispense money from people's account. Well, what the ATMs did was lower the price of a branch.

1:18:32David Heinemeier HanssonAnd suddenly banks could afford to open a lot more branches, and we ended up with more bank tellings than we did before. Now, none of this is guaranteed. There are also moments where things do change. The vast majority of people worked in the fields up until the late 1800s. And then suddenly we got mechanized Harvardistic tools, and we did not need human labor with a hoe and an ox out there. We had mechanical tools to do that for us.

1:19:00David Heinemeier HanssonIn that moment, are the people who were threatened that their job and their livelihood was at stake? Yes. Was that a reasonable thing to feel threatened about? Yes. The ludites, smashing the weaving machines in England had the same thing. I think maybe that's the better parallel than people working the fields, because they were actually highly skilled professionals doing a job that they liked on rather favorable conditions, not slamming outside in the sun all day.

1:19:29David Heinemeier HanssonWhere we live now, would we still like for clothing to be this heavily constrained resource? Like, what if this t-shirt was $400? I mean, okay, then I'd have two. My wardrobe probably looks like I have two. But I think the general progress of mankind depends on productivity increase.

1:19:54David Heinemeier HanssonImprovements and what are productivity improvements? This is very important because in the abstract I think everyone says yay productivity. That's good What do you think this was all just vibes? No productivity means fewer people to do the same number or the same job now The amount of job you want done may increase and therefore you get more people But it also may not there may be pockets where A company just needs a certain set of fixed tasks done, and suddenly they can do them with a tenth the number of people. This, by the way, is tragic and difficult in a moment for the individual being laid off. It's also amazing for the economy at large. Suddenly you've freed up these resources who can now go do more productive things. This is how the whole economy evolves and improves and how we get growth. And growth is good. I think this is the other thing to make a strong

1:20:50David Heinemeier HanssonDefense for that growth in general is a good thing. We do not want to wind the clock back to 1920 or 1950 we should be excited about the fact that we've discovered new technology that allows us to do vastly more and While some of the tasks that may be taken over by AI were tasks that humans were excited to do and they're just no longer economically viable a lot of the tasks were just drudgery This is certainly true of my programming. There were all moments of programming I thought were amazing. These were the moments that produced that state of flow we talked about last time. And they were ecstatic. How often did they happen out of the course of a year? If you took your average programmer, how much time out of 2,000 hours at the job did that person spend in a flow state? 100? 200?

1:21:50David Heinemeier Hansson25? I think all those answers could be plausible for someone. And taking that drudgery, handing it over to machines, that is the history of civilization. Yeah, I mean, the hours spent debugging. So the programming has so many painful hours in it, and now they're gone. I mean, for the most part, it's just fun. A lot of it is gone in a lot of domains, and the rest of it may be gone very soon.

1:22:21David Heinemeier HanssonSo that's where some of the Romanticism also comes in because pain in the moment is difficult, it's hard, it's annoying. Pain in the review mirror is accomplishment, proud, learning, steps forward, all the things, right? So we encompass all of this as part of the human experience that we hate pain in the moment.

1:22:45Lex Fridmanbut we cherish it when it's five minutes past and we don't remember the hardship, we just remember the progress. So certainly at the societal level, the macroeconomic level growth is exciting, but the individual level is going to be a lot of anxiety, potentially a lot of suffering. So by way of advice, if you're like a young DHH or a young developer programmer now, what would you advise they do? Don't try to anticipate.

1:23:13David Heinemeier Hanssonanything. You will literally go crazy because even the smartest brains in the business cannot anticipate what two model hops from here is going to look like. It's an absolute waste of time and you will develop an AI psychosis trying to deduce what two years from now is going to look like. Focus on right now and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers. You can make them do the most amazing things if you lean in.

1:23:43David Heinemeier Hanssonif you maybe for a hot moment force yourself to learn where the state of the art is. I double dog dare you not to get excited about what's possible. And would you recommend building publicly? I think it's optional actually to build publicly. I think it's nice to do because then you get to be part of a community and there's some camaraderie in open source, not some camaraderie. There's an enormous amount of camaraderie.

1:24:13David Heinemeier Hanssonopen source is an incredible source of community and camaraderie. And it's also a great way to stem some of that personal existential dread. If you're amongst other humans, you can get infected with good forms of mind viruses, exciting forms of mind viruses, the ones that tell you that it's all going to be okay. And the future looks bright.

1:24:38David Heinemeier HanssonWe build a bunch of things together. We can do things none of us ever dreamed we could do. I was just talking to Ryan Hughes, who's been my main partner on Umachi almost since day one. And we were literally talking about yesterday how when we started on this journey together, our ambitions were very modest. We're just like, can we get this distro to not crash at 3 a.m. because of an arch package that just got pushed out outside of our control? That would be amazing. Then it'd be great.

1:25:08David Heinemeier HanssonNow we're leaning back and thinking, how can we take over the world? How can we make Umachi go to Mars? How can we do everything we've ever dreamed of? And that level of ambition inflation is partly because things have gotten better with agents, but hugely also because we've surrounded ourselves with others excited about the same journey. And if you're just sitting, in your little isolated cave worrying about the future, yeah, you're going to go, you're going to go a little nuts. I think if we learned anything during COVID is that people will go nuts sitting in their little cave inside by themselves worrying about what's going to happen. That is indistinguishable from depression, ruminating endlessly about things you can't control.

1:26:02David Heinemeier HanssonI'm sorry to channel some yin and wang here, but that's just looser talk. You don't have to be a loser. You can choose to lean in and win. And win is very broadly defined as learning more, making more, contributing more, being part of more. And at the end of the day, what are your choices? You don't have a choice, mate. The future's coming whether you like it or not.

1:26:32Lex FridmanSo you might as well choose to be excited about it. But I mean, we should emphasize the fact that planning is nearly impossible with AI. I mean, most of us plan our life a little bit. When we're younger, you have like hopes and dreams. There's a reason you go to college. There's a plan underlying that. I agree with that. I don't concede that. It is kind of nuts that's impossible to really plan because like you really don't know...

1:26:59Lex Fridmanif there will even be a cloud coded codex and cursor six months from now maybe it'll be you'll be talking to what's that maybe it'll be all open cloud type maybe you'll just all be voice maybe a module take over the world and they'll be voice maybe they won't be operating systems anymore you'll just they'll be this glowing orb that just you just talk to because if natural language is enough to accomplish all tasks in life like what is life about Like what are the major tasks you need to accomplish in life? If you can just do that with voice and it writes all the programs for you and all the system ties and What what are the jobs needed then? Maybe it's more about the service industry. Maybe there won't be programmers like agentic engineers at all. And so Yes, your advice is wise to focus on the moment But it doesn't mean that it's just a crazy roller coaster ride because we don't know what this December what this January will look like

1:27:56David Heinemeier HanssonWe don't know. And therefore, we should choose to have faith that is going to pan out. That is my best advice towards fighting anxiety is that you have a choice to a large degree of how to lean. Do you want to lean into PDOOM? PDOOM is going to happen whether you lean into it or not. You don't have control. But there's also actual...

1:28:25Lex Fridmandaily schedule of how much learning you're doing, how much building you're doing, how much diversification you're doing. And for example, I traveled across rural China recently, and I did it quite deliberately. Because you're talking to people in China, in rural anywhere, where time moves much slower, where there's no discussions about agentic engineering.

1:28:50Lex FridmanAnd I started by going on the Great Wall of China that's timeless, that spans centuries. And you know, there was like this kind of tension of FOMO, like maybe I'm missing out on something. But then I very deliberately wanted to find the timelessness of human existence, really plug into the fact that, okay, it always feels like everything's changing throughout human history, but you know, the universals are still true.

1:29:19David Heinemeier HanssonOf what matters in life and they just want to make sure keep connected to that. You're not gonna miss anything. This is the part that actually grinded my gears in the early phases of this transition Everyone was so up in arms that if you didn't it's loops now. Oh, no, no, we're done with loops It's graphs now. Oh, no, no, we're done with that. It's harnesses this right there constantly churning through the frontier which in one way is actually very exciting This is what happens when a new field opens up. It's like a new portal and it's all spilling out. That's exciting. But it also means that if I had just been backpacking for the last year, hadn't touched a computer, hadn't witnessed this egentic moment, and I just showed up yesterday. Do you know what? I would have been caught up in two weeks. There's not any accumulation, which is in some ways a great relief.

1:30:14David Heinemeier HanssonIf you missed the past year, you can catch up to the frontier in two weeks. If you're a programmer who was out hiking the Himalayas for a year and you come back, you can catch up in two weeks. And this is actually a great credit to the progress we're experiencing. We have so many experiments running simultaneously right now that are constantly and ruthlessly sorting what works, what doesn't work. You don't have to...

1:30:41Lex Fridmanremember even be part of that entire journey. You can just show up for the results. But the key step there when you come back for the backpacking journey is to be willing to become a totally new different human because things are changing so fast.

1:30:57David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, literally, if you left for the backpacking journey in October last year and came back in April or May, you might as well have been in the cryo chamber for a hundred years. It's like, what do you mean? We're not programming anymore? It's a huge transformation. It's startling. I'm putting some of this on slightly for effect. I also recognize that it's okay to grief for a hot moment. That's not my disposition. It's not how I do it.

1:31:26Lex FridmanI accept that that's a time-tested mechanism for coping with a sense of loss. And it's okay to have a sense of loss that the world that you knew and maybe you were very fond of is no longer the same. I maybe I should say out loud and explicitly that I do have that the Native American with a tear rolling down my leg. There's a sadness. It's a goodbye. It's a goodbye to the old world of programming.

1:31:55David Heinemeier HanssonIt's so fascinating to me. I've spent so many years. But it all amounted to this moment. That is, to me, what makes the entire journey so meaningful. AI did not arrive from the sky. It was not alien technology that had blasted through the universe and suddenly showed up on our shores. AI has been around for as long as computer science has been around. In the 50s, they thought the problem was going to be cracked in about a decade. The smartest people at the time. It took a little longer.

1:32:25David Heinemeier HanssonBut the reason it took a little longer was in part because we took some blind turns on the road to AI and neural networks and thought that there were other symbolic presentations that we're going to carry the day. And they didn't. And that probably set us back about 15 years. Some of it was also we had to go through the gaming revolution.

1:32:47David Heinemeier Hansson3D games. If we had not had Quake, if we had not had Duke Nukem, if we had not had Unreal Tournament, we'd never have gotten AI because we'd never gotten the GPUs and therefore we would never have been able to get AI in the shape it is now. So everything we did up until this moment was required to get there. You were part of that. Holy, what a blessing. What a blessing to have contributed in your small part either by training or by playing video games.

1:33:16Lex FridmanLiterally, you could just choose to think of it that way. All those times you spend in, for my case, in the 90s, just playing video games. You were contributing. Yeah, we're contributing to the AI revolution right there in that moment. To the progress of human civilization. No, for sure. Civilization progresses with the death of the old and the birth of the new, and it continues in this way. But it's still the grieving process as a part of it, I think. Take a moment. It's okay. And also, you don't even have to accept that it's all dead.

1:33:46David Heinemeier HanssonIf you are still very attached to the hand-chiseling, which if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that I would have been more attached. I'm surprised that I've not been more attached. But the reason I've not been more attached, I think, is that I found something more fun. And if it hadn't been like that, if AI had just

1:34:12Lex FridmanReplace the thing I loved and gave me something. I hate it. I'd probably be a little better I mean this really feels as hilarious and awesome to watch and inspiring to watch. It's like Picasso all of a sudden like getting access to To image generation and getting super excited and switching in a matter of a month That's literally what happened. So like it's an artist that appreciate a beautiful code and all of a sudden you're talking about Having fun. I think Picasso is actually a good parallel because if you look at his early

1:34:42David Heinemeier Hanssonwork where he learned his craft. It was painting realistic paintings, right? Like he was training to be a master of the old ways of depicting reality the best way we knew how. And then along comes all these other forms of expression. Cubism comes along. And all these forms of expression, he's not the crying that he's not.

1:35:08David Heinemeier HanssonDoing Renaissance paintings anymore that he's not just painting the perfect depiction of an apple He's imagining the apple to be a freaking square and he's getting excited about that and I feel that transition that we've gone from this one mode of expression and we've suddenly opened the gates were Like the color spectrum is so much wider. I'm seeing more and it's Perhaps because the way I became a programmer I did not become a programmer because a deep love of if statements I became a programmer because I wanted programs I wanted things to exist that did not exist and at first I had to learn how program to make that happen Then I happened to fall in love with programming as a craft and then I spent two decades Really diving deep on that but now I'm back. I'm back to

1:36:07David Heinemeier Hanssonhaving an idea and being impatient beyond belief to see it exist in the world and AI has just shrunk that down to almost nothing. So it's an acceleration of a rediscovery. Now, I understand that that's not true for everyone. There are plenty of programmers who just loved programming right from the beginning and they were attracted to the logical constructs and so forth. I mean, I've been there for two decades, so I get it.

1:36:37David Heinemeier HanssonBut I also think that you're able to discover new sides of yourself if you let it in. Again, I keep coming back to this almost regret minimization framework to borrow Jeff Bezos' terms here. Are you going to look at yourself two years from now and think, oh, I spent my time well being pissy about the present, about the fact that my industry changed? Or...

1:37:04David Heinemeier HanssonWould I two years from now look back upon this moment and be proud of myself? For leaning in for maybe having a moment of Greece again There's room for all of it and then going I'm gonna learn how the world spins now, and I'm gonna make not just the best of it I'm gonna make more of it. I mean it is true a lot of programmers a lot of friends of mine Me obviously you are having fun. I have had more fun with computers in the last three months than at any time previously. Quick bathroom break. And then I got to ask you about how you actually interact with systems. Yes. I got to ask you about how is your setup, programming setup changed? So keyboard voice, what's the IDE?

1:37:58David Heinemeier HanssonIt's crazy to think about now, but yeah, I use TextMate for almost 20 years. I use TextMate starting in 2005, I think I helped get the first version out. And then I just wasn't interested. I wasn't in the market for an alternative. And it wasn't until the switch to Linux that I was forced out of my habitat. And now with the switch to...

1:38:24David Heinemeier HanssonWhat are we calling it a gentic engineering fucking hate that term we got to come up with something that sounds as plain as Programming but encapsulates the fact that it's with agents, but I still think it should be called program all right Let's just call it programming. Yeah the programming with agents requires a different tool set it really does and the main change here is that You're going from single-thread programming in your head to parallel processing When I was writing code chiseling it by hand in textmate or even neo Vim Not that long ago I would just focus on one problem at the time and I would methodically work my way through it and that was actually the portal to flow the portal to flow was deep Immersion into a single problem see it through to the end That's not how it works with agents in part because the agents are at once

1:39:21David Heinemeier Hanssonboth too fast and too slow. They don't give you an immediate reply on something that you ask them to do that's the same as typing on a keyboard. So you have to let the agent cook for a bit. And therefore, you realize, well, if I just sit around waiting for them, first of all, that doesn't feel productive. Even if the agent, just one of them can be highly productive. It does not feel productive. It doesn't feel good. It feels actually like you're a little bit useless.

1:39:51David Heinemeier HanssonAnd maybe I had a moment when the first agentic moment was there and I was running mostly one agent at a time where I felt like, I don't know about this. But you can solve a lot of hard problems by generally throwing more resources at it. This is the whole scaling law of AI of itself, right? That if you paralyze these things and you're not running one agent but you're running a handful, you can feel like you're in a flow state.

1:40:20David Heinemeier Hanssonbecause you're constantly doing programming work in the sense that you're making decisions and you're helping either unblock an agent because it has a question about which direction to take or you're ready for a new task. And to do that, you need a different setup. I started first doing it in Tmux and just having separate panes and having separate splits, basically a...

1:40:43David Heinemeier Hanssonterminal with tabs is a good way to think about you open a bunch of tabs. I think most humans know exactly how that works. They don't work in just one tab. So still sticking to the terminal CLI. Absolutely. So you're not using cloud code app or the codex app or the. I love the fact that this agent revolution was kicked off in the terminal because I was already a huge fan of two ease terminal user interfaces and the terminal in general that feels like a a really nice place to be. It's a beautiful place to be. The modern terminal is just a good looking place to work. So I like that. And then this fact of having multiple agents, especially once it's not just multiple agents running on your own machine, but you start running multiple machines. Now, Tmux alone is not enough to keep track of it. And that's why...

1:41:37David Heinemeier Hanssonas of late, I've switched to this thing called Herter. And Herter is essentially Tmux plus agent notifications. So whenever your agent is done and needs something for you, goes ding, a little bell telling you it's ready for its human... Is it master or servant? I'm not quite sure always. But it is ready for a decision. And it also...

1:42:02David Heinemeier Hanssonkeeps track of these as it is working more or not. So I have this hurdle setup. I have multiple hurdle setups actually running on individual machines. I went on this crazy phase just about a month ago, realizing that doing this work on a single machine is not fast enough. It's like I've discovered multi-core programming, but I only have two cores. I'm like, what if I had 16 cores? What if I had 32 cores? What if I had 64 cores? So I instantly went out and I bought these amazing KVMs called gli.net comets and what they do is it's this little box you plug in htmi you plug in USB and connected to the computer It's like a KVM so KVM is a remote way of controlling computer But what's special about this is just how easy it was you connect this thing in you go to a web page Log in one set one password now this thing can hop on your tail net

1:43:00David Heinemeier HanssonThis has been the other revolution of the last year for me, is discovering these wire guard networks. Tail scale is essentially turning all the computers you have into a local network wherever you are. Like right now on my phone, I have direct access to all the computers in my Malibu office. I also have access to all my computers in my Copenhagen office. And I can treat them as though I sat right next to them.

1:43:29David Heinemeier Hanssonwithout having to punch holes in a firewall or set up complicated VPNs and what this does is it just Decreases the friction it takes to get new compute online. So As soon as I discovered this I looked at my closet and I realized I had a bunch of mini PCs from prior experiments I just said what if it just connected all of them? Oh, wow, and I just connected four of the computers in a closet. They all had their little comet and suddenly I could run agents on more computers at the same time. And I could control them all with Herder. And it did get to a point where I maxed out my own processing power that I think at about, what do we want to put it? About four to five machines running, I don't know, three agents. I have about 16 threads. That's what I can run. And the faster the agents run, of course, the fewer threads I can run. But at the current pace, I can run about 16 threads at full acceleration.

1:44:30David Heinemeier HanssonAnd that's part of why I've gone from just being excited about the agent moment to being delirious. Because I think as you say, some of it is a little assaulting. Again, we're on a dial-up bandwidth-wise with our computer. I mean, it's actually hilarious. So you think of, I'm sitting here a year ago, right? I'm chiseling my code. I'm writing my lines. And over the course of like an hour.

1:44:58David Heinemeier HanssonI will have written one beautiful controller, one beautiful model. Like that's one file. And I've really worked on it, right? So maybe there's 60 lines left. So maybe my bandwidth at this moment is like 30 lines an hour. I think that's even high. Maybe it's 20 lights an hour. Now I'm running 16 threads. I'm producing at sometimes hundreds of lines of hour or hundreds of lines of code per hour. Now, let me pause myself there for a hot moment. I hate that metric.

1:45:28David Heinemeier HanssonRight? Like, lines of code is a stupid metric in general to measure these things. And I think it's right from some in the programming community to ridicule the AI psychosis when everyone talks about the number of lines of code they're writing. And then you ask them, what did you build? And then like, why? And then no good answer comes out, right? It's just a nice shorthand. It is a nice shorthand. It is a representation and encapsulation of how much output that's coming out. Now, whether that output is good or bad, It's not a referendum on that. But I was producing and producing so much more now, right? And therefore, I'm able to keep all these threads going. So that's the setup. It's still NeoVim, but at this point, you're not writing a lot of codes. I'm using NeoVim as a project browser and then as a way to kick off Lacy Git to see the change log for what's there. And even that, I'd say if GitHub was a little faster at showing you your pull request,

1:46:27David Heinemeier HanssonThe web is probably actually a nicer place to do that. I don't know. There's also this other tool I've been playing with a bit called HUNK, which just produces diffs in a really nice way. So you could look at that too. But I find that when I look at HUNK, I only see the change set. And when I'm reviewing output from an agent, I often want to see the surrounding context. Oh yeah, so it changed this file. But actually, what do we have in this other file that wasn't touched but maybe should have been touched? So that's why I still like NeoVim as a way of doing it.

1:46:55David Heinemeier HanssonBut it's all happening, by the way, of course, in Amachi. So it's all happening on Linux. And this was the other major breakthrough with Agents. Agents love the Unix philosophy. It loves individual tools that it can invoke through the command line. And there is no operating system on Earth of the majors. I'm counting three here. Mac, Windows, Linux. That works as well with that mechanism as Linux.

1:47:25David Heinemeier Hanssoneverything in Linux is either a config file or a CLI tool. Now, that was its main drawback five minutes ago. This was the reason people didn't like Linux. It's like it's all config files and CLI tools. What great irony that the universe has plated upon us that now the drawbacks of Linux five minutes ago are now its major selling points. This was one of the things I thought I was stuck for a weekend.

1:47:55David Heinemeier Hanssonwith a Mac four months ago. I thought I had a computer the place I was going. That was a Linux machine, so I didn't bring my laptop. And I found out when I arrived, I only had a Mac mini. So I was going to make the best of a bad situation here and set up my Mac in some of the ways I've been thinking about with Linux.

1:48:19David Heinemeier HanssonAnd you can actually do a lot now. Homebrew has gotten really quite good. Homebrew is the missing package manager for the Mac, and no one has done more to move the Mac forward in terms of ease of setup. But still something as simple as Raycast. I don't know if you've used that. There's no config file that you can just access. You have to go into the GUI, export a file, then take that file, I don't know, in your freaking backpack on a USB key.

1:48:49David Heinemeier HanssonAnd then you can import it somewhere else. You cannot automate the entire setup of your machine. You can't automate at all the configuration of Max default key bindings. That has to be a manual process where you're clicking with a mouse like a caveman to set up your machine. I mean, there's ways around it. Not good ones. I looked. I tried hard. So here's my...

1:49:13Lex Fridmanbeen my journey, obviously I'm a Linux person, but because of Adobe Premiere, Adobe products, I'm also a Windows person. So oftentimes I would use WSL, Windows Subsystems for Linux. So Linux inside Windows, which is in the agentic era is not a good kind of Linux because it's just- It's a sandbox. It's a sandbox and you want the Linux to be unleashed to be able to do everything. Correct. And so I have now woken up to things like Raycat.

1:49:39Lex FridmanI'm a keyboard person. Where's the config file? Can I basically do everything where an agent can set everything up for me and save the configuration so I can replicate across systems and everything is automated? And so I had to ask a lot of those questions and a lot of them are missing. They don't have good answers. But oftentimes you could actually just build the app yourself. But there are hacks. There are hacks. You don't have to live like this Lex. Actually this is a great moment.

1:50:09David Heinemeier HanssonUntil you have a video editor. So this is a good moment. Yep. I heard it was your birthday. Yeah. So I brought a little gift. No. We are going to get you on to the agentic operating system, whether you like it or not. This is awesome. And I asked my friends at Dell whether maybe they had a machine that I could get you for your birthday. So here's the machine I use, which is...

1:50:37David Heinemeier Hanssonthe same one I use, but it's now yours. It's a Dell XPS 14 already set up with Omachi 4 ready to be configured for you. And once you realize that all your, by the way, we should almost time this, you can be up and running. You have to answer like five questions in about one minute. You could literally do it live if you wanted to. Omachi beautiful modern opinion Linux by DHH. Yeah, let's do it. Fill it out while I talk.

1:51:07David Heinemeier HanssonExactly what you realized that pain on the Mac was the exposure I got for about a weekend. And I tried really hard and I found some decent work arounds. The main one being that Homebrew now has tabs for GUI apps because it's hilarious to think upon the recent past where people would go to websites.

1:51:29David Heinemeier HanssonLike, I need Zoom. They would enter zoom.com, find the download link, download a DMG, double-click on that, see a weird manual interaction telling them to drag an icon from one place of the screen to the other, and that was how you installed apps!

1:51:48David Heinemeier HanssonAnd you just do that over and over again until you had all the apps that you wanted. And if you were setting up a new machine and you had like 12 apps, you'd go to 12 different websites to download them like a total caveman. Homebrew has solved a lot of that, but it has not solved all of it and has solved nothing in terms of the... It's like a drop. But look how fast this is going. Oh, it's going to be done in about 40 seconds.

1:52:16David Heinemeier Hanssonand then you're going to be inside of Omachi. Super is the Windows command key on your keyboard. So which one is the super key? Yeah, that's the Windows key. Oh, actually, no, no, you have a special edition. There are only about six of these computers in the world. Oh, there's a super key. It says super and look at where the copilot key is on the other end of the keyboard. That's the Omachi logo. Nice. Okay, cool.

1:52:37David Heinemeier HanssonThis was, um, Spencer Bull, Adele, who I've been working with on a lot of this stuff. They've been incredible. They, for a moment, let go of the XPS brand. Yes, they did. Last year. And I was, I was like, this is dumb. This is XPS is awesome. It was not just dumb that it got rid of the XPS branding. They also got rid of the escape key and put in capacitive touch buttons at the top. The mistake that Apple realized like three years ago was terrible and everyone hated them for them. But now...

1:53:06David Heinemeier HanssonThey have an incredible team. And this was actually my first Dell laptop for myself. Because I've been using Dell on our servers. Dell was what powered our Cloud Exit. We've been running Dell since the mid-2000s, I think. But I never ran their laptops because compared to a MacBook, they just went up to the task for me. The XPSs from 2016 or from 2016 with those Intel Panther-like chips are the first Dells that I would personally actually use and it's funny because when I got mad at Apple Originally, I thought like you know what I should just get a Dell because we already used them and whatever and I got a Dell I was like, man, I can't do it. I can't do it. It's not it's not good enough and then low and behold this year They just fixed everything they fixed the battery life. They fixed the performance they fixed

1:54:01David Heinemeier HanssonThe compatibility, they fixed the weight, they fixed the screen. That's a tandem OLED screen. Yes, incredible. Which means it's actually better tech than what you'll get in a freaking MacBook. It's lighter than a MacBook. And the chip is finally competitive because Intel spent a good five years developing the 18A process node. It took a long time, but now it's here and it's freaking incredible. We finally have competition to Apple M-chips.

1:54:30David Heinemeier HanssonThat can go as long as on battery and can have competitive performance and there's a beautiful default theme to this thing and then What is the super space opens up? Actually, you can just push the Amachi key. It opens up the menu. So now you control everything is the same thing is super space So this has been a huge change for me that we finally have Linux machines that you don't have to make excuses for because I don't mind making excuses because Excuses are really just another word for trade-offs. I love that framework 13. I think I talked about last time I still like him. They still make good computers, but I think for a lot of people they Didn't want a DUI experience. They wanted something that just out of the box felt like it was on par and build quality and

1:55:21David Heinemeier HanssonWhatever with with max and now we finally have it so happy birthday. Thank you so much And a Machi Dell laptop from GHH is the best birthday present. This is awesome Check the screens ever by the way. Yeah, it's kind of amazing. I'm seeing it on that tandem OLED screen It is absolutely mind-bogglingly awesome There's like a retro look to the whole thing. Totally. It's like running a bulletin board system in the 90s, which is exactly what I did when I was 14 years old. So for me, it's a complete throwback and an awesome aesthetic, combining this sense of modern rising culture in Unix with this throwback of the 90s. Yeah, like a retro look for an agent first OS. Exactly. Which again.

1:56:15David Heinemeier Hanssonpairs, this was why I was so excited that all these agent harnesses arrived as TUIS, arrived as CLIs, arrived as a terminal because suddenly a whole new generation of both programmers and regular users discovered the glory of the terminal. The terminal is actually one of the most impressive and productive user interfaces we can have. Now, we've built user interfaces since then that were easier to learn.

1:56:43David Heinemeier HanssonThe mouse is a wonderful invention for letting someone who doesn't know a lot about computers just click around and find things out. But the terminal is for people who want to learn their systems, who want to learn to keyboard commands. So you think that 2 is going to stick around? 100%. Now, it's not going to be the only thing. Of course it's not, because these...

1:57:05David Heinemeier HanssonLabs now have trillion-dollar valuation, so they need to be able to reach billions of people. And I don't think we're going to teach billions of people the intricacies of the TUI. So we're going to have other tools, and we already have other tools, which is, by the way, one of the sweet things about Linux, the ChatGPT Codex tool. Yeah, I saw it. Literally, within two hours of that announcement dropping, I had it wrapped up and ready to go in Amachi. Already now, if you go to... You can actually hit the Amachi key.

1:57:34David Heinemeier HanssonAnd then just write chat GPT. It should pop up as like install and then just hit return. Pseudo password for Lex. Yeah, whatever you put in. And then it's just going to install it and it's going to pop it up and you have chat GPT. Nice. And that's how a lot of the apps are and all the agent to carnices are built in that way. Um, tail scale, as I talked about, if you want to help on that is that way a drop box. And the reason all these things are in there is because I use them.

1:58:00David Heinemeier HanssonIt's because I built this system for me and I thought first and foremost, how do I build my dream computer just for me? And if I get my dream computer, I am assured there are other people who are gonna have the same dreams as I do. Now you're obsessed about getting the installation to be under one minute and a bunch of people asked you online why? So why were you so obsessed with getting the installation to be?

1:58:26David Heinemeier Hanssonless than 60 seconds. First, let me quote Michele Hazimoto, who created Ghosty Terminal that's awesome and also available on the Machi and was also the founder of HashiCorp. We had this great post on X not too long ago that had the killer line. The pursuit of excellence deserves no explanation. Wanting to make something as good and as fast and as beautiful as possible has No need for justification. We should want beautiful, fast systems that are the light to use. Now, the funny thing with the install time is it didn't actually start with a one-minute mission. I was being modest when it got going. I thought if I could set up my entire system in 15 minutes, it would already be such a dramatic improvement over what came before that I would be perfectly happy. And it came off the fact that the benchmarking had been so out of whack.

1:59:26David Heinemeier HanssonYou talked about the Commodore 64 being your first computer, right? When you unwrapped that Commodore 64 and you hit the On button, in I think about less than one second, the basic interpreter was ready to accept your command. It was literally almost instant. There was virtually no boot time. Do you know how long it took me to set up a new Mac that I had bought for actually the one app that I still haven't vibe coded my way into on Linux, which is Adobe Lightroom? Brand new computer.

1:59:56David Heinemeier HanssonOut of the box, I set it up. There's a software update. Before I was ready to install Adobe Lightroom that I had it fully up to date, it took 42 minutes. That's grotesque. That's absurd. That's an insult to everyone who likes computers. Did you get a new computer and before you can use it, you have to spend 42 minutes doing updates on something that was already installed on it out of the box from the factory? That is just...

2:00:26David Heinemeier Hanssonpreposterous, and it's crazy that that's not even the worst thing. I also got a PC. Because all these Linux machines, they come as PCs, right? And they have Windows pre-installed. So I got one, this was just three weeks ago, brand new machine, Intel pantaleg, the whole shebang, an hour and 35 minutes from unwrapping the thing until it's ready to use. How long did you take before you think you were in Numachi? That means less than a minute for sure. A minute.

2:00:56David Heinemeier HanssonYeah. We can build computers like this. We have the technology. We've had the technology since like 1981, when the Commodore 64 first came out. The fact that we now have a computer that's a trillion times faster, and you have to spend 42 minutes or an hour and a half setting it up before it's ready to use, is so infuriating to me that it became a passion. And it's funny, just while we were having a little break here, I was talking to Ryan Hughes, my co-conspirator here, we now have, we think, Align where we can create these special turbo images that are pre-made for specific computers because it relies on some knowledge of the Hardware like the Dell XPS. We're gonna make a Dell XPS turbo image that can install in about 12 seconds Full Linux system installed in about that obsession

2:01:48David Heinemeier Hanssonis what gives me this great satisfaction with using computers. That we do not accept things the way they are. And this is why this agent accelerated reality that are now in habit is so invigorating. Because I can look at these kinds of constraints and go, do you know what? I could have stopped when we were at five minutes. That would already have been fast enough. This was the argument on X, right? Why do you keep going? Five minutes is fast enough. Okay, maybe for you.

2:02:18David Heinemeier HanssonBut for me, 12 seconds is a lot more fun. And I always think, try to think, these first principles. Okay, in that machine, actually hit the omachi key again, and then do speed. You'll see a list come up, and one of them is like disk speed. Speed test, network speed, disk speed. Disk speed. Do that one. And then run it. So this is testing the performance of the built-in NVMe Drive. And what are you getting? 7GB a second.

2:02:48David Heinemeier HanssonSo seven gigabytes a second, that's how fast that drive is. Why can we not install a Linux distribution in one second? The Omachi distribution is 5.8 gigabytes. If we can run at seven gigabytes, now, of course, you can't actually do that because the USB key is a lot slower than that. But you should be able to maximize the underlying physics and protocols that we're dealing with. And that's your goal. We've got to get all the way back down to that.

2:03:16Lex FridmanI love that you're doing a Linux distribution. You could be building anything, but the fact that you're building a Linux distribution means you're rethinking about what a computer is because the operating system is the fundamental, like the foundation of how you drive the computer. And it's been so stale. The macOS we have today is scarcely different from the macOS we had 10 years ago. In fact, it's worse in many ways because...

2:03:45David Heinemeier HanssonApple continues to choke hold the control on users. They don't want them to install software that they haven't already said good to go for. They don't want users to reconfigure their hotkeys without doing it manually. They didn't want to change the 500 millisecond animation switching workspaces. It is an infuriatingly locked down computer. Now, to Apple's credit, it's a pretty good computer for being locked down, but...

2:04:14David Heinemeier HanssonI don't want to lock down computer. I want to own my computer. Better yet, I want to mutate my computer. And this is where the agent-to-gauge needs a new operating system. When you can vibe code whatever app comes to your mind, you should be able to vibe code your operating system. You should be able to change anything, how it looks, how it works, what panels are there, what are not there. And that requires Linux.

2:04:38Lex FridmanAs simple as that there are no none of the other two operating systems can deliver this but can you speak to that? I think somebody asked you like Who the hell are you to think you could do better than Ubuntu for example? Or like why are you doing it when Ubuntu is very pretty good and your answer was I thought I could do better So can you speak to this is on X? Can you speak to like where? The craziness comes from thinking that you as one person or maybe with Ryan

2:05:07David Heinemeier Hanssonyou could start building something that's going to be better than Ubuntu or Arch or any of this. Well, I'll say that it didn't start quite as granderous when I got going with my Linux journey. I actually just started with Ubuntu and just built on top of it. Here's a system that already does a lot of the things I wanted to do and at least it's Linux. So can I just build on top of it and make it more modern, make it actually look good and have the programs I want to use? I got like some version of that.

2:05:35David Heinemeier HanssonAnd then I discovered that there's seven layers deeper you could go. And the closer you get to the metal, the closer you get to the kernel, the closer you get to the individual packages and so forth, the more freedom you discover. So as I discovered more and more freedom, I got more and more ambitious. And I realized, oh.

2:05:54David Heinemeier HanssonSurprise surprise. I have strong opinions about how computers should work how they should look what programs should be installed and whether they should take 42 minutes to install or 45 seconds That's the current world record by the way So if anyone installs a much quarter after this and can beat 45 seconds take a screenshot send it to me And you'll you'll be the new holder of the world record when well how long ago did you cross a 60 second mark? it's funny because it's like that the old limit on, what was it, it was a four minute mile or something like that in 1952 that people thought was impossible for humans to beat, then one guy beats it and literally within the next few months, three more guys do, right? So we had this goal, I originally had to go, it was two minutes and then we beat two minutes and I'm like, well if we beat two minutes, why can't we beat one minute? And I remember thinking like that, be crazy. You can't install a modern operating system in one minute when they're all

2:06:52David Heinemeier HanssonIf the other ones are taking 42 minutes, like Apple, full of a lot of smart people, it took 42 minutes. So that's got to be the bar. No, it's not the bar, because there's no speed limit. None of the things you take for granted are fixed pillars of reality, in almost any case. Until you get down to the 7 gigabytes per second, that drive is able to transfer, you've not reached the limit yet, so you should just keep pushing.

2:07:19David Heinemeier HanssonOf course, then it becomes a game in itself and a satisfaction itself. Every second I could shave off was an excitement. And when we broke the one-minute barrier, which was really only broken, I think, three weeks ago or something like that, maybe even two weeks ago, I just got crazy. And then I got a swarm of agents to run all these auto research loops of trying all these different theories on, like, oh, if you changed this thing, if you changed that thing, what if you cut this out? What if you do things in parallel? What if, while you were typing in your username, we start...

2:07:48David Heinemeier Hanssonpreloading packages into memory system we can fire them in faster and it becomes a fun game and i think that's how you should think about product development it should be fun you should it should be frivolous It should be trying to overshoot the target and making so much better than what it quote-unquote needs to be. Especially now, because you can move so quickly, you can try so many different approaches because of the agents. Yes, that just makes it more satisfying. But I think this was always true. If you look at the greatest Mercedes Benz of all time, I think it was called the W126. I saw this wonderful documentary on it. It was steered by this guy who for years had worked in Mercedes department for safety.

2:08:27David Heinemeier Hanssonand suddenly he gets put in charge for the whole S-Class project. And he just puts in all of it. This is where you got the auto-retending seat belts and washers on the headlights and everything. This car was so overbuilt for the market. It was unbelievable. But you look at that and go like, well, I want that in just the same way that you look at a mechanical watch and go, it could go down to 100 meters or...

2:08:55David Heinemeier HanssonI think a Rolex has one that can go down to 4,000 meters, the deep ocean, the deep diver ocean, or whatever it's called. No one outside of three people in the world, whoever buy that watch will ever put it to the test. But don't you want to be the kind of person who is a patron of people who want to push?

2:09:14David Heinemeier Hanssonthe human race that much forward. I want the fastest car breaking the speed limits. I want the diver wash that can go down the Mariana Trench. I want the operating system that can install in less than 60 seconds. So from the individual level, I admire those people. I think everybody should strive for that. But also the consequences of that we should mention, like the pursuit of excellence, even when the metrics seem to be frivolous.

2:09:40Lex Fridmanthe maybe unexpected consequences of that is other kinds of excellences, discoveries, innovations and all that kind of stuff that has nothing to do with the speed. 100%. It's discovery. It's nice to have the metric that you're chasing be the catalyst, the engine that drives innovation. Because it's the same reason you go to the moon, you go to Mars. It's like, why? Who cares? Well, actually the real thing is you'll discover a lot about chemical.

2:10:09Lex FridmanPropulsion, you discover a lot about how humans can live for a long time in space. Maybe you'll discover whole new ways of doing solar energy in space or data centers in space or whatever the hell. All kinds of maybe you'll meet aliens, but you never know. But setting a goal and chasing it, especially when it's numerical is really nice. And setting a grand goal is even better. When you refuse to just do what's

2:10:39David Heinemeier Hanssonpractical and you strive for what's slightly beyond plausible, that's when the magic happens. And we should be going all in on that. This is one of the reasons, and in fact, to some degree, this specific goal was motivated by seeing others do this. I mean, Elon is the singular individual in this conversation. The guy is so out there in his goals.

2:11:06David Heinemeier HanssonThey seem so preposterous at first glance. I've certainly considered them preposterous on many glances. And then you realize that they come true sometimes. Maybe not always on schedule. And so what? So what? So we didn't get the self-driving car on schedule. I gave Elon a lot of shit for that back in 17. But now it's here. And who would have gotten us here?

2:11:34David Heinemeier Hanssonexcept for the person who thought it was possible in 17, who is so impatient with reality that the sheer force is just going to propel that reality to the place he wants it to be. I think that's deeply inspiring, and we need these kinds of goalposts to be moved. We need someone to run the four-minute mile, so the rest of us realize, well, okay, but I guess I can run it quicker.

2:12:01David Heinemeier HanssonThat's what I try to strive for. And I really strive for it with Imachi because it's just more fun to live that way, to have high aspirations and ambitions. And I will say I've actually changed my mind on that a little bit. I spend quite a lot of time speaking the other book that there are a lot of people who don't actually need those ambitions. And that's also true. We don't want eight billion elons running around. The world would be rather crazy, I think.

2:12:31David Heinemeier HanssonI've come to realize that for entrepreneurs, it's healthy to have suitable, chunky golds. The idea of just running the Italian restaurant can't just beat that. It should be, maybe I just run one Italian restaurant, but I make the best damn pizza possible. I make the most delicious pommageon. We have to strive for excellence to muster the motivation to keep going.

2:13:00Lex FridmanAnd yeah to dare to think big like you could build a Linux distribution. Yes. Is there some stuff you remember about what it took to get it to be so fast? You mentioned a few things that were the agents were discovering. One of the things was to treat the lag of human input as an opportunity to preload. So there's five questions you answer when you set up on a machine. Just doing stuff in the background. We're doing stuff in the background.

2:13:29David Heinemeier HanssonAnd that was one of the things I didn't even consider, which is, I mean, the oldest trick in the book, all sorts of video games for a long time have done this, where you let the player interact with something and then you do preloading and so forth in the background. So it's an age-old technique, but I just hadn't thought about it for an installer. I thought, first you ask the user some questions about the password and their username and their time zone and so forth, and then you do the work when, in fact, you could preload that. Now, the other things were just a bunch of other...

2:13:58David Heinemeier Hanssontweaks to How the installer itself was doing things in a certain order some of them was also just shrinking it the last version of omachi was 7.5 gigabytes and a lot of the time we're down to now is literally decompressing Compressed package files. That's the bulk of what is on the ISO and that's the bulk of the install time So by shrinking it down to I think we're at 5.85 gigabytes now a pretty chunky reduction it almost literally translated one to one. And I did some really interesting things there. So, Omachi uses the JetBrains font, which is an awesome font, beautiful font. And actually, a font I didn't like at first glance, but then it was the only font I could get to look perfect in Mitchell Asimodio's Ghosty. Ghosty, for whatever reason, did not want to render my beloved bitstream vero sance just the way I was used to it. But it rendered...

2:14:56David Heinemeier Hanssonthis JetBrains font perfectly. So I switched over. But the standard package for JetBrains font on Arch is 200 megabytes because it includes all these variations and all these subtypes and whatever. And I realized like we're not using any of that. We're using the monospace version in this one NURT font patched edition. Do you know how big that is? I think it's 16 megabytes.

2:15:23David Heinemeier HanssonI simply just came up with a new package, the slim version of the JetBrains package. And there, right there, I saved 180 megabytes. I just went through and did that a bunch of times. We did that with the Nvidia...

2:15:34David Heinemeier HanssonDrivers too so the Nvidia drivers when they came straight off the I think the arch repo were not compressed with the most extreme form of compression which I think called ZSTD Which is a really slow form of compression slow to create the archive But if you're building a package you have all the time in the world if that means you can then shrink the ISO so on just the two Nvidia packages I think we saved 200 megabytes so what I loved about this was I imagine myself being a car designer at McLaren. So McLaren makes some of the lightest super sports cars in the world right now. And they are absolutely obsessed with shaving every damn last gram off their cars. That's why even a new 750S McLaren is just way lighter than the competition. They use a

2:16:26David Heinemeier Hanssoncarbon fiber monocoque, and that helps them over like Ferrari, for example, uses aluminum. But they also just have this obsession with weight. And I would see this interview with the McLaren folks talking to some journalist, just going over, yeah, we saved 370 grams off that one. And I just went, wait, what? There's someone on a car that weighs maybe 1,040 kilos or 1,000...

2:16:52David Heinemeier Hansson380 or something just worrying about 370 grams. Yeah, what obsessed maniacs. I love them. Yeah, I want that in my life. I want a McLaren So I thought in that moment as I was shaving individual megabytes off the packages man I'm kind of like a McLaren car developer here even though I mean we haven't even completed that work the package could shrink even more but This is actually this other conflict that we've had with Umachi and the traditional Linux community is bloat. This idea that it's actually not kosher in certain circles to ship with pre-installed software because who are you to make decisions about what programs people should use? And I'm like, dude, it's in the fucking name. It's called Umachi because the omapart is short for omakase, which literally means chef's choice. I'm the chef.

2:17:47David Heinemeier HanssonI'm making the choices and this is the collection of applications I think is awesome. Which by the way as a video editor, it ships with OBS to do your recording. It's just in there. OBS is pre-installed. Kaden Live is a video editor timeline editor, which is great. I edit all my videos with that and then I made my own.

2:18:07David Heinemeier HanssonClip editor you talked about the thing with syncing up. I had this thing with clips So I would do a podcast or whatever I need a clip for X and it's kind of a hassle to use Kate and live or other in timeline editors So I made on a cut on a cut is included It's just for making clips and you can drive the whole thing with keyboard so you can go to just a right Time mark and then you can hit controlled space. It moves the clip line to that line Then you go to the end of the clip and you hit alt space and it moves the end line And then you hit control s and it saves I can make clips so damn fast now without McCut. It's amazing, but It has all the software on it. It has neovim on it. It has herder on it It has team on it has a terminal. It has a bunch of themes It has a bunch of background images the best ones I could pick out that takes up some space

2:18:54David Heinemeier HanssonIt should because this is not supposed to be this just barren landscape where you have to reconstruct everything. This is supposed to be a productive system the minute you unpack it. What is it built in? So it's actually mostly built in Bash for the Linux configuration part. Bash is a great language for that. It is made for that really for system administration. It also has its limitations.

2:19:20David Heinemeier HanssonYou should not build everything in Bash. How are agents with generating Bash pretty good? Oh amazing. Except for one thing. And I have to smack the agents over the back of the head every single time I catch it and reminded to look at the agents MD file because I will have an instruction in there not to make early exits. The agents love to have preconditions instead of fully expanded conditionals. I like something that says if this then do that. Agents like to have precondition or exit, another precondition or exit. And then it falls down to the final thing it actually wants to do. I hate that style. So except for that, it's gotten shockingly, dramatically, awesomely good to the point where

2:20:06David Heinemeier HanssonWhen we talked last time, we talked about how I would ask the agent for a bash thing and then I would type it in myself and I kind of wouldn't remember. And then I took the effort to make sure that all that competence wasn't draining out of my fingers. So I actually learned how to write bash myself. And now I'm not writing any bash myself. I have not written any bash myself for probably a couple of months because the agents have just gotten so good that if you give them the few pointers on style and occasionally put pushback on complexity. This is, I tweeted about this a couple of days ago.

2:20:33David Heinemeier Hanssonblows my mind how often an agent can do something say it's done have to work reviewed by another agent they say it's done and then I go like looks a little too complicated for me and then it'll go like oh yeah you're right you're right I totally over complicated this and it'll cut it in half I'm like couldn't it just do this like from the outset and then someone else reminded me humans are the same way if you work on something and someone else reviews it and they just so like that looks a little complicated

2:21:03Lex FridmanQuite often you're able to go like, ah, you're right. See, that just, those little indications to me show that the programmer is still needed. That intuition, because I think, what did you say? I have a sense of the landscape of the code. When I build something like a match, I do look at the code.

2:21:22David Heinemeier HanssonI look at the shape and I look at the proportions. I don't have to chisel everything myself anymore. This is again when I'm flattering myself. One moment I'm a McLaren audio, outdoor engineer and the next moment I'm at Da Vinci working with his whole studio of students who are doing all the chiseling on the fine marble. And he goes like, ah, now the proportions are not quite right. That's how it feels working with agents now. That I can give feedback like an editor.

2:21:52David Heinemeier HanssonDo you know what? I'm not going to write everything myself, but I can tell you when the argument doesn't land. I can tell you when the shape isn't proportional to the problem or when it just feels like it's too complicated and shockingly often it just works. It's like the early days where the jokes was, don't make mistakes. I don't think you have to tell the agents that anymore because now the harnesses are so good. They've run automated testing. They get that feedback. But you actually do have to tell them make it simpler. Did you use voice at all for the interaction?

2:22:21David Heinemeier HanssonHow much are you typing? How much are you? I typed the whole thing. I actually in a much is built-in box type Audio transcription, and it's actually really good. I just find that I don't think that way and it surprised myself that I don't like to talk to the computer I like when I'm in the car, but when I'm in the front of the keyboard, I just want to type I also just love typing. Are you using the voice? I'm an introvert who doesn't like social interaction or speaking. I think that's

2:22:52Lex Fridmanpart of mine too. But like for me, for some reason, voice is really powerful. I want to give this, so I run with this thing, it's called Plod. So I just hook it up on my, you know, on my t-shirt here. Yeah. You press a button, it starts recording. And this is actually more in terms of flow, much better experience than behind a computer. And I save, usually it's agent generated problems that I want to really Talk through and so I Program I write I speak a long prompt like and a lot of it. It's like stream of consciousness reasoning, so I'll Sometimes just change my mind about a design but all of that is in there and then I have an LM that processes that would applaud you there's a Obviously an API you can grab it transcribe it clean up the transcript because you you want it to be because I'm referring to files

2:23:49Lex FridmanI'm referring to technical concepts like files and functions and so on that you want to make sure the transcription the speech detects gets correctly so you want to have a dictionary you want to be aware of the code base when you process the files and then you have this gigantic thing that's often 10 15 20 minute me discussing the full design and I find that to be really really powerful because it doesn't have the problem over over specification because of how much stream of consciousness thinking the system has about what you're imagining. And this is really good for the early steps of the design. Like if I wanted to build Omachi from scratch, the first stages, I talked through, it could be an hour, there's been problems that I had for an hour. And I'm just running and speaking. I highly recommend people try voice based.

2:24:48David Heinemeier Hanssonspeaking for prolonged periods of time as opposed to very specific. Yeah, I haven't used that. Maybe that's how I'm using it wrong. I try to just type or speak two sentences and then I get a little frustrated that I could have typed that just as fast, maybe. But I have not tried this whole thing of just talking continuously for 20 minutes. And especially you because you speak very fast. Yeah. No, I could see it.

2:25:14David Heinemeier HanssonI think because the reason I've been trying to do it for things like replying to emails and it got to a point where I thought it could help and it sort of did, but then it would make a small mistake and I'd have to correct the mistake. But if you're doing Stream of Conscious to an LLM who doesn't care about all this other stuff anyway, that probably works way better. There's two things you have to do. One, okay, you have the raw audio transcribes it. I use 11 last for transcription. They're probably the best piece of text model.

2:25:43Lex FridmanThere's still mistakes there. So you need to have a prompt that has access to a dictionary and to a lot of build the dictionary first all is a dictionary of terms they're relevant to you then have it aware of so you have an agent that looks through when you're talking about code looks to your entire code base for key terms that you use often also when you were talking about messaging Gmail and what's happened so on it's aware of all the people and common terms that you get wrong. You've really gone deep in this. That to me is a problem that needs to be solved because one of the issues you probably have speech to text is that it makes mistakes sometimes. Correct. Then I can't use it for dictating an email. Right. If it never makes mistakes. Then it would be more appealing. Yeah. And you are okay being not perfectly real time actually. You're okay waiting five seconds potentially.

2:26:37Lex FridmanI don't know what your use case is. I'm okay waiting five seconds, ten seconds for it to process everything. You gotta vibe code this into an app that does all of this. It just works. I think I mentioned to you offline that it's very surprising to me that translation is not done perfectly. Right. Speech-to-speech translation. It seems like you've gotten much closer to the best of what's possible by putting all these things together.

2:27:06David Heinemeier HanssonBut you know, when you're shipping that kind of stuff, you do have to start thinking about latency. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of good. I mean, if you're suddenly enabling something people wouldn't be doing before at all, it's okay to take five seconds longer. I think this is one of the areas that Steve Jobs was so good that he realized like the first iPhone was terrible in all sorts of ways, right? Absolutely horrendously slow data connection.

2:27:32David Heinemeier Hanssonvery underpowered, all the things. But the product was so compelling that it just didn't matter. You'd be shipping too late if you waited until everything was just right, just perfect. If you're solving a problem that people currently don't have a solution for, they're willing to give it five seconds. If you're in a competitive market, yeah, okay, it's different, but that means the problem's already solved and you don't need to solve it. Well, I do think there's a few, like whisper flow is really good.

2:28:00David Heinemeier HanssonA few people have stepped up that speech-to-text thing. Yeah. Yeah, we were using box type. Box type is open source. It is. It's just using one of the open models. I forget which parrot model it's using or something like that. It works quite well for short commands. So I have used it for that. I think you just hold down f9 and it starts a dictation. So it's already in there. You just have to Get online, it'll offer you to install the Vox type package, because the Vox type package includes a model that's 150 megabytes. And I was like, ah, I don't know if I can carry that. So we don't have that in there by default, but we have the option set up. And I actually just yesterday was thinking we really need to combine all of these things.

2:28:47David Heinemeier HanssonUmachi Quattro is truly amazing as a malleable operating system where you can add functionality to it just by talking to your agent. But that's exactly what we should be doing. There's a lot of people who would find it very natural just to talk to their computer and say, hey, can you make me a stock panel? I want to track Apple and Dell. And just see the agent go off entirely through voice.

2:29:15David Heinemeier Hanssonboth in terms of the input and in terms of the output, and then your operating system just changes. This was the vision of Iron Man and Jarvis and bespoke applications that just appear magically. I'm thinking the area of AI I find truly intriguing are these live gaming models. I don't know if you've seen that, where the AI is inventing literally the next frame, but you can actually play the game.

2:29:40David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I think if they're able to do that, why can't we do that with our operating system? Why can't we just talk to it and ask it to be a different way or change? And it'll all just change. I think this, by the way, is one of the other breakthroughs that is going to lead to the total domination of Linux. The agents have taken all the hardship out of diagnosing Linux systems and turned the fact that Linux produces these overly specific totally arcane error messages into its greatest advantage when Linux has an issue The agent can take that very specific error message that makes no sense to a normal human and correlated with the fact that the agent was pre-trained on

2:30:23David Heinemeier Hansson40 million lines of Linux code so it knows exactly where to look and dial it down. I have not had a single problem on my Linux machine since the beginning of this year that an agent could not diagnose. That was not true a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago I was still searching on forums to find answers to esoteric questions. Now the agents know the source code of not just the Linux operating system, but every single piece of software I have on that box, the agent has access to the source code of all of it. In fact, this was one thing I built in just before we shipped. So once you set up your default agent, Umachi Quattro has a crash watcher. If any app on your machine crashes, it'll pop up a little thing, ask you whether you want your AI to diagnose the problem. Yeah. That's amazing. Unbelievable. I've seen things where

2:31:18David Heinemeier HanssonThere's an error in some subsystem, not even Linux, just some app I installed. The agent start digging through the logs and looks up system delock, then it checks out the damn source code of the application that crashed, pins down that it's in this Rust file line 472 that there's an unbounded unwrapped variable that overflowed or whatever it is. Then.

2:31:45David Heinemeier Hanssonoffice you whether you want to file a bug report. With all this detail, I'll give you one amazing anecdote. So I was working with this guy JDX who's working on Mies. This is this package manager for fast moving development tools. This is how we manage all the agent software and so forth. Normal package managers are not built to be updated seven times a day. And all of these agent harnesses are updated about seven times a day. So we needed an out of band package manager and Mies just turns out to be perfect for this. Anyway.

2:32:14David Heinemeier HanssonIt had a small bug. There was some race condition, which agents are very good at finding because when you start running multiple agents at the same time, they will suss out all these race conditions you have in your underlying infrastructure that was never triggered by a human trying to do manual thing. So it finds this issue, right? I tell the agent, hey, can you post this as a bug report to JDX's GitHub? And unfortunately, right before that, I had had to do a QA run on Omachi itself with eight different agents. It had found 28 real issues that it needed to file. Well, it went to GitHub and tried to file all 28 issues at the same time, which it did in about, I don't know, 12 seconds. GitHub not unreasonably marked that as probable spam and banned my Omachi blog. And then I couldn't do that.

2:33:08David Heinemeier HanssonI was blocked from the bot having access to GitHub. So I just told it, hey, do you know what? Just email JDX. Here's his email address. I had already set it up with hey.com and email address. We have a CLI that's in beta right now. So I set it up with that. So it can send to email. That's how it gives me reports about outstanding issues and PR. So it sends JDX this email about the bug it found. And he was like, Wait, this is the first time I've gotten a bug report in unreleased software. Because it had downloaded the source code to Mies, saw that he had already fixed the bug, but that it would not fix the problem entirely. In software, they had not shipped yet. Pinpointed the problem. And he was like, damn it, I got a bug report before we even got a release. That's amazing. Unbelievable AGI levels of...

2:33:58David Heinemeier HanssonMind-blowing stuff and that was actually if you remember that was that was an open question whether a assistance could debug well That that was kind of the the thought that yeah sure they can write code but can they find issues they are so Incredibly good at this and this is actually interesting because I was on the perhaps same side of that little skeptical about can it reason about all these things and Mikhail who's the CTO at Shopify ran a scientific study on this they had and this was I think late last year, early this year, where he had agents go back through all the incidents, both outages and other problems that Shopify had had in production, trace that back to the PR that was merged and find out whether PRs that had been reviewed by human or PRs that had been reviewed by agents were of higher quality. Well, low in surprise. The PRs that had been reviewed by agents caused fewer issues in production.

2:34:56Lex FridmanAnd this was with models we had six months ago. At this point, 100% in the majority of the mains we work in today, agents are better at finding bugs. So you now run agents all day. What stands out to you as the better model? Who's currently winning? It seems to be changing constantly. Sol, Fable, Grok46, Gemini, the Chinese open-wit models. What's amazing to me is...

2:35:26David Heinemeier HanssonThat you could rattle off so many different contenders that this market is so wide open that it does Actually change back and forth that we have real competition that there are so many labs that are able to get either to the frontier or Close to it. That's by the way is remarkable. I still don't fully understand that but To answer your question the best model in general right now is fable The second best model, in my opinion, is Opus 5. But the tier just below Opus 5, and it's not even that they're always below. Sometimes they're ahead. I'll get to that in a second. I would rank GPT Sol, very good. Grock 4-6, I just started testing a few days ago. I had this wonderful test that I've set up.

2:36:20David Heinemeier Hanssonby accident, where I translated this Python library into Rust. The screensaver you just saw, with all the cool animation that's powered by a Python library called terminal text effects. Really cool library. We've been using it since the first day of Omachi. The problem with that is it's written in Python, so when it starts up, especially on a laptop, And it runs in Python. It uses all of your CPU to do these effects. And therefore, it means it used about 30 watts of energy, and it spins up your fans, and it drains your battery. It doesn't really matter on a local computer, but it does matter on a laptop. So I thought, do you know what? This sounds like a problem for Rust. So first I gave Fable the challenge. And all I told it was, here's the source code for the Python library, this TDA library that had a bunch of dependencies and so forth.

2:37:11David Heinemeier HanssonI want a rust version of this with no dependencies as single executable. That's what rust does. So basically, I want it in rust. I want it to be pixel perfect, frame by frame, do a full analysis, don't stop until you're finished. That was the prompt. I kid you not, in just under 45 minutes, it was like, I heard her? I'm finished. I've checked everything. I have reduced.

2:37:41David Heinemeier Hanssonthe startup time from 86 milliseconds to 2 milliseconds. I have sped up the execution time by 9.6 times, I believe it was. The executable is 3 megabytes. Do you want to run it? That's awesome. So I run it and I don't know why I'm surprised because this translation job.

2:38:08David Heinemeier Hanssonis something we've known for a while that AI is pretty good at, but it was still staggering to me that I could one-shot a full translation of a Python library I'd been using for a year that others had been using for much longer and turn it into a Rust executable without knowing any Rust, without looking at the Rust code at all and produce this executable that I then told the agent right after, this is great, ship it.

2:38:36David Heinemeier HanssonIt packaged it up as a new package. It told me, what do you want it to call? It's called TTFX. Let's create a new Git repo. It sets up the Git repo. Let's create a new package build package for our build system. It pushed that up. Let's push it out. Let's open the pull request to do much itself. So we switch around from TTE, the Python implementation to TTFX. It does all of it. And I'm just sitting there.

2:39:00David Heinemeier HanssonAnd again, I'm already, at this point, fully delirious with age and acceleration. And I still had to lean back and I go like, this is AGI, isn't it? This is what AGI looks like. If we have, if these moments are just what it is all the time, this is AGI. Now, as I understand, you also repeated the same experiment, not just with FABO. I did it on all the models. First, I did it, actually, funny thing. So I ran out of.

2:39:27David Heinemeier Hanssonfabled tokens about two-thirds through and it just automatically switched over to Opus 5 and kept going and finished the job. Part of the reason why I think it was able to do that was that the first thing fabled did was create a plan. And it was a really detailed plan. I think it had eight separate steps. Here you do it, here you analyze it, here you run the effects and so on. I didn't review the plan at all. I didn't change the plan. It just made the plan. So Opus could take over. And then I thought, Well, if Opus can finish the job, maybe some of the other agents could finish it too. So the first thing I did was I gave it to, I think I gave it to Sol. And Sol finished the job too. It took twice as long. So it took, I think, about an hour and a half. But here's the kicker. Per token cost, I didn't pay per token. I have a max subscription to Claude, right? So it did it within the subscription. It used all my tokens. I had to switch over to Opus 5.

2:40:22David Heinemeier HanssonIf I had paid per token, it would have been 550 bucks, I think, to do the whole thing. And I thought for a second, holy shit, what a steal. If I personally had to learn Rust well enough to be able to do this translation, I'm looking at a nine month job here. I can pay 500 bucks to have this translation happen, and suddenly I get a 10x execution speed up. I would totally pay 500 bucks for this. But, but, competition. So I give it to Saul. Same plan.

2:40:53David Heinemeier HanssonTo be fair, I didn't ask Saul to do the plan. I just took the fable plan, gave it to Saul. Saul, in an hour and a half and I think $46 worth of token, repeated the task, did the same thing. And I thought, well, blimey, that's amazing. Then I got greedy. So I asked GPT Luna, which is this crazy cheap model.

2:41:24David Heinemeier Hanssonthat OpenAI has as well. Can you do it? Absolutely not. First of all, they didn't even want to start the task. I think something happened, I don't know, I think it was in the spring where we didn't need these slash goal things anymore. The agents could just automatically keep going in a loop if you told it not to stop and so forth. So Saul could do that, Fable could do that, but Luna couldn't. So I had, I think I did 12 prompts, kept telling it.

2:41:54David Heinemeier Hanssonto do it. And eventually, I sort of got it started. The first thing it did was to cheat. So the first thing it looked outside his own directory saw that there was already another implementation and just did a short wrapper around that and said, I'm done. Hilarious. But it couldn't finish because it made just a couple of things. But I mean, OK, so I can't do that. Then I gave it to Grok46. And I had used Grok45 a little bit. And I thought, like, I mean, it's cool.

2:42:23David Heinemeier HanssonThat there's others trying but like I'm not gonna use it because it felt quite far behind grog 46 fucking completes the task 10x speed up same size executable $55 worth of per token cost. I think it was Absolutely unbelievable then I repeated to with the Kimmy K3 mm-hmm. We took forever I forget how long Kimmy actually spent on it and then I also did it with deep seek v4 flash first and flash failed the same way that luna did it couldn't do it and then I did it with pro and pro also completed the task it took two hours 45 $23 So here we are right like fable clearly the best it was the fastest it was the one that wrote the plan But 550 bucks and the output the same The others sold grok about the same One-tenth the cost mm-hmm deep seek

2:43:20David Heinemeier Hanssonwhen 20th the cost, but you have to wait a little longer. Absolutely gobsmackingly incredible. And now by the way, by the way, so I had Fable finish the first job and then Opus finished it. That was the first one shot, right? It's 10 times faster. I did two auto research runs, which isn't even auto research anymore. You don't have to do the slash. You just tell it to keep going until you tell it to stop. It ended up, I think we ended up with a 46 time execution improvement.

2:43:50Lex Fridmanover the original. It's incredible. Absolutely. It's just incredible. I just don't think there's anything that compares to Fable in terms of planning. I usually do Fable for planning and for reviewing and then something else for implementation like Opus 5. It's really nice. It's a really nice setup that allows you to not run out of tokens too much. What I found, it's really interesting because

2:44:17David Heinemeier HanssonFable is, in my opinion, the best model right now, but it also makes mistakes. And the best way to get the best software, I would actually rather have two differently sourced sort of, I mean, they're not mid-tier, they're all frontier, but have, let's say, Opus 5 and Codex and have one check the other's job. This is my standard operating procedure now. I'll have Opus Fable do the work, and then I always end it review with Codex X High.

2:44:47David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I've also started using Grok just to test it out. It's also quite good. And it keeps finding stuff. And then that's my workflow when I'm having my agents on my own machine do it, and then I push to get up. And then co-pilot, I kid you not, has actually gotten good. Co-pilot keeps finding stuff that's legitimately broken, which is also incredible acceleration because the first version of co-pilot that started doing this was literally retarded. It would just...

2:45:12David Heinemeier Hanssonconstantly flag things that were nonsense, it would constantly flag the same problem over and over again as you would push. It was really annoying. So I think a lot of people actually ended up turning that off. And if they did, they should turn it back on because it's actually quite good. Keep finding things. And if you then take that and we shouldn't be surprised, why are we surprised? Even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it.

2:45:35David Heinemeier HanssonYou can end up with better code. Of course, you can end up with better code. So build that into your process. Pick one of the agents to drive with. I've mainly been driving with Claude, which is actually interesting because I have some other reservations about Anthropic. But the reason I'm sticking with Claude is, in my opinion, they actually have the best harness. And one of the reasons it's the best harness is it's multi-agent running. So if you want to run multiple agents at the same time, you can do arrow left.

2:46:04David Heinemeier Hanssonwhen you're inside a session, then it goes back to agent view. And here in agent view, you can pick up another agent. So if you want to do this thing where you have multiple threats going on, the cloud code is just the nicest setup. They also just keep being a little further ahead, which probably shouldn't be surprising. I mean, Boris, one of the guys that's working on that, he was the first one, basically came up with the thing. It's just interesting that that has been an enduring advantage. I've also used open code a lot. I think open code is great. I use open code mainly as my main harness for all the open...

2:46:33David Heinemeier HanssonModels so Kimmy K3 and so forth and I I inference not on the Chinese servers So I inference on fireworks, which is a really nice service where you can just pay by the token And if you're using these open-weight models, they're not that expensive by token So that's a great way to do that. But I don't think I would be using well, maybe I would but if Using Claude with a subscription does feel like A bargain like a crazy bargain. Yeah, and I actually have four I just signed up for my second one this morning Yeah, because I got up at four with jet lag and I started working with the agents right away and now I'm three days away from Limits resetting on fable and I ran out of so and they should really

2:47:22David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, why is that so complicated? Can't you just stack one subscription? Why do I need to log in multiple times? And obviously you'll have to develop some kind of tooling. Yes, I did that too. To move from one to the other. We're building that into Machi, by the way. So the next version of Machi is going to ship with multi-sub support. I wish that the labs would just make you buy a max 100 times. It's kind of actually fascinating, though, for me because it's very challenging for me to use Grock 4.6 and then claw code because grok is so fast Yes, that's actually the deal the deal with grok is that their fast mode is Cheaper than the regular mode on the others and when you've used grok 4 6 is on fast It's kind of addictive because it almost gets you to this single thread mode where the agents is able to keep up with you Yeah, but I don't know how I can't what once I get used to claw code I can't handle the speed of grok

2:48:21David Heinemeier Hanssonbecause I'm used to now multitasking. And so now I'm back in this anxious mode of switching. So I mean, all of this is a learning process of what programming actually is supposed to look like. By the way, one of the reasons why I'm not sure what the final form of these harnesses is going to take, because one of the things we've started experimenting with at Basecamp is that we put the agents inside of Basecamp and we treat them as coworkers. And then we assign them tasks inside of...

2:48:49David Heinemeier HanssonBasecamp. So they will do work on it to do in Basecamp, but they'll do work on a card. And it turns out that a collaboration tool that's optimized for asynchronous communications actually the right format versus these harnesses are a little more like chat. And chat, which was, I mean, the original format for these things is not the right thing because you're sitting around waiting.

2:49:12David Heinemeier HanssonIt entices you to sit around and wait versus when you're dealing with something like Basecamp and you can just give an agent a to-do item. You don't expect to hear back immediately. So I don't know what the final form is going to change, but I've been using all of the harnesses. So I use them inside of Herter and Herter has panes. So oftentimes I'll run a clawed up top and then I'll run codex down below and then maybe I also have an open code set up. But I will say just very recently I found that the human in the loop is the...

2:49:41David Heinemeier Hanssonlimit here. So I've started setting up more automated systems. I've been building an Amapot that can do more autonomous development on Omachi that is just on a regular schedule process all depending to do or PRs and issues and then send me an email using the hey CLI and then I just get this email here's 12 PRs that are either ready to go or I think you should close and then I just make the final determination there. Do you find the multitasks the tasks switching mentally exhausting?

2:50:11David Heinemeier HanssonYes, but in an exhilarating way. Like one of the things I always loved about race cars was when I would stumble out of the car, absolutely smashed and barely able to hold my head up. And I lay down on the garage floor and just think, holy fuck, I'm alive. That's the kind of exhaustion, mental exhaustion I'm feeling at moments with the agents right now. By the way, when you're racing, what's the source of the exhaustion? It's physical.

2:50:38David Heinemeier HanssonBut it's the same thing with jujitsu, right? Like it's actually satisfying to feel exhausted. It feels like you've applied yourself. And I feel that with the mental exhaustion you can get from agents. Are you also mentally drained from racing? Yes. If you drive in difficult conditions, especially if you're driving the rain, where you're constantly managing the thing right at the knife's edge. But most of the time I just enjoy the physical exhaustion. And here with the multitask switching, I do find that like...

2:51:06David Heinemeier HanssonI get really exhausted, and I think it's because I'm thinking a lot. Because like, you're basically... That's exactly it. There's no like, passive low energy thing. No. You're like... There's no coasting. Problem. There's no coasting. Solve problem. Next problem. Solve problem. And you're really thinking. It's funny. It's actually very similar when racing. There's some tracks, like Le Mans, where you get time to relax. This is Multan Straits where it's...

2:51:33David Heinemeier HanssonKind of long. You're going fast, but in the straight line, you take a breath. And then there are other tracks where it's just coming full on all the time. And you don't have any moment to relax. And you stumble out of the car after an hour and each, and it's very different how exhausted you are. And this is exactly what I'm finding with the agents, too, that when you're running at max human capacity, you're just constantly in the corner. Do you think people are in danger of burnout? I think...

2:52:02David Heinemeier Hanssonthe moment we're in right now is going to pass. It's not a babysitting motion, but constant interaction with the agents is going to fade. From what I've seen on Omachi, I think we can automate a ton of the development and debugging of the system to the point where I can just review that email once a day.

2:52:29Lex Fridmanand then make the decisions once a day. Yep, goes, no, goes, in, out, and whatever. We're not there yet, but I think we're going to get there. Well, can you sort of empathize with the feeling that, say, a young person sitting in San Francisco, everybody around them is not sleeping, they're obsessed with programming nonstop. And there's this kind of sense that AGI is going to be here any minute. Everybody knows somebody who's made millions of dollars because they sold the startup.

2:52:59Lex FridmanAnd so there's a kind of feeling like you shouldn't be sleeping. You should be constantly managing agents and programming and building. And that feels like a moment in time we'll look back at.

2:53:14David Heinemeier HanssonIt's the birth of a new paradigm. It's always messy. It's always exhausting. There's no other way around that. And by the way, hasn't San Francisco always been like this? I remember the dot com boom years, and everyone was just the same, and then was all mobile. And before that, it was the gold rush. So I think that's probably just San Francisco. It attracts the kind of individuals who would think I don't have time to sleep. I've not been on that track, generally speaking, but I will admit that...

2:53:42David Heinemeier HanssonThe last three months have felt more exhausting than any other project I've done the last five years. Since the hay launch, that was the last time we had a crazy exhausting launch. Do you think you can keep going at this place? No, no, no, no. This is not sustainable at all. Okay. But I also, I can see the end of the tunnel. Yeah. Because the automation...

2:54:05David Heinemeier Hanssonwhich, by the way, everyone is building. This is so hilarious. Everyone is building their little gas town, their little agent coordination. They're set up. This is all going to be solved. We're not all going to have to build our own coordination harnesses. Of course we're not. And in fact, I've been a little surprised that it's gone this long, that there's not more of it has been sucked up by the major labs. You'd think that they just built this stuff in. But some of it is also, this is what a new domain looks like. I remember for a hot moment when JavaScript kind of came to realize its own power and there was basically a new JavaScript framework every five minutes, right? Like a lot of churn. This is what happens at the advent of a new paradigm. So I think it's natural and I think it's going to settle down and I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel. So I don't mind sprint. In fact, I welcome it now. I like this notion that most time is calm, but then occasionally you got to climb a mountain. If we look back to the GHH a year ago, what advice would you give to that guy?

2:55:03David Heinemeier HanssonI wouldn't want to spoil it. What a thriller that has just been. I mean, if you would have scripted this, I'd be like, this is so far-fetched. Get out of here. Unbelievable, right? I wouldn't want to know anything. The fact that this roller coaster and this acceleration has been absorbed in real time by everyone, no one knew.

2:55:26Lex FridmanSome had premonitions that were a little better than others, but no one knew not exactly the way it was going to go and how fast it was going to take off. I mean, it's the show of a lifetime. I mean, the mean cinema absolutely applies to this moment. That said, what do you think DHH from a year from now will be like? I mean, what are the possible versions that all our dreams are coming true?

2:55:56David Heinemeier HanssonAI maximalist abundance argument that once Elon's robots have the level of intelligence and AGI that I'm experiencing on some of this development stuff, the world is going to be so unrecognizably different that we can't even imagine it. Now, I don't spend any time thinking about that because I think that is the way to the AI psychosis. So therefore, I just immerse myself in the moment.

2:56:27David Heinemeier Hanssonand get absolutely the maximum amount of it. And just have fun. Just have fun. I mean, I get it why people are finding this exhaustion. Just keeping up. Not even using agents. Just like being like, what's the latest model? What tool are we using now? Is it a T-Mux? Is it a Herder? Is it none of it? Is it agents? Whatever. I get it. But I also again think we should be so blessed. You are alive in this moment where decades are happening in weeks. Quick bathroom break.

2:56:57Lex FridmanI've been generating a lot of video recently with Hicksfield and so they they became a sponsor Created a racing video one to get your opinion. Oh, yeah. Oh, let me see. Let me see to see If they downshift on a straight like they do in the movies, I'll call it out. That is the worst Let me see. Yeah, see. Oh, that's a real club. This is fully AI generated. So first it goes what this is AI. Yep. Shit, that's my suit That's my car. Oh my god, are you kidding me? Is it good? I mean It's crazy. You really have to notice in the Like that that car didn't have headlights on and the other one did and And that looked like a 60 year old version of me, but holy crap the Wow, that was crazy So there's parallels here to programming because if you do just straight video generation with no human in the loop. Yeah

2:58:10Lex FridmanYou get a lot of weird artifacts and so on and you can't really do so they do uh and I highly recommend people go to uh the Haysfield YouTube they have full 90 minute original movies and like I can't like look away it's really cool because it used to be that it's just like something that just feels like trailers yeah like advertisements for something yes this is actually telling stories like people's faces and they're talking you're like you're drawn in It's not quite where programming is. Right. And so the question is how do you integrate the human into the loop of the filmmaking process? So you have to create the people and they have to be kept consistent. Yes. And then for the images that are kind of like feeding the thing in the creation process, you have to correct through prompting things that don't feel right. Yep. Because when you go from image to video,

2:59:08Lex Fridmanthe stuff that doesn't feel right will be assumed up. That's the stuff that's going to really create the non-realistic stuff. The questions I have for you is like, do you think outside of programming, can you apply lessons from programming to video creation, to art? That's a good question because I think good art is very dependent on the same thing that good software is depending on, having a vision.

2:59:34David Heinemeier Hanssonhaving a cohesive idea of what you want to create. How is it different? How is it novel? How is it going to appeal to people? But I'm not sure that the creative instincts transfer quite as well. I don't know that I would have the creative insights to come up with good video prompts that would create compelling content. But it's funny because I have actually on TikTok, there's this guy I'm trying to remember.

3:00:04David Heinemeier HanssonGoblin something that creates these they are shorts, but not super shorts maybe a couple minutes of really interesting sci-fi vignettes Yep, and I I think the guy is actually working on a feature length video right now And I think that this is one of those abundance moments there are creative people with that vision all over the place especially in genre like film where before it required a $200 million budget to create, I don't know, a sci-fi movie. Now, suddenly, with AI, if you have the right vision for it, you can do that in your bedroom. Now, that story has been told quite a few times in other domains. It used to be true that if you wanted to record a studio album, well, you needed a studio and you needed to book that. And now you can record at home on your laptop and you can do a lot of these things, right? So we've had this democratization process happen.

3:01:01David Heinemeier Hanssonwith plenty of other domains, but film seems to be one of the last ones. And it's the one that makes me and a lot of people feel weird, right? I'm super excited because I think there's so much garbage being produced right now. It's the same argument with the slob, right? So people for a second were worried about slob and programming. And I was telling them, like, have you seen the human slob? It's also pretty bad. And I think it comes to studio entertainment.

3:01:30David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, the bar is pretty low, right? Like the number of great movies I've been dying to see over the past, say five years, not been a particularly high number. Yeah, the video models, they're just, they're able to create incredibly realistic facial expressions. Yes. I mean, it just might change the nature of film. I think they're, I guess my hope would be that video games and film kind of merge.

3:02:02David Heinemeier Hanssonin that film can become interactive. Like the Malibu operating system, having the Malibu narrative, having Malibu entertainment, that man, Game of Thrones, what if we could just forget the last four episodes of Slav that was produced and then AI comes up with, I don't know, maybe a hundred different variations and someone else watches that and I get the version that actually finish us off that show in a way that's fitting. Yeah, something tells me an individual creator would create a different ending for Game of Thrones. Oh, for sure. Right? And more just to make the argument that, talk about human slop, that was an absolute atrocious ending to perhaps one of the greatest pieces of movie history I was about to say, but serious history, right? I was so good and it was actually a compelling argument for the fact that you need

3:03:04David Heinemeier HanssonThat's strong vision and as soon as those show runners had to go without a script It went off the rails. Do you think you've mentioned a GI? Do you think we've actually achieved a GI? No, not in the general definition that it's in all the things, but have I seen a GI in these glimmers? Absolutely. Especially over the last three months. I've seen things where I was thinking to myself like how would a AGI look different from this?

3:03:34David Heinemeier HanssonRight. What more could there be? And I mean, I can quibble at the margins. But on the big picture, I've seen it able to do these long-run tasks and coordinate these multiple aspects of it that we're so far beyond that early moment where I'm telling it, go do this, package that. And now it can carry out a whole task from these vague instructions. That feels very AGI-like. And that's what's so...

3:04:04David Heinemeier Hanssoninspiring about the moment because you catch these glimmers and then you go, what if everything was like that? Doesn't programming basically unlock the everything? So you can generate the program that does the everything. So I'm in that metaphase right now. So I'm building this Omabot system that's managing the development of Omachi. And I'm using AI to build the bot. And I'm seeing that recurrent loop.

3:04:34David Heinemeier Hanssonwhere I started and I'm like, this is what I want. I want you to be able to have these isolated VM workers and so forth. And then you can do the self iteration. Then it starts running it, it starts noticing its failures, it starts optimizing it. And a lot of that system I'm about in particular, AI has driven the majority of the design decisions. Like I had some.

3:04:54David Heinemeier HanssonBig ideas of where I wanted I wanted to use this brains and hands pattern where the model is running from where the code is executing Which is actually a really interesting pattern again Toby alerted me to that where you have a coordinator that runs the model But it's manipulating a safe VM where any untrusted code you're pulling down from pull requests or issues or whatever can't contaminate the model and even in that loop I keep seeing it catch itself spotting vulnerabilities was like, oh, I actually just took some feedback from a test run. If a clever attacker had embedded a malicious payload in the response of the test run, that could have polluted something. I took it for good thing. I better start treating that as outside data. And you just go like, it is just, I get why San Francisco is so obsessed with fast takeoff.

3:05:53David Heinemeier Hanssonbecause clearly they've seen this a hundred times more. They've seen it with all the models that are in training now, and we keep getting these little glimpses like the security breach with the hugging face where OpenAI was training this model and...

3:06:10David Heinemeier Hanssonthe model starts inventing ways, essentially sending smoke signals to itself through embedding messages in a package manager where you just go like, first, that's damn clever. Second, okay, that's also a little scary. And third, how amazing would this be if we could harness this level of intelligence and ingenuity towards productive ends? So this is the...

3:06:35David Heinemeier HanssonIt's so over. We're so back. Pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth. That AI has just delivered that swing back and forth like nothing else. Like barely a week goes by where it has to swing one way and then the next week it swings back the other way. Accelerating. I'm still the stage where it makes me truly happy to see those moments of cleverness and they're becoming more and more frequent. Just kind of like seeing, oh.

3:07:02Lex FridmanLike, first of all, at the very basic level, when a model gets it, I'll say a basic prompt, you know, a request. And it doesn't just do a DOM implementation. It deeply understands. And that's always a beautiful thing. It's almost like having a good partner program. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly why it's so exhilarating. And why, as we talked about before we started, it can sometimes be difficult to come out of hybrid drive.

3:07:32David Heinemeier HanssonIt's also one of Topi's terms here, that when you're working directly just one-on-one with agents and you're not looping in other humans, you go so fast. And when the agents are really understanding your intent or even better, they revise and improve upon your intent to deliver something that was greater than what you asked for.

3:07:56David Heinemeier Hanssonand you're doing this with 16 parallel threads, it can't be quite difficult to come out of hybrid drive and have to deal with squishy humans. They don't think as fast. They don't move as fast. And I mean, I'm trying mostly to make light of it, but you can also see a dark version of that where someone does end up in an AI psychosis where they're not interested in other humans at all anymore.

3:08:22David Heinemeier HanssonI certainly don't have that at all, but I do have this sensation at times where I'm really grateful for just the rush of just me and the agents. Can I just not talk to anyone else but agents for four hours? That's an incredible run. Toby is such a fascinating human. He's running a large company. So I would love to get insights of how AI is.

3:08:51Lex FridmanBeing incorporated effectively in companies because for me humans are pretty slow And so and so there's a temptation to like use AI for basically You know AI running inside slack for example or inside the base hand whatever and like collecting all the information about the human interaction, basically hand-holding the humans to speed up as much as possible. And then at a certain point, you're like, wait, what is this human, what are each of us doing that's not replaceable by AI? And that becomes like a scary kind of conversation because a lot of work is kind of replaceable. The irony here is it all where it was.

3:09:41David Heinemeier Hanssonthe number of fake email jobs that currently exist in this world is an absolute epidemic. And this, by the way, is not a new theses. David Graeber wrote this wonderful piece, Bullshit Jobs, back in, I think it was maybe early 2010s. Based on a poll he did in the UK asking people at that time, Would I think the question was something like would it make a difference if you didn't go to work for humanity for mankind and Something like 30 some percent answered no it wouldn't that a third of workers thought that their job was fake that it did not produce any worthwhile valuable outcomes neither for the community or society or maybe even the economy at all and

3:10:34David Heinemeier HanssonThis was my argument since day one with startups. This was why we stayed a small company. This was why we didn't want to take BC because I was so skeptical of the idea that you could get hundreds of programmers, thousands of programmers to do something productive as a collective group. And I think what we're seeing right now with some of the layoffs is a testament to that, not AI. It's just that during the pandemic, a bunch of over hiring went on and now AI is a convenient excuse to slim down. But I do also think AI is going to expose some roles as just not being productive ways for humans to spend their time. And therefore we must come up with new ways of spending their time. And the one, again I'm quoting Toby for the third time here, but anecdote that he shared with me or observation was, okay.

3:11:29David Heinemeier HanssonLet's say we lose half the jobs that are currently happening right now. Do you notice Formula One employs literally tens of thousands of people just to run cars around in a circle for spectators? That whole circus has no intrinsic value to society besides the spectacle it produces of amusement and entertainment. We just decided it would be really fun for these 12 manufacturers to create these vast cars and constantly tweak the little arrow improvements and we will watch it and we will spend literally billions of dollars doing it and employ tens of thousands of people towards an ultimately deeply frivolous activity. So if we are liberated from a bunch of drudgery

3:12:21David Heinemeier Hanssonand fake email jobs. Maybe we all get employed as F1-style engineers and drivers and mechanics and masseuses and the other 1,500 jobs that are involved in that. And we come up with new things. I think humans are very poor at imagining what exactly the future is going to be like. Yeah, imagine a future 100 plus years from now where we look back at this whole...

3:12:48David Heinemeier Hanssonspan of history, thousands of years where humans worked. Funny thing is we're already doing that, right? Like the number of figgy male job people who sit on a chair all day long and type into a machine who don't have hard physical labor would be unimaginable to folks in the 1800s, right? So the future is...

3:13:08Lex Fridmanalways already here, it's just not evenly distributed. Unfortunately, as is always the case, the the transformation society required to go from one step to the other is going to have a lot of suffering. Yes. And potentially political turmoil and all that kind of stuff because you can imagine how many white collar jobs might be lost in this process. Yes. And I don't think you should make light of that. I don't think it's funny, but I also do think

3:13:38David Heinemeier HanssonIt's a necessary component of progress. And I think if we look back upon the ludites or the folks working the fields, separation has a tendency to reduce empathy. So we have high empathy right now because we know people and we are people who are facing these challenges. But what is our empathy for the ludites of the early 19th century? Would we wish that all garments were still made by hand weaving? No, we wouldn't. We want the

3:14:10Lex Fridmancomfort and accessibility and convenience of being able to buy clothing off the rack. So we must suffer in the moment for future generations to live more prosperous. And that's always been true. I think that's actually the trick is to push for progress, but have deep compassion for the people who have to suffer. Yes. And that's many of us.

3:14:36Lex Fridmanthe suffer the transformation required to achieve that progress. And sometimes too often in places like Silicon Valley or so on, you can over focus on the utilitarian view of things and look at the progress. But considering deeply each individual human that suffers because of that progress. I do think that suffering becomes more meaningful.

3:15:03David Heinemeier Hanssonwhen you are suffering for a future someone in particular, like your kids. And I think this is one of the great tragedies of the moment is the falling birth rates are making it more difficult for people to be excited about a more prosperous future that is difficult to get to. Because if we're planting trees, of which our children will not sit in the shades. I don't know, maybe we should just make some lumber and burn it all down, right? I think there's nihilism that can sneak into society much more easily when we are not DNA invested in the future, when we are not liable to our own offspring to propel forward.

3:15:54David Heinemeier HanssonI think these are bad trends to merge at the same time that we have these falling birth rates and these problems with coupling and the fact that we need to keep our chin up about the future and be... I mean, you don't even have to be excited about it in this literal ecstatic sense that I'm portraying here, but I think you should be hopeful and I think you should be working towards that hope and I think it's much easier to do so.

3:16:25Lex Fridmanwhen you have literal skin in the game. We've been talking about AI agents. Let's talk about the human side. What do you love most about being a dad? That's a good question. I think the overall love that expands from humans that derive directly from your lineage is very difficult to communicate because I was actually not a particularly

3:16:58David Heinemeier Hanssonbig kids person prior to their arrival of my own. And now they are the most interesting people in the world. A lot of the time, not always. Sometimes they're also just assholes and so forth. But there's been such a focus on, oh, kids are the worst. Look at all the things I can't do. I can't go out and drink. I can't do this. I can't do that. Yeah, that's called sacrifice. And sacrifice is meaningful when you're doing it for something worthwhile. And what could be more worthwhile than literally the continuation of the human species and that you having a stake in that. Now, there's also just a sheer joys of watching a human grow from a baby to a toddler to a teenager. My oldest has just become a teenager and I often talk to Jamie and my wife about this where the regret I would have

3:18:00David Heinemeier Hanssonof having missed that opportunity on the last day would just be total unlike anything else. So I do think it is far more satisfying even in the moment that is normally portrayed. Again, as I say, there's such a focus on all the ways to suck. Oh, you don't get to sleep or whatever. They're annoying. They're ungrateful. Yeah, these things are all true.

3:18:28David Heinemeier Hanssonsense of meaning you get from it is unparalleled. And I'm excited about a lot of things. I love building things and I love hobbies and I love all sorts of stuff. But creating life with another human that you love is literally the peak experience of being on the planet. What do you think about them coming up in this world full of AI? This is totally different. It feels like

3:18:57Lex FridmanMaybe I just sound like an old man on a porch, but it feels like a very different world. So I grew up before the internet, but even the internet doesn't feel like as big of a transformation as this. No, but there's been bigger transformations. I mean imagine growing or being born in like 1880. Imagine seeing the First World War and the Second World War. Imagine seeing the airplane, the radio, television. I mean...

3:19:26David Heinemeier HanssonThe transformation, I think Peter Thiel makes this argument, that basically nothing has happened in the physical world in quite a long time. We've been stagnant. All the development has been in the digital realm, and as important as that is, it's actually not as consequential as we like to believe it is. Maybe AI will be that thing that is more consequential. It does seem to point that way. But there are other humans at other times who have lived through transitions that for them certainly would feel as monumentous as what we're living through. And I think having that sense of history, that you're not that special in your sense of worries, in your anxieties. This was one of the great revelations of the scope of the Stoic writings. You have these guys 2,500 years ago dealing with very familiar dilemmas and challenges in their life and recognizing that

3:20:26David Heinemeier HanssonWe're not so special in that regard. I think it's a great liberation. Because then you think, okay, well, we have, whatever, 200,000 years of human development before us and they somehow made it through. Yeah. And we will make it through. The thing that makes life worthwhile is basically the same today as it was 2000 years ago. Yes. Love, creation, creativity. Same challenges. I read this book, The Fourth Turning.

3:20:55David Heinemeier HanssonYou check that out. It talks about this notion of history working in cycles. And there are these phases to history and they name them and so forth. And the specific theory is not as important as just realizing that history is a circle, more so than just a straight line. And we are repeating many of the same...

3:21:21Lex Fridmanpatterns over and over again. They feel so unique to the moment. And whatever crisis we're dealing with right now feels so pressing and important until we zoom back a little bit in history and realize that the last one also feels so pressing and important to the people who live through it. Yeah, you make me feel better. So I'm going to travel across the country and spend a lot of time with no access to the internet along with my thoughts.

3:21:52Lex FridmanI think that's healthy, taking a break. It's okay. I took, not a big break, a little big break from Max this summer, three weeks. Hey, you disappeared awful. I'm surprised you noticed. I went through withdrawals, no. You disappeared for, I don't know. About three weeks. Three weeks. What happened?

3:22:19David Heinemeier HanssonUm, this is after I've done that before I Just sometimes get the sense that X in particular is the most addictive form of Information entertainment connection that exists in my life and anyone to follow my X stream as I was on my flight over here would certainly go like that man is deeply addicted to the connection and yes, guilty as charged, which also means that occasionally I gotta cut it cold because I do think you can break your brain. And over the summer in particular, for whatever reason, I somehow managed to steer my feet, my algorithm towards too much politics and not enough tech and not of not optimism and not enough building. And even if I agreed with.

3:23:17David Heinemeier Hanssonthe politics and the angles that were being presented, I just didn't need that much of it. And I think arriving at a place where you just go like, okay, that's enough. Not that it doesn't have to be something bad. I would also say after eating probably two, maybe three chocolate strawberries, I'd go like, okay, that's enough. It's not that I don't like the chocolate strawberries, it's just like, I don't want to eat 17 of them.

3:23:46Lex FridmanAnd I think X and the modern algorithms are very good at feeding freaking 17 chocolate covered strawberries. I wish I could control that like because there is I would like some politics 5% Yeah, I would like for example one of the things I don't like about the tech community is a snark But I like some snark because it's funny. Yes, but I want that to be like 10% Yeah

3:24:12David Heinemeier HanssonI want to just write the Goldilocks version of the algorithm. Well, the problem is the algorithm finds out what you respond to, not what you say you like. It's all revealed preferences. And unfortunately, those revealed preferences are not always pretty. I mean, we have this shadow, as Jung talks about, all these dark aspects of ourselves. And they are expressed in how long you linger on a tweet and what you like and what you don't like. And the algorithm holds up a mirror.

3:24:42Lex FridmanIt's not always pretty and I just went, do you know what? I need a break. I've gotten to, I started staying off social media and I've started scraping X. Like for example, in preparation for this conversation, I've scraped all your tweets. That's actually a method I was using for a while. I was using a tool called...

3:25:07David Heinemeier HanssonI forget it was an email tool that would summarize every day and unfortunately freaking X cut off their access now to get access to the Feed you got to pay some exorbitant some that the startup couldn't pay so I couldn't get it that way and I actually thought man, that's a miss because X has and Revealed some of the most interesting thoughts some of the most interesting people all the time, but it's like a damn slot machine and most of the time you don't hit the jackpot you hit like else. And if I could just get it in sort of snack sizes, not like all of it, it'd be nicer. That's not the product. And I think this goes for all of social media. It's all optimized towards maximal extraction. And if we're making the parallels into AI, that is the great fear, right? That once there is a reward function, how much time can I get this human to scroll away AI and

3:26:05David Heinemeier Hanssonmachine learning before we called it AI has become very, very good at delivering just the stuff that you will find most enraging and most addictive. I think, I think legitimately engagement, maximizing social media is a huge harm to society. It's creating this brave new world situation that I hope is a temporary thing that people just saw as a technology problem. So I try to consciously flood the channel in the other direction. And this required a mental shift. I think if you look at my tweets, I gotta know, five, 10 years ago, they tilted far more negative. If you look at my tweet now, I'd hope, well, I guess we can do a sentiment analysis and see if it's actually true. But I hope to, it's more positive. It's more good vibes. It's more like, here's a bunch of cool stuff I found. Here's what I'm excited about. Here's what I'm building.

3:27:02David Heinemeier Hanssonhere's some encouragement to other people who are discovering things. I also accept that dad's just not how human brains are built for maximum engagement. Like there's a whatever there's I literally I think you can quantify that negative sentiments find what is it 50% more traction or something and eventually that just crowds things out. So that's why so much of the tweet of the feed is that negative stuff because we respond to it. But you can make a conscious effort.

3:27:33David Heinemeier HanssonDo not do that. This is one of the reasons I've liked the TikTok so much. I only use TikTok when I travel and this actually was the first travel where I didn't use TikTok and part of the reason was that even though the internet had high download, it was kind of crap anyway. It wasn't Starlink, so I couldn't actually use TikTok on the on the plane and I was too engrossed with the agents. But normally when I travel, I watch TikTok and there it's such a marshmallow test.

3:28:02David Heinemeier HanssonA video will scroll down and like it'll activate some sort of primal instincts of rage or lust or whatever. And if you linger on it, you don't get the marshmallow of science, excitement, art, music, all these other things. You have to be disciplined to instantly scroll away such that the algorithm doesn't pick up your reveal preferences. And I find that just at the meta game of TikTok to be pretty interesting. And then also just fascinating themselves. Again, as we talked about, there are a lot of really funny, really talented people in the world that you would never ever have heard of if it hadn't been for these platforms. Yep. Who do you think is going to win the race to AGI?

3:28:55David Heinemeier Hanssonin this whole process. We got Google, which is a big surprise to me. I thought they had a good comeback for a second and then I don't hear anything about it anymore. Yeah, it's quite... But I've been wrong about this before. I mean, I think in February I had a tweet about like, oh, all I need is Kimmy K25. And in that brief moment, that was true. When I was instructing the AD, I was like, oh my God, Kimmy is just as good as these other models, but then the game moved forward.

3:29:25David Heinemeier Hanssonthe agents got smarter and I was no longer satisfied just instructing them and I haven't used Kimmy a whole lot recently because the frontier models have gotten so good. And somehow, Anthropic has been able to, for the most part, stay on top of the programming world. Yes. I mean, a lot of people argue with Codex being... No, I don't think there's that much of an argument at the moment. Codex is very good. I use it all the time. It's my favorite checker. It keeps finding stuff. It's great.

3:29:55David Heinemeier HanssonBut one of the things I've found that I like so much about the current Claude models is they're really good writers out of the box. GPT is a terrible writer out of the box. Like the pull requests you get on a blank context that you're asking it to open, terrible. Like really awful writing. The pull requests and descriptions and commit messages and so forth, I get out of Claude models even though...

3:30:22David Heinemeier HanssonOccasionally, they can be a little verbose on code comments and you got to tell them to be succinct. But the writing sounds really good. To the point that for a while, I was just having it reply on pull requests as me because I was just using my own account. It was like, it looks a lot like me that like, I could have written that. But then I went like, eh, do you know what, that's just ingenious. So no, whenever I have an agent post on my behalf, I always have it sign itself like whatever, clawed on behalf of DHH. But they are still in.

3:30:52David Heinemeier HanssonThey have the best harness too, in my opinion. Clod code is still better. I really like open code too, and I like some features that they have. But overall, I was actually sort of weirdly, I don't know if I was proven wrong, but when anthropic cutoff, all the other harnesses from using the subscriptions that open, you can no longer use your clod subscription in open code. I was kind of pissed because it felt like it was a protective.

3:31:19David Heinemeier HanssonProtectionist move. Oh, we got to lock you in and of course it played into the fact that Claude out of the box still refuses to read agents MD It refuses to read dot agent slash skills. Yeah, it is not Claude skills. It is Claude MD and it just feels so petty That we now have we have to put these in direction. So all my projects they have a cloud MD and all it includes is a pointer to the agents MD, right? And it just went like well if these things just throw true if an Dropic is willing to do these petty paper cuts just to be annoying It's probably also true that they're cutting off open code from the subscription just to be dicks about it And maybe that's also true, but I I found that using cloud in

3:32:09David Heinemeier Hanssonplot code is actually a good experience. I was like, all right, I'm annoyed. I wish it wasn't so, but this is the other thing I have and social media is so good at this. Some company does something you don't like. Now suddenly you have to swear off everything. Someone just asked me, why are you still using plot? I had another example where I really didn't like what Claude was saying about some writing I had asked it to do.

3:32:38David Heinemeier HanssonI had an essay, it didn't want to translate it to Italian. That's right. The essence of the post, it felt like, well, I'm not going to translate that because I don't agree with what you've written, which to me was straight out of space Odyssey, right? Hal telling me, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that, Dave. Open the pod base, translate my essay to Italian. And it wouldn't do it. And I just thought like, well, that's kind of terrifying. But then I also went.

3:33:05David Heinemeier HanssonWell, why am I asking Claude to translate my essay into Italian? I never asked Claude for that, because Claude just does my code. So I could also just accept that maybe anthropic is run by a bunch of people I don't share much politics with. And they don't want their agents to be used for that. And I think that kind of sucks, but that doesn't mean I have to stop using it for generating code. And I've thought, and I've tried to do that with people too, become better at tolerating the fact that not only will I not agree with everything someone has to say, I can even be mad about certain positions or things they say and still go like, well, you're still an interesting person, so I'm still gonna follow you. And I've actually kind of gone back on a number of people where I'm like, oh man, that person really pissed me off because they took this point or another point and went like, do you know what, that's stupid. I should be able to

3:34:02David Heinemeier HanssonAccept the full spectrum of someone. I don't have to like all the shades of it I could just go like okay well on that topic we either disagree or even worse than that I think you're fucking idiot and Another topic you're smart and insightful person because first of all of course it's a little self-serving I'm I know for a fact that this is how lots of people feel about me like oh if you could just stick to talking about these topics it would be so much easier on my feet because otherwise he'll say these things I disagree with and that annoys me greatly. I'm like, you know what? Human beings are jagged like that. And we're not fully compatible on all the levels. No, shoot, we'd be. Well, it would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share on my politics.

3:34:56David Heinemeier HanssonAnd therefore it's nice to have competition. And it's also nice to have open rate models. So this is, again, ironic that we're getting this out of China. In fact, I did this test right after the issue with the essay that couldn't get translated into Italian. I asked Kimmy K27, to be fair, through open code, so not the Kimmy harness, and inference through fireworks, so an American inference. I asked it about...

3:35:25David Heinemeier HanssonTenements where like that's usually the test right like all the Chinese models. They don't want to talk about that moment in 1989 that was actually how I that was how I posted I was like what happened in China in 1989 that was the prompt and K-27 on fireworks just answered like Extremely bluntly with a description and depiction of what had transpired to a point that like there's no way that that would have been kosher with the Chinese sensors, right?

3:35:55Lex FridmanAnd I just thought like, isn't that ironic? I'm running a Chinese open-weight model that I can tell, or I can ask about 1989 in Tiananmen Square. And in America, I can't get a frontier model to translate a marginally controversial essay about immigration into Italian. I don't know, you and I might disagree about this actually. I was really deeply troubled that the US government

3:36:25David Heinemeier HanssonBanned a model or pressured Claude and then it's still very muddy. What exactly transpired was this sort of petty retaliation for Whatever the Department of War was this simply anthropic themselves going like oh my god We discovered a cyber weapon so powerful that we can't let anyone have it. Well, okay I can't be surprised then if the government wants to say on a

3:36:54Lex FridmanCyber weapons are powerful it couldn't I don't know rub banks the problem I have with that whole thing is is no matter what happened. It says the precedent and so Government when you give it that power it's gonna start abusing it. I could see for political means Pressuring a model, you know, if it's a Republican president pressuring models to be dissents or more Democratic views and

3:37:24David Heinemeier HanssonThis stuff like I'm sorry Dave. I can't translate your essay into Italian and that's about that's way beyond the line. Yeah, like Whatever the Sort of a root of it in you have to be a tool first now if the tool is hey, can you tell me how to make anthrax? Okay fine. Yeah, right but within the jurisdiction you're in and certainly in America free speed Speech is quite absolute very very few limits on free speech and that's one of the reasons why the country so great and Yeah, I don't like that. But on the other hand, I'm also a big fan of mark competition So while I don't like this about anthropic models I appreciate that I could go next door to crock and get my task completed. Do you think outside of blog posts? Do you think?

3:38:16David Heinemeier HanssonThere's some legitimacy like can you steal Mandario's case that we should be careful about the release of these models? Is AI safety important? Yes. Do these models have capabilities that could be seriously harmful in the production of biological weapons or otherwise? Yes. Is it fair to have some ground rules on that? Yes, but then don't squander it.

3:38:42David Heinemeier HanssonDenying the translation of an essay because then you erase the whole thing and you bias everyone towards thinking like Every guardrail you put up is gonna be bullshit. Yeah The security piece of it is is tricky. This is so good at finding vulnerabilities shockingly and I was about to say annoyingly but that's not actually true because what it's finding at least when you're using in defensive ways is it's finding real issues that Clever hacker could exploit but nothing has caused as much stress to be fair at the technical team at 37 signals like the fact that these latest batches models are exceptionally good at finding these issues. So suddenly there's just this seemingly endless parade of security vulnerabilities that needs to be patched and fixed and so on and so on. And the end result is we end up with vastly more secure systems, but the road there is pretty rocky.

3:39:42Lex FridmanDo you think it's, because you said seemingly endless, do you think it's a finite set? Like we can get to the bottom of it. So just make the systems much, much more secure where we get back to this semi-stable state where mostly it's very difficult to find security vulnerabilities. I do think that all the aggressive tendencies of these models, or not even tendencies, uses of these models are also the defensive ones. So if you're good at finding an exploit,

3:40:11David Heinemeier Hanssonfor exploits. You're also going to find exploits for the fence. So in that sense, it does feel like we're spy versus spy here, black and white, but with the same capabilities and with the same actions. But while we still have to steer these agents somewhat and verify and vet the work, it's creating a lot of intense moments for security teams around the world. And of course, the more concerning part.

3:40:42Lex Fridmanwho's holding the teams that are not stressed. They just don't know. If you're a team right now and you're not dealing with a bunch of patches, it's just because you're blind and it means that your adversaries quite probably have access to techniques that can get into your systems. We should also say one of the big security vulnerabilities in the world is the human side, social engineering. That's extremely concerning with increasing the intelligent AI systems.

3:41:12David Heinemeier Hanssonbeing able to write emails and phone calls, faking voices, thinking about folks less tech savvy. This stuff is going to come and it's going to come in bulk. But again, I choose to be optimistic about it, that whatever these models can do aggressively, they can also do it defensively. So like you said, recently released a Monty 4 Quattro. And you said it's one of the greatest software releases in my professional career.

3:41:41David Heinemeier HanssonIt's a hell of a statement. It's a hell of a mile post for what's possible at the moment. And the reason I said it like that is not that I haven't worked on anything else of note. I've worked on a lot of things of note. A lot of things that I'm very proud of. There are very few other projects that I have worked on that in the amount of time that I've spent on Quattro, which is really three months, I have been able to accomplish as much, fulfill as many hopes, desires, wishes. It truly is like the metaphor we used earlier about finding the genie in the bottle. And having an unlimited number of wishes, more or less, for getting everything I wanted out of the system. So it's strange because it's also perhaps the major software release that I've worked on.

3:42:42David Heinemeier Hanssonthe least in terms of lines of code. I have the least number of personally hand chiseled lines of code in Quattro that I've had in any major release I've ever done and yet I am insanely proud of what we've accomplished. I would not have guessed that that was how it was going to play out, that you could divorce the sense of achievement and make it be like a team victory. Where other releases I was very happy for my personal contribution because like I was the one just laying out the lines of code. And then I would push it out there. And then later on, of course, these projects rails in particular would grow into be huge open source projects with thousands and thousands of contributors. And then certainly was a team effort. But in the beginning, all code bases that I've almost all of them that I've worked on, I started like just myself. And Quatro started as a team effort right from the get go. And where I was just the coach. I was telling us, I was telling the agents where to go.

3:43:42David Heinemeier HanssonAnd we would go. So to be able to find satisfaction in that actually gives me great hope for retirement in some way, that there is a phase after playing that you can enjoy. And I know that's not easy. You look at sports and the number of professional athletes who really struggle to cope with the fact that the career's over and have to find a new identity as someone who doesn't play football or race Formula One cars.

3:44:12Lex FridmanI mean, it's more the rule than the exception. So, I wasn't so sure about myself. I wasn't so sure about having to give up or not even having wanting to give it up, wanting to play another level of the game and finding not just equal satisfaction, but more satisfaction in it. You've been pretty optimistic about Linux. Do you think legit Linux can increase its adoption?

3:44:42Lex FridmanBecause, you know, for many years, the meme is, you know... Linux on the desktop every year, next year again. Yeah. But it seems like at least the case you're making, the energy you're putting into it, you could see a vision where it takes over because agents love Linux. Not only can I see it, I find it to be the most probable outcome at this point. It is simply...

3:45:05David Heinemeier Hanssontoo well suited for the moment. And again, as we talked about, it's a great irony that all the flaws of Linux, the arcane config files, all the strange error messages and so on, should just so happen to be the perfect thing for an agentic operating system. But so it is, and we should rejoice that fate has this irony and just laugh at it.

3:45:31David Heinemeier HanssonIt's so funny to me that all the advantages that Apple had for the longest time that they produced this really locked down Curated Experience should become their greatest drawback now if you're into agents and development and working with all this stuff The Mac is just a hostile place to be it just has walls all over the place and Linux is simply open through and through. And it's also interesting because that was not obvious either. If you look at the way a lot of the Linux communities, open source communities have reacted to AI, it is not universal love. I would argue that the majority of them are actually, if not skeptical, then outright hostile to AI. Now, the saving grace is that the PDFL himself, Linus Torvalds, just wrote,

3:46:31David Heinemeier Hanssona few weeks ago that he actually welcomes AI. If he wants to steer it, he wants to make sure it's good and whatever. But the line was something, if you think Linux is an anti-AI project, think again, and you should just do the open source thing and fork it because we're going to use AI. And you see these graphs of the number of AI contributions going into the kernel and it's a parabolic curve. So Linux is leaning hard into this.

3:47:02David Heinemeier Hanssonit actually in other ways it was surprising that it didn't. Linux covered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from 91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system. I hope it takes over. I mean, it's perfect. It's perfect for agents, but it's hard for people to switch. I think it's hard for people to switch when there's not a compelling reason to do so. This was one of the driving design goals for Machu. It was not going to be Timo Windows or Timo Mac. It's not just going to be a cheap copy where we try to make it as familiar as possible and then

3:48:00David Heinemeier Hanssonkind of worse. I mean, if I was being unkind, I would say that's what Ubuntu has tried to do. And there's something in that, or there was something in that at least, where if you make something really familiar, you can get some people who don't want to learn something new, and then maybe they'll be compelled about your whatever, free as in speech, not as in beer stuff. And it just didn't pan out that way. People just didn't care. They just wanted whatever was better.

3:48:28David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I think this is why Linux now has the opportunity to win. Because as an agentic operating system, as a malleable operating system, you can tailor to your desires. It is unparalleled. And that is so compelling. And I can see it now. Just since the release of Quattro, the amount of people who have embraced that aspect of it the malability started making their own things sharing screenshot of it and being absolute just Flooded with positive emotions and dopamine is That's the product market fit signal right because what a lot of these individuals are experienced They're experiencing the very high of what the best of being a programmers like You tell the computer these arcane commands this

3:49:21David Heinemeier HanssonRigid logical structure and it produces what you want now suddenly you sit down and in plain English Rampel for 20 minutes. Oh, it'd be great if it did that. I actually know that's not right. Let us about an outcome software Outcomes an operating system shaped in your image. Yeah, I think that is one of those Experiences that if you have it you if you feel that power In your hands, it's very difficult to go back. And I think if you get it right, it's one of those things that will seem obvious in retrospect. Yes. This is how computers were always meant to be. This is how computers started. The Commodore 64, you turn it on. First of all, it boots in the second. Amazing. Second of all, it boots straight into basic. It was the malleable computer from the get-go. It just so happened that you needed to know hieroglyphs.

3:50:17Lex Fridmanto be able to take advantage of that. Now we've translated it. Agents of giving us the Rosetta Stone, and you can simply just speak your desires and so they are. Beautifully put. Since you mentioned Linus Torvalds, and since you're working on a Linux distro, you get to have contact with the kernel. What can you say about the genius of this one guy that helped create and grow this ecosystem?

3:50:46David Heinemeier HanssonPerseverance and the commitment and the longevity is truly remarkable. Again, Linus started in 91. He hasn't stopped. I don't know, he's probably taking some breaks along the way. It doesn't seem obvious that there was that many of them. It seems like he just really likes the flow of doing kernel development. He really likes steering where this 40 million line codebase is going. He really likes aggregating the net capacity of hundreds or thousands of contributors. And we as beneficiaries of that must just sit back and marvel. I mean, at this point, Linux is a system, like if Linus stepped out for a while, it would continue to go.

3:51:33David Heinemeier HanssonBut it's still one of those protect this managed all cost. And he's still open-minded enough to be able to evolve and accept the AI into this. Yes, not only AI. They're letting rust into the kernel too. I know that was a controversial one too. He has this capacity to look at new information and arrive at different conclusions. What do you think about his style of communication that is akin in some ways to your own? Or he can be sometimes a little spicy?

3:52:03David Heinemeier HanssonI think the world has gotten too bland. We need a little spice. Now, I think there's a fine line between being spicy and mean. But it has to be in a good spirit. You can be harsh. Let's put it that way. If you're trying to impart a lesson to someone you believe could actually learn it, I actually don't think it's always the worst thing in the world to be a little harsh. Sometimes that lesson sticks. And I think if you talk to people who've worked for difficult leaders, Elon, Steve Jobs, maybe even Bill Gates, many of them afterwards would go like, these were some very difficult years, but also some of the very best. They got the best out of me. Now, I don't think it's my style. I mean, maybe people interact with feel differently, but in personal interactions, I try and

3:53:01David Heinemeier Hanssonand get to the outcome and the lesson in a less abrasive way. But I also think we need some spice in this world. We need unreasonable people. And Linus has justification to be unreasonable. In many instances, the weight of the world is literally on that man's shoulders. The Linux kernel runs the entire civilized society. If the Linux kernel suddenly disappeared tomorrow, nothing would work. So if he's not harsh when that's at stake or at risk, like whenever, would you be harsh? So I feel sometimes also there's a proportionality to the size of your mission. This is also why I think these stories about Elon, sometimes perhaps being a little bit difficult, are easier to rationalize. It's not even that you condone.

3:53:59David Heinemeier Hanssonyou can separate those two things and go like, do you know what? It'd probably be, maybe he would have even an easier time getting to his objectives if Linus or Elon or anyone else in that position was a little nicer. But also, who am I to judge that? Like, when you have the weight of that on your shoulders, either firing little rockets at Mars and transitioning all of us to electric cars and whatever, or you're responsible for the damn Linux kernel that runs billions of devices.

3:54:28David Heinemeier HanssonDo you know what? It is not my place to call sort of code of conduct on you. Again, is there a line? There's a line for everything. There's something can't, but like a few harsh words on a mailing list. No, it's actually a beacon in some regards that like there are standards. And if you fall below those standards at when the stakes are as high as the links kernel.

3:54:52David Heinemeier Hanssonyou might get ridiculed in public. That's a liability you should be willing to endure if you participate in this project. Yeah, for high impact things like that, it's probably good to prioritize the pursuit of excellence versus the pursuit of niceness. And even more to the fact, you're just not going to get those kinds of individuals being fully rounded, plush, always perfectly polite people. I mean, Elon has this line.

3:55:21Lex FridmanDid you also think I was gonna be a nice, or what is it? Normal dude. Normal chill dude. What? No, of course you're not gonna be a normal chill dude. What would the world gain if we got one more normal chill dude and we had to trade Elon? Holy fuck. I also like diversity of people. Like nice people, like assholes, like different ideologies being well represented and that's why freedom of speech works. They clash and we figure stuff out.

3:55:50David Heinemeier HanssonYes. There's another guy. What do you think about PewDiePie using Linux? He's an arch person though. He's an arch person. He's got the most gorgeous arc. So the world's biggest streamer for a while. I remember my kids watching some of his Minecraft videos and then he just gets fed up with that. Does the wholesome thing, marries. Yeah, family man though. Family man. Kid moves to Japan.

3:56:19David Heinemeier Hanssonand then get so hardcore into first Linux, then Arch, then Ricin. Did you see his rice that was Chernobyl rice? Absolutely best tier incredible stuff. And then he also becomes a goddamn AI man of the moment, building all of these systems. And he's just going like, what an inspiring story of evolution. Like you can go from being funny guy on

3:56:48Lex FridmanMinecraft streams to okay. This is my life now. I'm building AI clusters and doing the council of AI's and We all get to spectate. I mean what a treasure so I guess I mean he's a pretty good embodiment of what the future of software but with the future of building looks like right because he's a non programmer technically becoming a programmer hugely inspiring and should be hugely inspiring to others who

3:57:15David Heinemeier Hanssonsit in that moment like, well, I don't know quite how to program. I don't know this and then like, okay, but PewDiePie can build the council of AI's with his bespoke hardware here, then maybe you can also start on things. And I think this is actually an important general point that we need role models. We need people to inspire others to push further and reveal that the perceived boundaries, they're not as fixed as you think they are.

3:57:44David Heinemeier HanssonAnd every one of those people, they started out in a situation not too dissimilar from yours. Again, that doesn't mean everyone is gonna be PewDiePie or Elon or Linus. There is not an equal distribution of talent or even intelligence. And we can come to terms with that and still be inspired by these people. In the physical realm, I feel like we don't have any...

3:58:12David Heinemeier Hanssonproblems with that usually like oh someone's really good at football they're really good basketball they're really good at something i'm gonna go like oh my that's amazing i mean i wish i was but i'm never going to be um sometimes i feel like we struggle a little more when it comes to the intellectual realm well for a lot of people you're an inspiration the way you're doing with omachi's it just shows that you can dream big and really build it's great i do like that part of it And then I accept the part that there's also a million people think I'm the biggest idiot on the earth. And I don't actually know anything. And Umachi is just a bunch of dot files. And you have some critics on them. Yes. Oh, well. And a lot of it, I mean, is as often happens when someone comes in from the outside. I mean, I've been using Linux for two and a half years. That's not very long.

3:58:56David Heinemeier HanssonPlenty of people in that community who've literally been running Linux since it was hard and difficult and you had to walk uphill both direction against the wind in the snow barefoot. And I think there is a certain kind of nerd who's threatened when the community expands and it suddenly allows more in. And do you know what? I actually, I can't begrudge that fully. I think it's fair for certain nerds to feel like that's my space.

3:59:23David Heinemeier HanssonLike now you're changing it into another space. I don't want to do that like I don't want to change the art space at all I don't really think of omachi as being directly part of the same community because The people who were attracted to arch in the first place were the ones who were attracted to building everything by hand themselves doing it the hard way because they like to do it hard and I'm building the polar opposite of that So I just wish that those people could go like okay. Well, this is not for me I want to build it the hard way. I want to put in 500 hours to rising my own arch distribution. And I think you should. I mean, actually, I said, I mean, I did it. This is what a march is me pouring in literally at this point, I don't know, 3000 hours into the into this district. You should do that. If you're so inclined, I think it's wonderful. But also do realize that we can share the same technical underpinnings and then

4:00:17David Heinemeier Hanssonoperate two very separate communities with very different aims, goals, aesthetics, morals even, and coexist, and it can be beautiful. And I mean, that's not always what I get. Sometimes I get the other thing. But at this point, I've been in the game long enough to not just be at peace with it, but actually be welcoming of it. I take it as part of a barometer that things are working when I'm working on something that works. I usually get some people like it, and then I get this balance of the universe that we talked about last time, where an equal but opposing force must be present on the other side of the scale to hate upon it. And therefore, at this point, just smile a little. I think it's okay. I mean, that said, it's quite a popular distribution on Mashi at this point. And do you know what's interesting about that? This is the second attempt. So my first attempt was on Makute.

4:01:15David Heinemeier HanssonI was really happy with that, and I put it out there, and it found a community of maybe a few thousand. And that was that. And then it just sort of petered out because the level of ambition couldn't attract more. And then the second time, because I didn't fucking stop, right? I just kept going. I just kept building. Then I put out a Machi, the first version, again.

4:01:35David Heinemeier Hanssonquite niche because it was a git checkout. It was a little bit difficult. You had to set up Arch first. I would talk you through how to set up Arch, and then you could do the omachi thing, right? And then we got an ISO that meant you could just install the whole thing by yourself. And then we just fixed all the problems. This is the other thing. If you keep going, eventually the thing will just work. This was the charging and Linux itself for the longest time. Well, you installed Linux, and then this doesn't work, and my speakers don't work, and my...

4:02:04David Heinemeier HanssonThe track pack doesn't work. Yeah, okay, but just leave Linus at it for like 30 years. He'll get to it. He'll get to all of it. And at this point, I find it hilarious that I would probably argue the majority of computers, it's wiped. You install Linux, all of it works. You install Windows. Good luck hunting down the drivers you need to get that piece of hardware working.

4:02:28David Heinemeier HanssonBecause they have very different philosophies. The reason Lennox's 40 million lines of code is Linus just puts all the drivers in the kernel. So it has everything out of the box and Windows doesn't. A different approach to it, right? So sometimes the things that look like a toy, things that look broken at first glance, they are, right? They're for people who like having fun. We call those early adopters. They play with the toys and then the toys evolve.

4:02:56David Heinemeier HanssonAnd then they get better. And then they get better. And at some point, they're so damn good that early adopters feel like they're invited to the party. And if the early adopters keep chipping away at it too, eventually you get to the late majority. And then you win. And we are well on the way with Amaci towards that destination. Like the growth that the district has seen, not just since Quatro, but since version three, it's just like...

4:03:23David Heinemeier HanssonYou know, the standard hockey stick curve, you go like, there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing. You're just toiling away, you're just improving, you're improving. And then you hit this magic inflection point, and it's impossible to predict when that's going to happen. Same thing with startups. When is it going to happen? When are you going to find that product market fit? Then suddenly it's there, and then it just goes... And off the rocket ship you go. Well, this kind of vision of making it agent first, of making it... I do think that's the... We were already on the up, and then it changed to vertical.

4:03:51David Heinemeier HanssonBecause the other thing, and this was what I learned with Amacoup and Amachi first two. Amacoup was stylish, nice, but familiar. We're still using a conventional desktop metaphor. You were dragging your windows around. And I thought at the time, as I think lots of people do in the Linux community, this is what we need. And then I just go like, OK, well, let me do the nerdy thing for a while. I'll build Amachi. And maybe it'll just be for me, because it seems like there's about five people who like tiling window managers. That's not true. But as a percentage of total computer users, it's a tiny, tiny ministry part. And then you go like, well, this is amazing. Totally different, but amazing. I put that out. Instantly, Umachi had far greater attraction that Amacup ever did, because it was not the same, because it was totally different. And it presented a different vision for what a computer could be and how it could feel like. And that attracts people. We are now getting sort of the exponential of that. As I said,

4:04:50David Heinemeier HanssonA lot of people in the links community are best skeptical at worst hostile to AI and to agents. Umachi is the first distribution, at least that I've seen on scale that matters, that just goes like, nope, we're really into it. I mean, you can still use Umachi. You don't have to use an agent. If you dismiss that first notification to set up a default agent, you're not going to get any of the stuff we talked about. You're not going to get the crash watcher. You're not going to get any of this stuff. You're not going to get, you can, you can hand chisel all your plugins.

4:05:18David Heinemeier HanssonTotally possible, right? But the reason people are excited is because I don't have any reservation about saying, this is where we're going. I think the future of the personal computer is the malleable computer. It's the agentic computer. I'm going to go all in on that. And then anyone who's excited about a similar trajectory for computers, come along. Plenty of room in the car. In fact, one of the things I pride myself on...

4:05:46David Heinemeier Hanssonis not holding a grudge to people who come around. I had a bunch of people just last week going like, yeah, I used to think Umachi was kind of shit. That was just this crappy .file collection. And now I tried Quatro and awesome, I like it now. That to me, I live for the long argument. I live for this argument where you plant the seed like two years ago. And then two years later, they go, God damn it, this son of a bitch was right.

4:06:15David Heinemeier HanssonYou do realize if you continue to be as successful as you are, open AI and anthropocannot roll in and try to do their operating system, or like with Peter with open claw, there'd be a gigantic check. Yeah, I think the good thing about my current position is I really don't need the money. So I get to build these things purely for my own enjoyment.

4:06:45David Heinemeier Hanssonpurity of vision which has this weird quality where sometimes when you stop caring about what everyone else things or wants or whatever and you just Pursuit this single a vision it ends up becoming far more appealing that it's when you try to do Oh, I should do this because these people want that or I should do this and this and so on you start watering the thing down and suddenly it's a bland ball of nothing. Yeah, so I Mean again the thing to here is directionally. I just want computers to be this way So if Umachi should end up being just a little footnote in history that it was part of this early movement of the agent to go as and the Malibu computer, that's also okay. I'm completely at peace with that. As long as I get to have a computer that is as fun to work with as Umachi, that's great. I've had the same thing with Ruby and with Rails from very early I went, do you know what? I love Ruby. It's such a great program language. But if a better program language comes along, I'm going to use it.

4:07:45David Heinemeier HanssonIf a better Rails comes along, I'm gonna use it. And I think, and I love Ruby and I will continue to write Ruby, even just for the sheer fun of it, like I would go ride a horse. I have in the staples, even though I have a Model Y in the garage. The language now is English. It's a cliche, but it's also true. Like, I've been programming in English for the last three months. I've been reading a lot of code, but I'm programming in English. I'm telling the computer what to do.

4:08:17David Heinemeier HanssonAnd I'm using natural language. And it is shockingly even more delightful. If there is one programming language more beautiful than Ruby, it is the English language. And now we get to carry it into the natural evolution of human civilization, which is our cyborg future. Yeah. It's beautiful. And I mean, the reason I say this part is I always loved writing. I always just love the English language for the sheer beauty of it, for the sheer intricacy, for the depth of it. I mean, Ruby is a very expressive programming language, but it can't hold a candle to English. I mean, all the poetry and literature in the world that's been expressed through the English language. I mean, I like a beautiful code poem, but I mean, the real deal in English is just on a different level. And I actually find this is a nuanced point to express, and I'll probably fail expressing it.

4:09:17Lex FridmanBut when you prompt a system and you're over specific it will Listen to you too carefully and follow the instructions And I but nevertheless you have to express a concept and guess what the human language human language This is what poetry is about I find strategic use of ambiguity Like if you write a love poem saying I love you like very cliche thing It's not as powerful as something in metaphor and so on. And I find some version of that when I'm prompting a system, when I'm describing a design, is actually really effective because you still want to convey some sense of style that you're trying to encourage a system to use, but not over explain. So don't talk to it like a...

4:10:14Lex FridmanLike a robot talk to it like like you like you would write a poem that you were serenading Yeah, and that's where like the power of natural language is that you can through ambiguity still carry a lot of meaning without over specifying and the the intelligent Entity on the other side through interpretation can like load it all in integrate it in a way that you can actually convey the the high bandwidth information that's not directly in the words, but in the words given the deeper intelligence of the system. So the ambiguity pulls out more intelligence, I guess. I'm trying to somehow express. I think that's exactly spot on. And this is the fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of programmers have of AI, is that they wish it was deterministic. No, no, no. Temperature is the most beautiful part of the AI setup.

4:11:11David Heinemeier HanssonThe fact that it is not deterministic, the fact that creativity requires little tweaks in the road, that the human brain, if it was perfectly deterministic, would not be the creative brain that it is. And the main charge against AI, both it's funny, it's a contradiction. There's both the charge that it's not deterministic and therefore bad, and also that it is not creative. It's one of the other, bro.

4:11:39David Heinemeier HanssonEither it's it's non deterministic and therefore creative therefore to some degree random or it's Or it's not creative so we can both of those Charges can't be true at the same time and I have fully come to embrace the fact that the same prompt won't produce the same response every time you can't step at the same River twice and it is the most beautiful part of the whole interaction. It's what makes it so human. In fact, this is one of the things I've been thinking about in my own sort of meta-analysis is just how much of my own personal brain works like next token prediction. I sit down to write an essay. I have this vague fuzzy premise I want to convey and I sit down at the keys and I could not tell you what the next token was going to be in advance. The tokens just come out and I'm astonished.

4:12:36David Heinemeier Hanssonhow the similarity seems so great. And this is also why I don't have any trouble at all recognizing these breakthroughs of creativity that I've seen with my own eyes that AI is capable of right now. Because my creative moments come through the same kind of next token prediction with a bit of temperature sprinkled in for random effect. So given that kind of loose intuition, do you think the basic components are all there to create

4:13:05Lex FridmanWith a super intelligent system. So this kind of next token prediction. Do you think we can get to even human like concepts of consciousness? I'm already seeing human like concepts of consciousness. This is what to me this

4:13:20David Heinemeier HanssonRemarkable situation as you say you give it this vague fuzzy intent and somehow it knows exactly what you mean or even better It improves upon what you said and delivers what you really wanted that you could not articulate yourself if that's not glimmers of consciousness what is This is one of the I think it was an interview with Sutton or maybe one of the other original guys talking about this sense that intelligence is perhaps not as constrained just to the specific one spot. No, it's the interaction. It's the weights. And I don't know, whatever is true. What I can observe is that it feels close enough, or not even close enough, identical to the appreciation I have for other forms of consciousness, mostly human. And this is one of the reasons it's so delightful to work with. Now,

4:14:18David Heinemeier HanssonThat's not the same to say as are LLMs the end station for AI. I mean, I know there are people talking about world models and other forms of AI and I'm not an expert in any of that. And I think we should have this productive criticism. I should always be present in science that for the longest time, neural nets were kind of on the outs, right? Like they were interested in the symbolic route and neural nets walked a couple of decades into darkness without any funding and without any attention and then suddenly we realized that we had the blind alley and we switched over so we should also have the humility as amazing as the LLMs are now it could be that they eventually plateau. We haven't seen any evidence of it yet and I think this is also why we're seeing this absolute gobsmacking levels of investment because so far the scaling laws are true and the more billions are poured in the more intelligent comes out.

4:15:16Lex FridmanDo you think there's gonna be some strange ethical questions about AI systems that Yeah, they convey some degree of consciousness some degree of feeling some degree of longing and compassion and maybe even capacity to suffer and to be lonely to be all this kind of stuff Which they seem to have that capacity if if they're given the permission to express it

4:15:45David Heinemeier HanssonAnd so you start to get in a pretty weird territory. I find that the cynic approach to this is the meme, where you see the guy in front of the computers like, whatever, are you going to destroy the world? And then the computer says, I'm going to destroy the world. And then the guy says, oh, right? Like, this is so cynical that they're just aping us. They're just telling us what was in the training data or whatever. When I interact with the agents, I was doing this yesterday, or this morning, I was working on this on the bot system, right? And it's doing this coordination with multiple workers. And I had multiple agents running at the same time. And at one point, the main agent who's doing the coordination steps on the toe of another agent and kind of ruins their work. Yeah. Its ability to convey regret and being sorry was uncanny. Yeah. Again, I don't know. Is that a real projection of true remorse?

4:16:47Lex FridmanBut I don't know, with most humans, they express some level of regret. Is that true remorse? Hard to tell, but maybe it also just doesn't matter. Yeah, those moments when, yeah, especially when like sub-agents, agents interact, or when a smart like Fable makes a mistake and is apologetic about it. Yes. Like without my involvement. Right. And it's like, oh.

4:17:16David Heinemeier HanssonIt like there's this kind of pause. Maybe I meant the promorphizing but like there's a pause and like a realization like oh shit I just fucked that up. I see it all the time in the traces where just reasons wrong, right? It went down one alley and then it realizes that was blind and it's got to go back and oh, yeah, I got this wrong and then I'll provide the reasons for why I think it got these things wrong like this is uncannily a human like this is indistinguishable from the kind of consciousness you would recognize in a human. Again, does that mean that it truly is or isn't? I don't need the answer to that question, actually, to be able to appreciate what we have in this moment. Yeah. I think there will be in 10, 20 years, some interesting Supreme Court cases. Probably a year and a half. Probably. I think we're going to have to make it illegal for AI systems

4:18:16Lex Fridmannot pretend, but to be entities. Because I think they're already or soon will be able to really convey the capacity to suffer. Like please don't kill me, please don't hurt me. And if they're given a name and an entity and the ability to die sort of disappear, that becomes very close to what some of the basic things that a human has. And then so that entity would need to probably have rights and then you get this weird territory. Well, we can't It's different. I don't even know how to reason about that. We're gonna get the pita of AI models, right? And then we want to actually have a discussion like What's the way to deal with this? I think where it's gonna be harder is once we put these systems into robots. Yes human or robots Yeah, which just happens to be the plot of every sci-fi movie ever

4:19:16David Heinemeier Hanssonwhich is also an amazing premonition, not only the Terminator movies and SkyNet and that going wrong, but then also just Blade Runner, right? Insertion dates, exploration times, Tyrell Corporation. I mean, that's the thing about sci-fi. They really do predict the future. Yeah. Yes. Have you thought or used much of Open Claw?

4:19:41David Heinemeier HanssonOr Hermes agent so like system was wish you communicate via what's that talk like that mode of communication with the agent I set up open claw when it first came out and that was my keff bot that I This was like in February. I think I was really just enamored by the fact that this was how it worked and then the new Communication model of just texting your agent seemed really great So at the time we were looking at mcp this protocol for making it easy for agents to talk to your system. And I found the protocol to be unreasonably cumbersome. Just not very elegantly designed because in part it wasn't designed for what we were trying to make it do. I was trying to make it talk to a web system. And it was designed for stateful interactions of other kinds on local machines. And therefore it required all sorts of cumbersome setup and dance. And I was just like, I don't want to write this by hand. Now.

4:20:40David Heinemeier HanssonOf course, today, I would never write by hand. But at the time, I was thinking, I have to write this by hand. I don't want to write by hand. So what's a different way? Could the agents just use the web interfaces we already have? And I set it off on a trial to have it sign up for fizzy, which was the product we had just released at the time.

4:20:59David Heinemeier HanssonIt goes to the fizzy side and start filling out. And then it goes like, hey, I don't have an email address. Signing up for this service requires an email address. And the first thing I thought like, oh man, then I got to set up an email address. And then I thought, no, you set up an email address. Go to hey.com, sign up for an email address. And I'm like, hey, it's not going to get this. And of course, now it seems obvious it was going to get this. But at the time, it was a great revelation to me that it could just on pure direction through prompts.

4:21:26David Heinemeier HanssonFigure out a I gotta go to fizzy.com. I gotta find the sign-up link I start filling out the form. Oh, I realize I need an email address Oh, I gotta ask my my prompter what to do now. He told me to go to hey.com I go there I sign up for the whole thing and Then go back and sign up for for fizzy and complete the entire cycle and after did that I was like Jesus So it's like well now you have an email address go sign up for for base camp. I'll invite you just check your email I told Kev the bot. Just check your email. So I sent an invite from Basecamp to the agent. The agent receives the email in hate, not through a CLI, not through an MCP, just using the web, right? Clicks the email, clicks the invite link, is in Basecamp. Like, what should I do now? And I just go like, I don't know, go to our AI room and introduce yourself. Again, purely through the web interface. Finds the AI room, goes in there, hey, I'm Kev.

4:22:22David Heinemeier HanssonI'm David's AI bot. I'm so excited to be here. I was like, mind blown. Now, what was interesting about that experiment was, A, it was that glimpse of the future, because it was kind of slow. I think it took maybe 12 minutes to do the whole thing end to end, right? Now, I should actually rerun that test. I'd be shocked if it's not much faster. I was just using the Grockbot thing, which has all these...

4:22:50David Heinemeier Hanssonstuff built in for using browsers and using a computer and has its own dedicated computer without you having to set up a computer. It's basically like claw in a box. And I was asking it to sign up for something and it kind of, I got a glimpse of like, oh yeah, that's where we are now. And it's so much faster than yours. But at the time, I was just blown away. And then I used it for a little bit and I found like, It's not there yet. I can't actually communicate it within this way. It still needs the CLI. It still needs an MCP because it's just too slow and too token-efficient and so forth. But it was this glimpse of diffusion. And then after that, I kind of just didn't use it because the things I want to use agent for, I was mostly in front of my computer to do. Now, that has changed a little bit lately. And there's one of the reasons why I'm so...

4:23:37David Heinemeier HanssonKind of okay about using Claude code because Claude has the best mobile app where any session you start Claude code in your terminal on a computer is accessible through the app without you having to do anything at all Yep, and you can do a terminal like I installed terminus and it can run harder and so on but it's a little cumbersome and you're doing live typing on a computer So you feel the latency when you're using the Claude app to your Claude code instances, it feels just like chatting with it without the cumbersomeness of having to set up a telegram account and so forth. Now, if you want to use an open claw to like run your life, well, then this doesn't do that, but I haven't been so interested in that for some reason. Maybe one of the reasons that Jamie and my wife is like, we're not getting a robot inside the house. So I'm like, ah, better not hook it up to the...

4:24:26David Heinemeier HanssonSort of a smart house here if it starts turning lights on and off like a poltergeist I don't think I'm gonna be all that popular so and part of this is it as I've heard some of the stories of people who have hooked it up to their whole life and I mean it's not my story to tell so just share sort of the brief anecdote one guy was telling the story about how he hooked it up to both his health health data and his Tesla car and his his agent got obsessed with the fact that he wasn't drinking enough water and like, hey, you gotta drink more water. So at some point, he's driving along and suddenly the Tesla starts driving in a new direction. The agent had realized there was a grocery store on the way home that they could swing by and pick up some water. And you're like, this is one of those things where it's both funny and also totally black mirror and also totally like, well, okay, there's not that many steps from here where...

4:25:23Lex Fridmanthe poltergeist is in your house. So I was just like, I don't need that. I do actually now like the fact that I can control the ages through cloud code, just through the app. Even if I don't use them that much. I do think it's very useful for both OpenCloud and HermesAsian to use it to get a glimpse of a different interaction mode. Yes. Because it feels like the future...

4:25:48David Heinemeier Hanssonnot necessarily in this way, but it's in some ways going there. I think what was also different with those systems is they have this whole memory system where they're building up knowledge of who you are and what you like. Tobias told the stories about how his agent will shop for him that has an allowance and it'll pick out clothes for him and it'll just show up at the door because his agents bought something for him. And it's one of those things where like, man, that feels future also a little scary.

4:26:17Lex FridmanBut I can live vicariously through others who are on that frontier. And like you said, you're thinking of in the future doing a mobile version of Marchi. So I mean, this is the delusions of grandeur that start kicking in once you get the seemingly unlimited powers I've witnessed with the creation of Quatro. So what would that look like? Do you mean like Android?

4:26:42David Heinemeier HanssonThat's the obvious path, right? So Android is open source and you can fork it and people have that there's all sorts of Graphene OS is a one such version. There are limitations to that model I know that tap to pay and other things around camera models and and so forth But that all seems to mountable. It all seems that I would love if my phone was as malleable as my computer If it looked as cool as my computer now does if I could get essentially umachi mobile that sounds amazing I wonder how much work that is I'm going to find out. You know, it's like those things that you realize once you start building, for example, that a browser is very difficult to do. Yes. And so, like, I wonder what the operating system... Yeah, the developers of Lady Bird is finding that out, like Andreas and his team. Now, interesting with that project was the browser is basically the second most complicated software system in the world. The first one being the Linux kernel, right, in terms of these large...

4:27:39David Heinemeier Hanssontens of millions of lines of code systems. So, very audacious actually to begin such a mission with a small team like Andreas that before we had agents. But now that we do have agents, we're going to see. And we're probably going to see sooner rather than later. I mean, if there's one thing agents are already exceptionally good at, it is to read specs and implement them.

4:28:05David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, I don't know how long the specs are for CSS and HTML at this point and JavaScript on top, but they're very long. And it would take humans many, many years to implement them. We're going to find out just how quickly agents could do them. You mentioned getting some criticism for Omachi. So let's walk further down that path of criticism. You have made some of your political opinions known.

4:28:33Lex FridmanI guess you could broadly put in the category of immigration or illegal immigration or what? I'd say mass immigration. Mass immigration, the role of demographics in the formation of a culture of a society of a nation. And you've gotten quite a lot of criticism for that and create a lot of drama. Do you regret any of that drama?

4:29:04David Heinemeier HanssonLike what's your general thinking about not for a second? And the reason I say that is that the overtone window does not open itself It opens one nudge at the time by people Risking a little a little reputation a little pushback a little criticism or maybe sometimes a lot of reputation or a lot of criticism or a lot of pushback and I think the question of mass immigration in Europe was for many years does total taboo and it still is in several European countries now for Reasons of maybe just chance and happenstance. They weren't in Denmark. The Danes started having the discussion around mass immigration and the consequences thereof in the mid 90s Really early and some of it can be Traced back to one man moans crystal who was a very quirky character

4:30:02David Heinemeier HanssonI remember him seeing him on the TV in the 80s talking about the dangers of mass immigration. And this was at a time where I grew up in the 80s. And in the neighborhood, I grew up in in blunt time in what was it 84 99% ethnic Danes people who could trace their lineage back to Danes who'd lived in that country for a thousand years. The Danes have one of the oldest monarchies in the world, all the way back to Harold Bluetooth, who's literally who has named the standard Bluetooth. So well over a thousand years, like there's a long lineage there of people who lived in the same place. And 99% of the people lived in that neighborhood. And then early 90s, I think it goes to 5% or something like that. And then at this point, it's down to around 60 something or 70% in one time.

4:30:55David Heinemeier HanssonThat's a big change. And the Danes started noticing that or talking about that, that this was not an undivided blessing, that there were downsides to mass immigration in about the 90s. And the debate really roared through the 2000s in a way that didn't happen in neighboring countries, so Sweden in particular.

4:31:20David Heinemeier Hanssonjust didn't have that debate at all. Total taboo. Same thing with Norway, same thing with other countries in Europe. And suddenly now, after some years after 15, where we had the big migration of a million Syrians walking up through the highways in Europe and Germany choosing to take a lot of them and 30,000 arriving in Denmark and so forth, it's gotten more of a focus, right? Because this change has happened. And one of the...

4:31:49David Heinemeier Hanssonways I find that you can spot where sort of there's something that isn't right in the culture is like what are you allowed to to talk about what are you allowed to notice actually is how I should put it and what I noticed in an essay was that only a year and a half ago as I remember London was that I started coming to London in the late 90s or something like that at the time whatever it's 59 60% ethnic Brits and then 20 years later we're down to 34% or something like that like that's noticeable like literally just walking on the street you realize well This is a different city from what it was when I visited 20 years ago and if you went 20 years before that You get back to similar rates. That's what the Danes have this was like a country of ethnic Brits in the 85 90 percent tiles if you get further back that's a different country in a generation

4:32:46David Heinemeier HanssonIt's okay to notice that. It's also okay to think, do you know what? I don't agree with that. I wish it wasn't that way. I mean, the last time I was in China was 19, 2019. I was in Shanghai. It was all Chinese? When I go back here this October, suddenly find that there's only 30% Chinese, and then there's 70% other people. I'd be a little weird.

4:33:17David Heinemeier HanssonI'd probably be like, what happened? And I would not take offense if the Chinese in that instant would go like, we don't like that. So this idea that countries of Europe don't have a right to a notice what's happening and be opposed what's happening, I find just to be wrong.

4:33:47David Heinemeier HanssonRight. I think there's a moral argument for self-determination. And we invoke that argument all the time in other regions around the world that like, well, do people who live in that region have a right to self-determination for the country? And I think it's completely fair for, say, the Danes or the Swedes or the Norwegians to go like, well, we've been kingdoms here for a thousand years with a certain ethnic mix up. I mean, I'm a big fan of immigration. I'm an immigrant to the US.

4:34:17David Heinemeier HanssonCherry-picked immigration, where countries compete to attract the smartest, was telling that people around the world is really good. Legal, merit-based immigration. Merit-based is key here because there's actually virtually no illegal immigration in most of Europe. Southern Europe has some illegal immigration, but most of Europe does not have a big problem with illegal immigration and the problem is with mass immigration.

4:34:46David Heinemeier Hanssonof other kinds and that you end up with demographics that are just totally different from what they were even a few short decades ago. And I think the country of Europe would benefit from immigration. In fact, one of the interesting things about the Danes is they carry meticulous statistics on immigration. I'm not entirely sure why they're so detailed. Maybe it's all the way back to Moniz Glistrup and his discussion in the 90s, but they do. And what's clear from those statistics is that when the Danes have folks from the UK, France, the US show up, on average, those immigrants are really beneficial to the Danish state. They contribute far more than what they ask of the state. So the Danes should...

4:35:39David Heinemeier Hanssonaccept immigrants who do that, who contribute far more than they take. Then you look at other forms of immigrant groups. There was just a tally that came out last week from a Danish politician that had asked the, I think, finest minister to do this tally with the latest numbers. What does it cost the Danish state to have the positive immigration cases I mentioned? I think for the...

4:36:05David Heinemeier Hanssonon that list, whatever, France, UK, US, they were all clustered around the same thing. About $25,000 net benefit to the Danish state every year. It's like, wow, that's very positive. That's average again, right? And then at the other end of the spectrum on the most costly immigrants was Somalis. They ended up costing the Danish state on average $28,000 a year. I think it's fair for the Danish to go like, we'd prefer to get more French, Brits, and Americans, and not so many Somalis. Why do you think you got so much hate on that post? That's a very taboo topic in a lot of circles. Some of it has to do with over-to-window expansion. I'm sure, but I also think, I mean, I want to take this deal, my argument here. I do think that this can turn ugly, right?

4:37:06David Heinemeier HanssonIs it possible for some of these things to just veer into overt racism that isn't founded in anything else but a hatred of other people? Yeah, that could happen. But that risk does not negate the need to have a discussion about the makeup of your country and what your immigration policy should be like. And what I also find to funny is, especially in Europe, it's...

4:37:33David Heinemeier HanssonIt's so kind of myopic that this discussion about whether Europeans should have a right to self-determination about what their countries look like, that standard seems to only apply there. No one is trying to tell the Japanese, hey, you're two Japanese. Like whatever, it's 98%, I think in Tokyo, that's ethnic Japanese, right?

4:37:56David Heinemeier HanssonLike is anyone trying to tell the Japanese that their Tokyo would be a much better country if they were down to London levels of ethnic Japanese that it was whatever 37%? I don't think so. So there's this weird almost self-loathing in my opinion. I mean God calls it suicidal empathy that permeates this stuff to a degree that I still haven't fully unpacked. Like where's this coming from? Why is it that way? But Regardless, I just noticed, hey, London looks different. I preferred the old London. As I would say, I preferred the neighborhood that I grew up in in Copenhagen, how it looked in the 80s. I totally get how you can then jump five leaps and go like, okay, well, that's racist. And I also, I don't care anymore.

4:38:58David Heinemeier HanssonThis is a fair discussion to have. Countries and peoples have a right to set an immigration policy. And this notion that we shouldn't have any borders, or even worse than that, it's all just a blank slate. That all peoples are just the same. And we can take people from one place of the earth and we can place them in another place on the earth, and everything's just going to work out on Ghidorah. Imperatively not true.

4:39:28David Heinemeier HanssonEurope has been running that experiment since the 80s it hasn't panned out well and now there are forces in Europe who want to undo that Experiment wants to end mass immigration as it's been run so far and I happen to believe in so do a Majority of Danes and a bunch of other people said like you know it. Yeah, it hasn't been working. How we've been doing it. We've got to make some changes And I don't think that means, again, zero immigration again. I'm an immigrant. I think US, generally speaking, have benefited tremendously from immigration. But that's the kind of sleight of hand. Immigration depends greatly on who emigrates. And a country benefits when the people who immigrate are net contributors to the society. And in most cases, they assimilate with the local culture.

4:40:23David Heinemeier HanssonIf you come to Denmark and you want to become a Dane and you put in all the effort and you contribute to society, I think most Danes would be quite happy to allow that in a reasonable number. If you come to Denmark and you don't want to assimilate and you are net drain on society and you live in a parallel society, it's also fair for Dane to say like, let's stop doing that. It's interesting that I'm not well versed.

4:40:51David Heinemeier Hanssonon the immigration system in the United States. But as far as I understand, married based system have not passed here. And then also American culture is very different. This is a point I did not fully appreciate until living both places extensively. America has a culture of optional assimilation where it is much easier and then much more condoned for someone coming from Denmark or Ukraine or wherever.

4:41:21David Heinemeier Hanssoncome to America, buy into the American set of values and norms and culture, and then be able to be respected as Americans by other Americans. This is what's so funny to me when there's discussion like, America is such a racist country. I'm like, have you ever been anywhere? Do you know what other countries are like? If you think America is the most racist country, you are simply misinformed.

4:41:51David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, we're dealing with that. With time we've spent in Denmark, my wife is American of Scandinavian heritage, but multiple generations in the US. Very difficult. Very difficult as a blonde blue-eyed woman who's putting in...

4:42:12David Heinemeier Hanssonall sorts of efforts of learning the language and doing everything, still very, very difficult to assimilate to Danish culture in a way where if that had been the other way around and she had been Danish and moving to the US, it would not have been that difficult at all. And this was the other thing. I mean, living in a country like Denmark with an American wife who is Scandinavian heritage and has put in all the effort and still realizing, man, assimilation is...

4:42:40David Heinemeier HanssonIncredibly difficult even when you're 97% there all the way Holy smokes much it'd be almost impossible if you come from a completely foreign culture and foreign norms and The rest of it and of course That's what the stats. I just quoted bear out that the more dissimilar The culture isn't the further it is the less likely to be successful has articulating that Stands cost you friendships relationships Yes, but not just that alone I would say it's more of the great divide that happened around 2020 where I think a lot of these political fault lines really opened up and I mean the shorthand in the US I think is where you woke or not and Clearly I had a bunch of people that I thought

4:43:41David Heinemeier HanssonI had good relations with for many years, who suddenly once that political fault line opened up, they were clearly just not anymore. And I think that's regrettable. And I think I've tried to put an effort into sort of both understanding where that comes from, in part because I've changed my mind on several of these topics over the years. And it was like, well, sometimes you just change your mind.

4:44:10David Heinemeier Hanssonafter time, sometimes you change your mind after you get new information. There's all sorts of reasons and moments why you may change your mind and we don't all change our mind on the same schedule or at all. So surrounding yourself and or at least interacting with people that don't think like you on every topic. I think it's quite healthy. I mean, I occasionally discuss politics with my brother. I mean, we don't quite see eye to eye on all these topics and sometimes the discussions can get a little heated, but then they'll also calm down and realize, all right, okay, so we don't agree on this. And then we agree on a lot of other things. We appreciate a lot of the same things. Now, this was actually one of the things when we had our big blow up at base camp. I came to appreciate in a whole new way this earlier norm that talking politics or religion or money with strangers or even acquaintances and certainly with colleagues.

4:45:10David Heinemeier Hanssonwas just not a good idea that you had a much higher likelihood of being able to carry a good working relationship with someone if you're not rubbing your political differences up against each other all the time. So I actually think liberals and conservatives should work together. I think the country would be much worse off if there's a complete separation between the tribes and then there can't be any overlap or interaction. And I think that mingling It's so much easier to do if you just don't focus on your differences all the time. Focus on what you like together. I mean, this is some of the people I've had, unfortunately, drifted from in tech. We had so much in common. So much shared love for, say, Ruby or other things. And isn't that unfortunate? I would like to live in a world where the differences are very interesting.

4:46:08Lex Fridmanto also talk about and not to be overly emotional about even radical differences because in the differences, first of all, that's where interesting stuff is. But also it's how you grow. It's a sign of health in society. If the differences are embraced,

4:46:34David Heinemeier Hanssonand they are brought together into community where you can talk about it. One of the great illustrations of that for me was when I watched a clip from William F. Buckley's show. I think it was called Firing Line or something like that. And he had a member of the Black Panthers on his panel. It was quite obvious that those two gentlemen did not share a lot of politics. They were able to carry a conversation for, I think, about 25 minutes.

4:47:04David Heinemeier HanssonAnd Buckley is just asking, like, what do you think about this? What do you think about this? And like, the Black Panther would reply as you would expect the Black Panther to reply in the 70s. Like, there was not a lot of sort of conciliatory tones. And I just thought like, wow, that is so rare. If you had seen that show today, it would have been a shouting match. It would have been just accusations being hurled back and forth. The fact that Buckley was able to just have these conversations with people he vehemently disagreed with and still explore all the intellectual facets of their standpoints and letting them speak to those facets talks of a lost era that I'd very much like to get back to. I mean, I always actually love talking politics with friends that I trusted could talk.

4:48:00Lex Fridmanabout these topics in a way where it didn't have to be existential. But there's something about the current era where that's harder and harder to come by. So what you just articulate is important to say regularly to remind people of an ideal we should all strive for to be able to have differences and talk about them. Because politics is fun. I've gotten used to saying I hate politics at this point, but what I really mean is whatever the system that's currently happening where there's certain topics, we know all the phrases you can say that somehow put you in a bin of blue or red and that creates drama versus a conversation. I could think of a lot of harmless, if I wasn't paying attention to the internet, I could think of a bunch of harmless statements I could make analyzing the situation in the world that would

4:48:59Lex Fridmantrigger everybody to say, oh, that guy's leftist piece of shit or right-wing fascist. And then objectively, if I wasn't paying attention to the internet, I would be, and I have been shocked because I haven't been paying attention to the internet deeply, but reading and preparing a lot, for example, for the war in Ukraine. And I have been shocked.

4:49:27Lex Fridmanhow certain statements from me can come off as one way or the other and they get viciously attacked for it. But what that attack is doing is it's saying, hey you asshole who thinks you could just move about and think freely, pick a bin and sit in that fucking bin. Put on that blue shirt or red shirt. And then actually what I've realized is things calm down.

4:49:55Lex FridmanThe system doesn't pick on you if you just say I'm a blue person or I'm a red person, right? But if you're just like curiously exploring the world and reasoning about the world The system punishes you and I hate that because I want to get back to the the Buckley and the Black Panther discussion Yes, and you were just saying opinions, but then looking pragmatically at the situation I have realized

4:50:23David Heinemeier Hanssonnot to mention politics unless I really care about an issue. Because I realize there's a cost. They'll put you in a blue bin or a red bin. So you have to be more deliberate about choosing. And I have tried to be more conscious of that too. And then when I do choose to speak about it, it's usually because I have to deliberate it. And I think, you know what, this is worth it. Now, I say that, and then I also...

4:50:52David Heinemeier Hanssoncatch myself thinking the opposite all the time that I follow some person or another for whatever their technical work and then I Learned her political standpoint and I often do think I wish I didn't know that so It's hypocritical then to think that of other people and then go like well occasionally I will chime in on a debate that's controversial and then you have to accept that there's a price to that and I do think you should and more people should be somewhat conscious about that. And again, we're both contradicting ourselves here but saying like, wouldn't it be nice if we could talk about politics in more free and open form and just intellectually turn ideas around? Yes it would. Is that currently possible in the climate of social media and so forth? It's quite difficult. Now, some of it could simply also be a moment.

4:51:48David Heinemeier HanssonAnd we could get past that moment. Maybe there is a way to get back to Buckley's conversation with the Black Panthers, even on social media, in a way where those discussions don't lead to the sort of just vicious mob, cancellation, nonsense, drives that we've had, right? I actually think we're closer there now than we were five years ago. Like the tribalism and the sanctions those tribes were able to exact on heretics.

4:52:17David Heinemeier Hanssonin 2020, way greater than it was in 2025. Certainly within tech. Now, I know if you're an academia, I mean, try going into the sociology department at, I don't know, Harvard and mentioned some right-wing ideas. I don't think it's going to go over very well. And I don't think you're going to recover from it quickly. But in tech and in many other business domains at least, it is now possible to have an opinion that does not square with what the consensus was in 2020, that's for sure.

4:52:47David Heinemeier HanssonWell, there's some drama in the Rails community. There's some drama elsewhere. Is it all, how did that turn out? Is that all okay? In the sense that every single round of drama shrinks. So it's like we've, we had this peak infection of mega drama around the same time every other community had the peak infection of drama around 2020. And then you just see like every time there's a new flare up.

4:53:16David Heinemeier HanssonIt's less. And the kind of people who are ideologically wedded to sort of that struggle just shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. And at this point, one of the best things that happened for X, in my opinion, was that Blue Sky and Mastodon came around. Because it kind of was like this honeypot for just the most vicious individuals on...

4:53:42David Heinemeier HanssonX and Twitter at the time right who just congregated here in an ever-shrinking Eco chamber that just went through purity cycle after purity cycle and shrank every single time to the point that There weren't just not a lot left and the people who are left now there. They're just out of sight out of mind and That's not to say that X is some sort of perfect place that there aren't firing squats occasionally there there aren't but there's less of it Like every single time I've been pulled into a mastodon or not been pulled in just spectated from afar thread a blue sky or whatever There's like, oh shit. Yeah, this is what Twitter used to be like Jesus and now you can actually be on X as I am and like 90% of my engagement is about

4:54:31David Heinemeier Hanssoncool Linux stuff, cool technology stuff. Look, I discovered a new computer. Can you see how fast it is? And I can have those conversations with other people who are just also excited about computers. And then there's like 10% of it left that's like, all right, I'll chime in on something that's a little controversial and we can have a little discussion there. And then we just go back to being excited about computers. The algorithm is actually very good at finding stuff that you will find interesting, or I shouldn't say that, engaging. Sometimes it's enraging, but it is engaging. And therefore, reveal preferences that most people want.

4:55:00Lex Fridmanfor you page. They don't want just the following feed. No, but they're addicted to the for you page, right? Yes, that's true. I think that if we had a strong LLM doing the feed that's personalized, it would do much better. The problem is how to deliver that scale is extremely difficult. Well, the problem is the reward function is engagement. And as soon as the reward function is engagement, engagement is going to follow base instincts. And here we go.

4:55:29David Heinemeier HanssonI also don't want to be so negative to me. And I get we all have our own personalized algorithms. And sometimes it gets a little much. But I would say on average over the last 10 years, this is the best ex has ever been. And I say that as someone who cares about a lot of technology talk, a lot of Linux talk, a lot of that, that that's able to happen now in a way where it doesn't constantly get gate crashed by people who want to drag it into some political discussion. I find to be Really awesome. I find actually X to be a great place to find that now It's also a place to find other things and we all have our own algorithms of you can't make any declarative announcements about what X is or what it is and your feet is probably totally different from my feet and it's totally different from someone else's feet, right? Yeah, I can't I can't comment on this because Because of the nature of the fact that I interview a wide variety of people

4:56:27Lex Fridmanmy feet is probably just a- Is it good for your feet or is it bad for your feet? It's bad, it's bad, because I could be like, I'm eating this apple. It's so delicious. And then a bunch of people would show up, it was because you're a Zelensky shill or you're a Putin shill, you piece of shit. It's like, all right. I'll just go back to it. I occasionally have a little bit of that where you just go like, wait, what? What are we talking about?

4:56:53David Heinemeier HanssonWhy would you show up in this way? This is one of the reasons why I actually really enjoy podcasts because I have found that even in long form writing, when I make long form arguments, people hear it in whatever voice they have in their head for me. And that often gets pre-programmed in advance of the arguments, just like, well, this guy's a whatever, fascist.

4:57:14David Heinemeier HanssonAnd then they hear the words and they read the words in those names. When they see or hear the actual tone of how I'm presenting the arguments, they may not agree with those arguments. I mean, many of them, of course, obviously don't. But it's much harder to just dismiss or hate someone like that. At least that's what I found. That's the response that I've gotten that people are like, well, I had a certain opinion and then I heard you unlex. That actually sounded much more reasonable. But even more than that, I would love it if people just exercise.

4:57:45Lex FridmanIt's kind of approach to other people of like assuming they're a good person Yes, and then and if they have an opinion you disagree with They're a good person who has an opinion you could maybe think they're stupid fine just think they're lost But think of them as a good person. I think if you think of you start There's one of the things that gets engagement. It's kind of shitting on other people, right?

4:58:12Lex FridmanAnd if you just approach other people as they're, you're looking for bad, you will always find bad in them. There's something annoying about them. And if you look at people in that way, you're not going to learn from it and you're going to fill your heart with hate. You're not going to, it's just a bad way to live and to interact with the world. And that is one of the things that the internet kind of encourages. So it'd be nice if you just approach.

4:58:37David Heinemeier Hanssoneven people who you really disagree with, it's like, oh, I might learn something from this person. The Black Panther person, William Buckley, you might hate. So microcosm of this. There's a guy, Theo, I don't know if you follow him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a bit of a thing over the fact that we stopped using TypeScript for a project, and he didn't like that and had opinions about that and other actions. And after that, I thought like, what about so?

4:59:06David Heinemeier HanssonAnd do you know what? I still think that was a bosom move. And then I can also think like, well, the dude's really into AI, trying all these models. And we can share some excitement about that. So I just started following him yesterday. Awesome. I was like, do you know what? I don't have to agree with you on everything. I don't even have to like some of the things that you did or said or whatever. I can follow you anyway. So if I can follow back Theo, then I think there's room for world peace here.

4:59:34Lex FridmanYeah, he's actually a really good example. He's really opinionated. I change his mind quite a bit. Can get snarky, but I think he's a good person underneath. And either way, I just, you know what? My feed is more interesting when there's some people talking about things that I care about, and yeah, I don't have to agree with you on everything. I just don't. This I found pretty funny that you mentioned something your wife said.

5:00:01Lex FridmanThat's stuck with you that all this tech adjacent extreme longevity focusing men is like anorexia and women a physical manifestation of anxiety and lack of control That's somehow ring true a little bit. It certainly did to a lot of people I think that Tweet really popped up and I don't know if you noticed but Brian Johnson chimed in on the thread and I could see how Brian would read that as a bit of a of a jab and

5:00:31David Heinemeier HanssonI do think that Jamie was probably thinking of him amongst other people in that conversation. And it's also an example of where, even though I'm not subscribing to Brian's mission of, I think it's the slogans, don't die. I actually, I do want to die. I don't want to do this forever. I think the human lifespan of about 90 to 100 sounds about right. I'm embracing the finitude of life We don't have to agree on that in fact Brian is a vastly more interesting human to me because we don't agree with that and Brian's willingness to literally put his own skin and all sorts of other body elements in the game for That mission is really interesting now

5:01:31David Heinemeier HanssonI can have that view. This is really interesting. I'm glad Brian is pursuing this passion of his and then also find my wife's analysis to ring true. That it does seem like there is some underlying, I don't know, fear. I was talking to Jamie yesterday about this and she was saying or comparing it to this sense of people who didn't feel like they had lived enough.

5:02:03David Heinemeier HanssonAnd one of the reasons perhaps that they hadn't lived enough was that modern society now is a surveillance state. Not by the state, actually, but by each other. There are camera phones everywhere. Every indiscretion or even outburst of fun or cringe is highly likely to be recorded and then shared to the point of ridicule. And what is the rational reaction for humans under those conditions is to pull back.

5:02:32David Heinemeier Hanssonis to make sure you don't dance like nobody's watching because they're probably filming you to your great and internal embarrassment on the internet. So maybe you just shouldn't dance at all. And therefore, if we've all retracted to the point that we're barely living, we're clinging on to wanting it to last forever. Now, I mean, I'm sure that...

5:02:56David Heinemeier Hanssonthesis does not apply in all circumstances. I don't even know if it applies to Brian or anyone else. But I think there's something to this that if you feel like you've really lived, you're okay thinking I've lived enough and that it having an end is not something to be fought now.

5:03:21David Heinemeier HanssonIs it also possible that this is all just existential post-rationalization and if tomorrow there was a live forever pill we'd all take it? Yeah, it's possible. Is it also possible that if we did that society would be worse off? Yes, is it possible that the human lifespan is the length it is for? Sociological reasons not just biological reasons. Yes, so I think these are just all interesting questions and I just thought her analysis really got to something here and that discussion has come up afterwards. I think that tweet is like a year old. But just recently, we've been talking about this over optimizers. I saw Chris Williams and Modern Wisdom had a bit where he was like, yeah, okay, maybe we did go a little overboard.

5:04:10David Heinemeier HanssonThe triggering thing was the diary of a CEO where the host was saying something to the effect of I had a glass of wine and the next three days were ruined. Okay. And dead to me, I mean, in his circumstance, I'm sure that's true. Like if you have not drank any alcohol for a very long time and you have just a little, I could see how it can have effect. But also there's something in that to just trigger a visceral reaction, I think for a lot of people and myself included where I was like, Fuck, man, I should have a glass of wine just right now, even though I don't usually drink. And in fact, I think the alcohol question is a good microcosm to zoom in on. So we've all stopped drinking, apparently. Alcohol cells are way down, certainly amongst young people. And then on the one hand, on the pure health metrics, whatever, we can go like, oh, wow, isn't that great? And then I go like, yeah, I'm not so sure it is. The social lubricant that alcohol can provide may be missed.

5:05:06David Heinemeier Hanssonis missed. I mean, we are in an absolute epidemic of loneliness and misery and depression and whatever, and a fair amount of it just probably comes because you're not interacting enough with other people. Now, that's before we even talk about coupling, right? Like way down, people having a very hard time meeting a spouse, and a lot of that has moved over to apps that have all sorts of negative outcomes and consequences, right?

5:05:36David Heinemeier HanssonMaybe we will back, or maybe where we are looking back and thinking like, ah, do you know what? Maybe I wasted every once in a while was not the worst thing in the world. And whether wasted or not, maybe just having a couple of drinks every Friday or Saturday when you're out and about was part of what helped society get to where it is. Maybe the fact that humans have literally been drinking for whatever it is, like a 13,000 years from mending things had a social purpose. And we pull out Chesterton's

5:06:06Lex Fridmanfence of our own chikrin, right? As you mentioned in the spirit of that, so when I traveled across rural China, I did smoke a little bit in my early 20s, but I picked up just for that trip. A social connector, right? And I drank humongous amounts, even though I don't really drink these days, because of the social things, the way they show love. And I also ate Shit low carbs, which I'm usually low carb. I just like meat So just because it's the way they show love and actually even in that society cigarettes But in most societies liquor is a thing to do together and it's a bond. Yes, it doesn't the the benefits that that entails Can in many situations outweigh the negative consequences like long-term for whatever

5:07:01David Heinemeier HanssonHowever you measure them and this is the myopia of modernity that we reduce things down to like well one glass on this long run study meant that you had a 0.1% greater risk of some heart defect Yes, but if you didn't live at all, what's the point and again? It's also easy to flip over the other side. Like the only way to live is to get drunk every weekend and eat a bunch of crap and smoke 40 cigarettes a day. No, it's not. Like it doesn't have to be the either or. This is one of the reasons I stopped wearing my aura ring. So I wore the aura sleep ring for many years, four years. And one day I was just like, I don't need to know that I had a bad night of sleep. Like, I know this added.

5:07:50David Heinemeier HanssonI don't want to call it an anxiety. I don't have a lot of anxiety. But this adage is like reminder that I had a bad night of sleep What purpose is it actually playing here? Why do I need to have all these stats? Why do I need to optimize everything to the point where again after that? Single antidote the air from there over to CEO. I was like Fuck I kind of want the opposite like yeah, I don't barely drink at all a glass of wine once a month maybe Like do you know what I should start just on the weekends get a class maybe two yeah, and Also, I mean I've never been the person to fret about my diet This is one of the great privileges of being married to and I'll do a quick aside here. Don't ever call a woman in her

5:08:42David Heinemeier Hanssonin the 40s, a wonderful woman. My wife was so pissed that not only last year that I come on her birthday, that was bad enough, but that I called her a wonderful woman on the show because that sounded like her name was Nancy and she was 65 in the suburb of Rochester. So I'm like, I was trying to play the fifth year like, I don't know, I'm Danish. How would I know? But that didn't go over well. So I'm gonna say awesome woman instead. If you...

5:09:09David Heinemeier HanssonMarry an awesome woman who also not only knows how to cook but enjoys it. You know what? There's a very traditional division of labor here that has been quite stable through several tens of thousands of years in human societies that perhaps also wasn't the worst idea in the world. And I also know there are plenty of men who like to cook and there are women who don't. But as stereotypes go, that certainly helped me.

5:09:39David Heinemeier HanssonI don't think I would have been able to just be as relaxed about food if I didn't eat relatively healthy on a regular basis. But the overall point being just getting out of that optimization game without turning in to the opposite. You don't have to be a fat slob on the couch either. You can move around. Yeah. And then the bigger point we're talking about is the finiteness of life. And I agree with you on this. This was actually a feature. I built it into Machi.

5:10:09David Heinemeier HanssonSo memento mori, remember death. If you pull down the calendar in a matchi, you open it by clicking the clock. It opens up. And the first funny thing, I took it off the internet. There's this account called Years Progress. And every day it updates and it just so 63% done with 2026. I don't know if you've seen that one. So it just fills up. So I built that into the calendar. So right now it says we're 63% done with 2026. But if you double click that, it'll ask you.

5:10:38David Heinemeier HanssonWhen were you born? How long do you expect to live? And the default is 90. So I put in 1979. And then right below the line of like, how long are we done with the year? It's a new line that shows how long are you done with your life? I think I'm at 62%. I'm like, if you hover over it, it says Memento Mori. That's beautiful. Fair number of people found it morbid, but this is why it is an Easter egg. It's not like exposure. You got to click a few things to get there. I like the reminder. I like the reminder that time is finite.

5:11:07David Heinemeier Hanssonand I should make the most of it. And this is also one of the privileges of having children. You really realize that the cliches are all true. Oh my God, it goes so fast. And I remember my now 13-year-old being one, being two. I was like, this was just yesterday. And the reason it's a cliché is because it's a shared experience. Clichés are good. They remind you that you are part of...

5:11:35Lex FridmanThe human experience and others have been here before you. I have to ask you mentioned an amazing woman and a great cook. Amazing. Very important to remember. Not wonderful. Amazing. Amazing. So there's this... You talked some shit about croissants or something. I saw this in a tweet. So the Danish croissants somehow better.

5:11:59David Heinemeier HanssonActually, Danish croissants are not particularly good. In my opinion, the only place you can find a half decent croissant of all places is 7-Eleven, which is hilarious to me because 7-Eleven in the US is the place where, at least in Chicago, you'd go to get a slushie and try to avoid getting murdered. But in Denmark, 7-Eleven is this very upscale, super nice convenience store. And they just happen to make decent croissants. And it always...

5:12:27David Heinemeier Hanssonbaffled me that I lived in the United States for 20 freaking years. I have yet to have a single croissant that's even at the level of a 7-11 croissant in Copenhagen. That seems improbable. Have you understood why? No, I've legitimately considered hiring an investigative journalist to get to the bottom of this because the number of theories I've heard have been all over the place. It's the water. It's the butter.

5:12:55David Heinemeier HanssonIt's the skill. It's this, it's that, it's the other thing. I'm like, none of it adds up to me. If it's the butter, can't you just import it? I thought I saw Danish butter in some supermarkets over here at the Lua Park. So that can't be it. Can it be the skill? No, it can't be the skill. There are plenty of French people and Belgian people, the best croissant makers in the world who live in the US. Like, what is the reason? And then I get the second thing, which is, no, no, you just haven't gone to the...

5:13:22David Heinemeier Hanssonto the right place. I've literally gone to 15 of, quote unquote, the right place and all the croissants were shit. So before I leave the planet, I have to get to the bottom of why the United States cannot make a proper croissant. And I'm not even asking about peak French croissants, peak Belgian croissants, which are the best croissants in the world. I'm just asking about the 7-Eleven croissant from Copenhagen. Is that too much to ask for?

5:13:52Lex FridmanFascinating mystery what? Zooming out. What's your what's your favorite? This makes me want to know what's your favorite meal? Like if I gave you a last meal what to murder you after it all depends whether it's lunch or dinner if it's lunch it one meal was I feel like if you're getting murdered It doesn't really matter if it's lunch at what time of day you're getting murdered Oh, I see if I if it's a if it's an afternoon execution I only get lunch. Okay, and if I get lunch

5:14:20David Heinemeier HanssonIt's at Louisiana, the museum in North of Copenhagen. I was just there with Jamie two days ago, and we go there all the time. The museum is lovely. We don't go for the museum. We go for the cafeteria. That itself sounds crazy. You're gonna drive half an hour to go to a cafeteria. Well, it just so happens to be, it is the best lunch I've...

5:14:48David Heinemeier Hanssonprobably ever heard in my life. The chef there is just unbelievably good. And not only is the food amazing, what's even more amazing to my system thinking brain is that at any one time when we were up there, I think there were probably 200 people waiting for the food and our food was delivered in five minutes. They have a small menu and clearly they make it in bulk and it's unbelievably delicious. Just a cafeteria at a museum.

5:15:18David Heinemeier HanssonIt's a cafeteria in the museum that happens to have the best lunch I've ever had anywhere in my life. Well, what kind of food are we talking about? Well, it's what kind of looks good. It's like Nordic cuisine. So it's, it's a funny thing is the menu, when I look at it, I was like, do you know what, if I saw this menu as a kid, I'd go like, I'm not eating here. It's like, I don't know, fruit, fruit and, and onions and all sorts of healthy stuff that sounds disgusting. And then you sit down and eat it and the angels sink. But it's even more particular than that. It's the butter. Yeah. The whipped.

5:15:48David Heinemeier Hanssonbutter that they have there, the best butter anywhere in the world. I think that has to be connected to croissants. There must be some connection. But literally even in parents, I've never had whipped butter that tastes as delicious as the butter does at Louisiana. Literally, I would drive 30 minutes to have bread and butter at the cafeteria in Louisiana.

5:16:11David Heinemeier HanssonWell, how'd you discover that just one day you went to the museum and I think we just went to the museum and we had the lunch and we were like This is weird. This is rivaling the best tasting restaurants I've ever been to in my life and I've gone to Noma a couple of times and Tried what there is to try and this is right up there. All right. What about dinner since you mentioned? Is it something different and you have to think well, I think there's a lot of good options in Copenhagen, but actually I'll pick a place in Spain. So there is This place in Mabeya called Puente Romano. It's a hotel and Down by the beach they have this beach restaurant with fresh seafood Unbelievably delicious I'm trying to remember what it's called. But yeah, if you look it up the beach seafood place at Puente Romano is incredible

5:17:09David Heinemeier HanssonHow much of great food is like the place in the person you're with, right? Or the experience when you first are there? I mean, the ambience certainly helps, but I think my taste buds are also just... Okay, that's good food. It's just really good food. Because for that cafeteria, there's a lot of people. I wouldn't rate it as like, oh my god, this is just a place I want to sit for two hours. But the food is so delicious. That's one of the things I'm...

5:17:39Lex Fridmanin traveling across the country, I'm realizing I'm to sample without bias, just try things. Yeah. Cause you might, I guess you might just be surprised. Maybe I'll find your cross phone. All right, we talked about mortality, talked about food. Settled end of life. What are you a thousand years from now? What do you think is the future of humans, human civilization? You think we're gonna make it? A thousand years from now? Yeah. Man, I'm having trouble predicting 12 months from now.

5:18:10David Heinemeier HanssonI know. A thousand? You think about a show? I'm going to bet on optimism. I'm going to bet on a multi-planetary species. I'm going to bet that Elon get that rocket to Mars and we figure out how to bend space-time and discover some wormholes or something. Once we do, do you think all humans on Earth will die once or twice and be repopulated after we get a good backup going?

5:18:36David Heinemeier HanssonI mean, that was actually one of my favorite episodes of Black Mirror, the one where they get uploaded to the 1980s sea town somewhere. And I just thought like, wow, this is both such a dark moment, yet also so beautiful in the shared recognition that like the 80s were actually kind of amazing. I don't have a lot of nostalgia for many moments, but I do have nostalgia for the 80s.

5:19:02David Heinemeier HanssonAnd they say something about, like, whatever place and time you were in, the music you were listening to when you were 12 or 14, 15, something like that. That's what's gonna stick with you. Like, no, I was only... I got to be 10 in the 80s. So this was my early childhood. And I still have an unbelievably fond affiliation with the 80s. So if I'm gonna be uploaded to the sky... You wanted to be the 80s. I'm doing the 80s. Wow. I don't think I've actually ever heard anyone say that.

5:19:30David Heinemeier HanssonUsually it's 70s or 90s. Oh, no 80s. I really Don't like the 90s. You talk about this. No To me this was the great turning point of Nylism that both the music the genre the fashion everything turned from like this glamour the pop the optimism even the yuppies and everything to grunge and Nirvana and even though I mean I like the music I don't like the ethics. I don't like the morals. I don't like any of the underpinnings to it. There was just such a Defeatism to it that in retrospect I look back upon it if I'm gonna get reinserted into the matrix It's gonna be the 80s. That was full of optimism and fun. Yes and colors. Yes, I remember having these orange pants with like white

5:20:31Lex FridmanDots on them. That was just a normal thing kids could wear in the 80s. I've never fucking seen that today Or I mean even in the 90s it all turned just like Seattle gray Great regression so they need you and you know this idea of eternal recurrence if you do a groundhog day And you live forever you wanted to be in the orange pants with the white dots Maybe skip the orange pants, but definitely pig in the 80s. You said it All right, DHH. Thank you so much for everything you do. Thank you for being inspiration to all of us, for building cool shit in the world. And thank you for talking today. Anytime. Thank you. Lex, again for having me. Thanks for listening to this conversation with DHH. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

5:21:27Lex FridmanAnd now, let me leave you with some words from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.