Lex Fridman PodcastDHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,012 words- 0:00 – 1:27
Episode highlight
- DHDHH
There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen, and we have seen decades of progress happen in the last nine months. If you're not recognizing the gravity of the moment, that's the delusion, that's the psychosis. Who 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 gonna take me two hours"? I want the fastest car breaking the speed limits. I want the diver watch that can go down the Mariana Trench. I want the operating system that can install in less than 60 seconds. 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'd lay down on the garage floor and just think, "Holy fuck, I'm alive." The overtone window does not open itself. It opens one nudge at a time by people risking a little.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- DHDHH
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. Creating life with another human that you love is literally the peak experience of being on the planet.
- 1:27 – 2:56
Introduction
- LFLex Fridman
The following is a conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson, also known as DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, creator of the new Omarchy Linux operating system, bestselling 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 handcrafting beautiful Ruby code. But recently, since late 2025, DHH 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. Yes, 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 rollercoaster ride of a conversation. This is the Lex Fridman 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.
- 2:56 – 18:14
Programming with AI agents
- LFLex Fridman
13 months ago, we sat down right here to talk about programming, and then, uh, everything changed. At 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, uh, a- agentic engineering. So, uh, 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 rollercoaster ride?
- DHDHH
I am incredibly excited.
- LFLex Fridman
You've been talking about fun a lot.
- DHDHH
There is none of the existential threat. 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, unadulterated joy-
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm
- DHDHH
... 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
Yesterday, The 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, there were 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 of human history, how many humans got to live within the same epoch that they were born in? They never saw that complete change of the world and of society. And to have been blessed with two of those feels just such a privilege. I got to see the Internet-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... from pre-Internet to post-Internet, and then now pre-AI, post-AI. What an amazing run. How fortunate.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, but the thing is, this feels like a thing that happened faster than anything else in human history.
- DHDHH
Correct.
- LFLex Fridman
So I, I would say somewhere around December, maybe late November-
- DHDHH
November 24.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs] This is... [laughs] You know, when they talk about-
- DHDHH
That's the exact moment
- LFLex Fridman
... when one nation invades another in a world war or something like this, it-- this is how we talk [laughs] about AI changing everything. Yeah, the... And it really just sh- shifted for many great developers. It shifted to where AI's doing some, uh, basic autocomplete, maybe writing five, 10, 15, 20% of code to writing 80% of code.
- DHDHH
Or 100.
- LFLex Fridman
Or 100, yeah, especially if it's not a, a public-facing product.
- DHDHH
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 right from the get-go, great way of looking things up on the internet, not what was gonna replace me chiseling code. But-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
... then we get the agents.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
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 AGI?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
And all of that happened since last year, even just in, within the last nine months. We have basically these few phases 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... who could bounce ideas off, and I could look up this, uh, information 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, 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 realize that the quality of the output is uncannily close to what I would've written, and I, I remember just leaning back and thinking, "What just happened?"
- 18:14 – 27:30
How software will change
- DHDHH
awful
- LFLex Fridman
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. There seems to be the progress on development there has not accelerated. So why is it-- what lessons can you draw from Basecamp? Like well-established, huge user base. Why aren't we seeing like super rapid increase in like new updates, features, all this kind of stuff in these well-established apps?
- DHDHH
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. When 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 Omachi the last three months is that to get that magical 10X, 100X, in a few rare cases, 1000X 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. But 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 on implementation. They're bottlenecked on ideas. They're bottlenecked on vision. They're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those element 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 gonna 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, if you step back for a moment and think of the towering organizations we, we have who have had tens of thousands of programmers at their disposal. I mean, I'm picking on 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 life cycle capacity of internalizing what's going on.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- DHDHH
And I think it's actually funny that the critique of AI is, why isn't it going faster?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
What are you talking about? We've not had any other form of progress that has moved as 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?
- LFLex Fridman
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, uh, Mac is, uh, because of video editing, Premiere.
- DHDHH
We're gonna fix that. But-
- LFLex Fridman
So the question is, who's gonna build Premiere and Photoshop for Linux? And it feels like one person can now.
- DHDHH
100% one person can.
- LFLex Fridman
And so-- And I'm, I'm allowed to be impatient. In fact, me or anyone else, impatience is the first step of doing it yourself, [chuckles] right? Like-
- DHDHH
Correct.
- LFLex Fridman
And there's a community of tens of thousands of people that use Adobe Premiere or DaVinci, all these, uh, nonlinear video editors, that know the frustrations. Uh, everybody shares them. You can look at Reddit. You can look at the forums. Everybody knows it. Uh, 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, uh, the, the bureaucracy that's in, in- inside companies that's slowing everything down in the development of features. But it feels like they're-- 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, to really accelerate into the agentic era by letting developers just build.
- DHDHH
This is the classic innovator's dilemma. These companies have gotten so good, so 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 supertankers. It just doesn't happen. This is why We're finally getting this upset in the technology industry. For a while, I was very upset about the duopoly 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, whether 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. All 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 depended on that bound you to Windows, it is completely within reach for you personally to start rewriting it. And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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, and have done it a lot of times over. So one of the amazing things I've found with the latest agentic age is I have become a polyglot programmer, something I was absolutely not before. I was a Ruby programmer-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... first and foremost, and then I dabbled a little bit in Bash-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... when I had to. And in the last two months, I've written C++. I've written three applications that have shipped in Omarchy Quattro. I wrote a writing app. I was using this app called Tpora, which is a very nice app-
- LFLex Fridman
Great, great app
- DHDHH
... which in itself is based on another app called iA Writer, which was my real love on the Mac-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... for a clean, simple markdown writing environment. That's where I write all my essays.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And then I moved to Linux, and I couldn't get iA Writer, so I moved over to this other tool called Tpora. It was a piece of shareware, and it had a lot of features I just didn't need. And about six weeks, seven weeks ago, I thought, "Do you know what? I only need 5% of Tpora," 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 it, and it wasn't quite right. Within two days, I'd given up Tpora, and I wrote and have written all of my essays since that moment in OmaWrite.
- 27:30 – 37:21
AI impact on open source
- LFLex Fridman
Can I ask for your advice and your vision about something? So what I find with, with agents, you can actually write something like a replacement for Tpora that is perfectly customized to you, to your needs-
- DHDHH
Correct
- LFLex Fridman
... with just one user in mind. And then there's a version of that that is, starts 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.
- DHDHH
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
I've never, uh, 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? Like, 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?
- DHDHH
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 GitHub.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
You don't even have to do anything else. It will figure out how to put that repo on GitHub. It'll write a nice README. It'll start using GitHub releases so that you can track things. It'll actually be a better software maintainer than you could ever be-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... because it is far more patient, it is far more diligent in doing the drudgery of managing open source software than you are.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And you can simply get on with the joy of 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... 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." What are you complaining about?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
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 contribute 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, and suddenly they're being disintermediated here by, um, was it the 95 theses by Luther in, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm. But don't you need the wizards to keep a high bar of excellence in the code base?
- DHDHH
100% you do, which is also something that's always been true about open source, which is the second argument that really grinds 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.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs] Yeah.
- DHDHH
And I don't mean that in the way it sounds.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. [laughs]
- DHDHH
That was why I paused for a hot 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 unit tests. They don't do all of these things it takes to create good software. But do you know who'll do all that stuff? Agents, if you tell them to. They're very diligent at following your instructions, most of 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 than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's 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 ball 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 inconvenience or hurt the feelings of a human. It's just a clanker, and the clanker won't mind. In fact, the producers of clankers, the labs, love when you spend tokens in vain. They get paid just the same.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
So I, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
I've been running the Omarchy project now for a little over a year, and in the last three months working on Quattro, I have merged over 1,000 pull requests.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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-
- 37:21 – 47:05
Building Omarchy Linux distro
- LFLex Fridman
So some people listening to you right now will say DHH is suffering from the old case of, uh, AI psychosis. Uh, can you steel man the case, uh, that you are in fact experiencing, uh, in a state of delusion, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and can you argue against it?
- DHDHH
I'm in a state of delirium.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
That's what the state I'm in.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
A whole career, a whole life dedicating to 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?
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
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. That'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 at 12% year over year? First of all, give it a minute. It hasn't even been a year, goddammit. [laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
But second of all, I feel on my own account, I have actually brought the pudding.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
Omachi Quattro launched on Friday. It's been downloaded by tens of thousands of people-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... and they like it. They like it a lot.
- LFLex Fridman
We should mention that, uh, going to Perplexity here, Omachi is a highly opinionated Arch Linux-based desktop distribution centered on the Hyprland Wayland tiling compositor. It was created by David Heinemeier Hansson, DHH, as a polished developer workstation set up with a cohesive visual style and many everyday tools already configured.
- DHDHH
Let me put it. Omachi is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
It's an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it's freaking amazing.
- LFLex Fridman
And the Quattro thing is, uh, you're pushing towards the age of agents.
- DHDHH
That's right. That's the latest version that we just dropped out, which is also funny. The Omachi project is only a year old and a little bit. I started it last summer in between sessions at the 24 Hours of Le Mans-
- LFLex Fridman
Yep. [laughs]
- DHDHH
... where I had watched, uh, one too 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 Omacoop, 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, was completely different, but it was still done in a pre-agentic world. I wrote all those Bash scripts by hand in the beginning, and then I got to see the midway point where things changed over.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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.
- 47:05 – 1:00:06
Vibe coding vs agentic engineering
- LFLex Fridman
So I hope to see, uh, projects like Omachi, several of them, that, like, really show agent first-
- DHDHH
It's coming. It's, all of it is coming
- LFLex Fridman
... in the spaces, in the silly spaces that I already mentioned, like video editing, all these kinds of apps that rely, like Typora-
- DHDHH
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
... this kind of stuff.
- DHDHH
It's gonna come, and I've already seen the early inklings of this. One of the really neat features about Omachi 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 as- and its features by creating your own plugins that can be cloned off of tools we ship in the box. For example, say you want a different calendar. Omachi 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 Omarchy plugin marketplace. I have never seen growth like that with any project I've ever been involved with. 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 Omarchy 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 agentic. I hate that fucking word.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
And the reason in part I hate that word is, first of all, it's become marketing slob speak-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... at this point.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
Like, it's just slapped onto everything. I wish it, we had a different word that just meant AI doing stuff.
- LFLex Fridman
Vibe coding feels wrong, too.
- DHDHH
It does, because vibe coding to me smells exactly like script kiddies did in the early 2000s.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
People applying PHP scripts they just downloaded offline they don't understand anything of.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And while, [laughs] 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++.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
I've written things in Rust.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
Rust. I hate Rust with a passion. Rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to look at the code.
- LFLex Fridman
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Why, why, why do, why do you hate Rust?
- DHDHH
It is, in my opinion, the ugliest programming language-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh
- DHDHH
... that has been invented-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... in probably the last 40 years.
- LFLex Fridman
So it's the opposite of Rails and Ruby.
- DHDHH
It's the, it's the opposite. But-
- 1:00:06 – 1:10:24
The end of manual programming
- LFLex Fridman
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 to not doing that. So like, what is your, uh, current setup look like? 'Cause you're, I assume, are still looking for the beauty, for the chiseling, for the crafting, but you're just crafting in a different medium.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
What I'm coming to realize is that the economic payoff 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm
- DHDHH
... quickly with a small team, and not exorbitant cost, and not introducing a bunch of bugs when you change one thing over to 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, at least for the moment, is that tokens are still scarce. At this moment in time, we are all token limited. Well, not all, but anyone who, 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 cheaply as the last one. And this is the classic ball of mud where [laughs] you end up with a system that's a ball of mud-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... because it's just put together in a way where nothing is connected and it's just a, a real mess, right? I've seen that with agents, and 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 a 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 gonna look like.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
What two years from now is gonna look like. But as an intellectual experiment, I think the first computer I used was a Commodore 64.
- LFLex Fridman
Me too. Cool.
- DHDHH
It had one megahertz CPU and 64K of memory.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
Everyone who wrote software for that machine internalized certain constraints. [laughs] Well, all the constraints. That machine was nothing but constraints. If you put that programmer in a time machine and teleported him or her to 2026 and gave them a modern computer today and said, "Now write me a piece of software," they'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. Like, the amount of optimization you have to apply for a one megahertz computer to produce video game is just very different from what you have to apply today.
- LFLex Fridman
Just imagine that guy that was programming back then on a Commodore. Just re- remember all those, like, what programming felt like and what it meant, highly constrained resources-
- DHDHH
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
... how slow everything is.
- DHDHH
Beautiful in many ways. Beautiful.
- LFLex Fridman
It's chiseling. [laughs] But-
- DHDHH
It, it-
- LFLex Fridman
... imagine that person coming now.
- DHDHH
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 when we used horses for transportation?
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
It was an open sewer. They just shat everywhere.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, but have you played Red Dead Redemption?
- DHDHH
[laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
You know how cool those cowboys were-
- DHDHH
That is the way-
- LFLex Fridman
... on the horse
- DHDHH
... to experience the nostalgic past, when you don't get the, uh, all the furry, uh, impulses and senses.
- 1:10:24 – 1:22:30
Advice for programmers
- LFLex Fridman
So can we talk about the general anxiety that programmers feel, uh, going through the same transformation? They've maybe gone to university, uh, majored in computer science, dreamed of being programmers and building stuff, high salary, and now everything's changing, and there's deep anxiety about, "What do I do when w- with my life?" Can you empathize with that, and what the hell are they supposed to do?
- DHDHH
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 wanna separate things a little bit. I 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 under threat 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 gonna happen at all. Some stats actually show an increase in openings because the advent of AI is so dramatically lowering the price of 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 gonna be more demand for it. And this is the example 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, and suddenly banks could afford to open a lot more branches, and we ended up with more bank tellers 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 harvesting tools, and we did not need human labor with a hoe and an ox out there. We had, uh, mechanical tools to do that for us. In that moment, are there 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 Luddites smashing the weaving machines-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... in, in England had the same thing. And I think maybe that's the better parallel than people working the fields because these were actually highly skilled professionals doing a job that they liked on rather favorable conditions, not slaving outside in the sun all day. But where 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.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
My wardrobe probably looks like I have two. But I think the general progress of mankind depends on productivity incr- improvements. And what are productivity improvements? This is very important because in the abstract, I think everyone says, "Yay, productivity. That's good." What did 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 10th the number of people. This, by the way, could... is tragic and difficult in the 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 defense 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, they're just no longer economically viable, a lot of the tasks were just drudgery. This is certainly true of my programming. There were 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 s- spend in a flow state?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
100? 200? 25? 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, I mean, the hours spent debugging. So the pr- programming has so many painful, painful hours in it.
- DHDHH
Yes.
- LFLex Fridman
And now they're gone. [laughs] For the... I mean, for the most part, it's just fun.
- DHDHH
A lot of it is gone in a lot of domains, and the rest of it may be gone very soon. So that's where some of the romanticism also comes in-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... because pain in the moment is difficult. It's hard. It's annoying. Pain in the rear view 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, but we cherish it when it's five minutes past and we don't remember the, the hardship. We just remember the progress.
- LFLex Fridman
So certainly at the societal level, at the, um, macroeconomic level, growth is exciting. But the individual level, there's going to be a lot of anxiety, uh, potentially a lot of suffering. So by way of advice, if you're, like, a young DHH or young developer, programmer now, what would you, what would you advise they do?
- DHDHH
Don't try to anticipate anything. You will literally go crazy.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- DHDHH
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 gonna look like. Focus on right now, and right now is the most incredible time to be into computers.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
You can make them do the most amazing things if you lean in. If 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.
- LFLex Fridman
And, uh, would you recommend building publicly?
- DHDHH
I think it's optional actually to build public- publicly. I think it's, 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. Open 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 gonna be okay, and the future looks bright, and if we 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 Omachi 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 3:00 AM because of an arch package that just got pushed out outside of our control? That'd be amazing. Then it'd be great." Now we're leaning back and thinking, 'How can we take over the world? How can we make Omachi 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And if you're just sitting in your little isolated cave worrying about the future, yeah, you're gonna go, you're gonna go a little nuts.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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 gonna happen. That is indistinguishable from depression, ruminating endlessly about things you can't control.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
I'm sorry to channel some Jensen Huang here, but that's just loser talk.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
You don't have to be a loser. You can choose to lean in and-
- 1:22:30 – 1:31:46
Surviving Internet Hate
- LFLex Fridman
you're doing. And for example, I traveled across rural China recently, and I did it quite deliberately because you're talking to people, uh, in China and, and rural anywhere where time moves much slower, where there's no discussions about agentic engineering. And the, the ti- and I, I started by, uh, going on the, 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, it always feels like everything's changing, uh, uh, throughout human history, uh, but, you know, the universals are still true, uh, of what matters in life. And I just wanted to make su- keep connected to that.
- DHDHH
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, it's harnesses this, right? They're, they're 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 agentic moment, and I just showed up yesterday, do you know what? I would've been caught up in two weeks. There's not any accumulation, which is in some ways a great relief. If 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 remember or even be part of that entire journey. You can just show up for the results.
- LFLex Fridman
But the key step there when you come back from the backpacking journey is to, uh, be willing to become a totally new different human because- Things are changing so fast.
- DHDHH
That's right.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, literally, if you left for the backpacking journey-
- DHDHH
[laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
... in October last year and came back in April or May-
- DHDHH
You might as well have been in the cryo chamber for 100 years
- LFLex Fridman
... it's like, "What? What do you mean? We're not programming anymore?" This... It's a v- it's a huge transformation.
- DHDHH
It's startling, and I actually... I mean, 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, but I 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.
- LFLex Fridman
I maybe sh- I should say out loud and explicitly that I do have that, the Native American with a tear rolling down my... Like, there's a sadness. It's a goodbye. It's a goodbye to the old world of programming.
- DHDHH
That's... It's so fascinating to me.
- LFLex Fridman
I've spent so many years-
- DHDHH
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 gonna be cracked in about a decade, the smartest people at the time. It took a little longer, but 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 res- presentations that were gonna carry the day, and they didn't. And that probably set us back about 15 years. So some of it was also we had to, um, go through the gaming revolution, 3D 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 would never have 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
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. Literally, you could just choose to think of it that way. All those times you spent in, for my case, in the '90s just playing video games, they were-
- LFLex Fridman
You were contributing.
- DHDHH
Yeah, I was contributing to the AI revolution right there in that moment.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs] To the progress of human civilization. Oh, 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 is a part of it, I think.
- DHDHH
Take a moment. It's okay. Take a... And also, you don't even have to accept that it's all dead. Like, if you are still very, uh, attached to the hand chiseling, which if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that I would've been more attached. I'm surprised-
- LFLex Fridman
I'm kinda surprised
- DHDHH
... a little 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 replaced the thing I loved and gave me something I hated, I'd probably be a little bitter.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, this really feels... It's, it's hilarious and awesome to watch and inspiring to watch. It's like Picasso all of a sudden f- like, getting access to, uh, to image generation and getting super excited and switching in a matter of months. That's literally what happened. So, like, it's an artist that appreciated beautiful code, and all of a sudden you're talking about having fun-
- DHDHH
I think Picasso is actually a good parallel because if you look at his early work where he learned his craft, he 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And all these o- forms of abstract expression, he's not decrying that he's not doing Renaissance paintings anymore, that he's not just painting the perfect depiction of an apple. He's reimagining 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 where, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Ah.
- DHDHH
I became a programmer because I wanted programs.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
I wanted things to exist that did not exist. And at first, I had to learn how to 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 having 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, 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. But I also think that you're able to discover new sides of yourself-
- 1:31:46 – 1:44:11
Programming setup for AI Agents
- LFLex Fridman
I gotta ask you about, uh, how has your setup, uh, programming setup changed? So keyboard, voice, what's the IDE?
- DHDHH
It's crazy to think about now, but yeah, I used TextMate for almost 20 years.
- LFLex Fridman
Uh-huh.
- DHDHH
I used 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, what are we calling it? Agentic engineering? Oh, I fucking hate that term. We gotta come up with something that sounds as plain as programming, but encapsulates the fact that it's with agents. But-
- LFLex Fridman
I still think it should be called programming. That's fine.
- DHDHH
All right, let's just call it programming.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
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 Neovim, uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
That's not how it works with agents, in part because the agents are at once both 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And maybe I had a moment when the first agentic moment was there and we... 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 simply throwing more resources at it. This is the, uh, 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, um, feel like you're in a flow state because 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 terminal with tabs is a good way to think about it. You open a bunch of tabs. I think most humans know exactly how that works. They don't work in just one tab.
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, still sticking to the terminal, CLI.
- DHDHH
Absolutely.
- LFLex Fridman
So you're not using Cloud Code app or the-
- DHDHH
No
- LFLex Fridman
... Codex app or the-
- DHDHH
I, I love the fact that this agent revolution was kicked off in the terminal because I was already a huge fan of TUI's, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
So I like that.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
And, um, 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 as of late I've switched to this thing called Herder.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
And Herder is essentially Tmux plus agent notifications. So whenever your agent is done and needs something for you, it goes ding, [laughs] a little, uh, a little bell telling you it's ready for its human, uh... Is it, is it master or servant? I'm not quite sure always.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
But it is ready for a decision, and it also keeps track of these, is it in working mode or not. So I have this Herder setup. I have multiple Herder 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- DHDHH
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.
- 1:44:11 – 2:07:06
Obsessing about speed
- DHDHH
So this is a good moment.
- LFLex Fridman
Yep.
- DHDHH
Um, I heard it was your birthday.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
So, uh, I brought a little gift.
- LFLex Fridman
No.
- DHDHH
We are going to get you onto the agentic operating system whether you like it or not.
- LFLex Fridman
This is awesome.
- DHDHH
And I, uh, I asked-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... my friends at Dell whether, uh, maybe they had a machine that, um-
- LFLex Fridman
Okay
- DHDHH
... I could, uh, I could get you for your birthday.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, no.
- DHDHH
So here is the machine I use-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... which is-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... well, the same one I use, but it's now yours. It's a-
- LFLex Fridman
No
- DHDHH
... Dell XPS 14-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
... already set up with Omachi-
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, wow
- DHDHH
... 4 ready to be configured for you. And, um, once you realize that all your... By the way, we should almost time this. You can be up and running. You have to a- answer, like, five questions in about one minute. You could literally do it live if you wanted to.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, Omachi, beautiful modern opinion Linux by DHH. Yeah, let's do it.
- DHDHH
Yeah, fill it out while I talk. So-
- LFLex Fridman
Cool
- DHDHH
... exactly 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 workarounds, 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. Like, I need Zoom. They would enter zoom.com, find the download link, download a DMG-
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- 2:07:06 – 2:21:05
Voice prompting vs typing
- LFLex Fridman
[chuckles] Is there, um, some stuff you remember about what it took to get us to be so fast? You mentioned a few things that were, the agents were discovering.
- DHDHH
One of the things was to treat the ... lag of human input as an opportunity to preload. So- Hmm ... there's five questions you answer when- Yeah ... you set up an Omarchy machine. So it's doing stuff in the background. We're doing stuff in the background. And that was one of the things I didn't even consider, which is, I mean, the oldest trick in the book. Um, 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, 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 their 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 tweaks to, um, how the installer itself was doing things in a certain order. Some of them was also just shrinking it. The last version of Omarchy 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 the, 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 Omarchy uses the JetBrains font- Hmm ... which is a 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 Hashimoto's Ghostie. Ghostie, for whatever reason, did not want to render my beloved bitstream vero sans just the way I was used to it. Mm-hmm. But it rendered, um, this JetBrains font perfectly, so I switched over. But it, 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 NERT, uh- Yep ... font patched edition. Do you know how mu- big that is? I think it's 16 megabytes. Hmm. So I simply just came up with a new package, the slim version- Mm-hmm ... of the JetBrains package. Nice. 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 drivers 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. It's slow to create the archive, but if you're building a package- Mm-hmm ... 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. Mm-hmm. So what I loved about this was I imagined 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 carbon fiber monocoque, and that helps them over, uh, like Ferrari, for example, does it, 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, uh- [laughs] ... 370 grams- Yeah ... off that one." And I just went, "Wait, what? There's someone on a car that weighs maybe 1,040 kilos or 1,380 or something. They're s- they're worrying about 370 grams?" Yeah. What obsessed maniacs. Mm. I love them. Yeah. I want that in my life. I want a McLaren- [laughs] ... just for that reason. So I thought in that moment as I, I was shaving individual megabytes off the packages, man, I- I'm kinda like a McLaren car developer here, even though- Yeah ... 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 Omarchy, and the traditional Linux community is bloat. Mm-hmm. 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 Omarchy because the Oma part is short for omakase, which literally means chef's choice. I'm the chef. I'm making the choices, and this is the collection of applications I think is awesome," which by the way has a video editor. It ships with OBS- Mm-hmm ... to do your recording. It's just in there. Yeah. OBS is pre-installed. Nice. Kdenlive is a video editor, timeline editor, which is great. I edit all my videos with that. And then I made my own clip editor. You talked about the thing with syncing up. Yeah. I had this thing with clips, so I would do a podcast or whatever. I need a clip for X. Mm-hmm. And it's kind of a hassle to use Kdenlive or other- Mm-hmm ... timeline editors, so I made Omacut. Mm-hmm. Omacut is included too. Omacut, cool. It's just for making clips, and you can drive the whole thing with keyboard. So you can go to just the right time mark- Mm-hmm ... and then you can hit Control + Space. Mm. It moves the clip line to that line. Then you go to- Nice ... the end of the clip, and you hit Alt + Space, and it moves the end line. Nice. And then you hit Control + S, and it saves. Nice. I can make clips so damn fast now with Omacut. It's amazing. But it has all the software on it. It has Neovim on it. It has Herder on it. It has Tmux. It has a terminal. It has a bunch of themes. It has a bunch of, uh, background images, the best ones I could pick out. That takes up some space. It should, because this is not supposed to be this just barren landscape where you have to reconstruct everything. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. Bash is a great language for that. It is, um, made for that really, for system administration. It also has its limitations. You should not build everything in Bash
- LFLex Fridman
How are agents with generating Bash? Pretty good?
- DHDHH
Oh, amazing
- LFLex Fridman
Okay
- DHDHH
Except for one thing. [laughs] And I have to smack the agents over the back of the head every single time I catch it and remind it to look at the agent's MD file, because I will have an instruction in there not to make early exits.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- DHDHH
The agents love to have preconditions instead of fully expanded conditionals.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
I like something that says, "If this, then do that."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
Agents like to have precondition or exit, another precondition or exit-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... and then it falls down to the final thing it actually wants to do. I, I hate that style. So except for that, it, it's gotten shockingly, dramatically, awesomely good, to the point where when 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 kinda 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 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 w- I, I tweeted about this a couple of days ago. It blows my mind how often an agent can do something, say it's done, have the work reviewed by another agent-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... they say it's done, and then I go like, "Eh, looks a little too complicated for me." And then it'll go like, "Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right. I totally overcomplicated 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 are like, "Eh, it looks a little complicated," quite often you're able to go like, "Ah, you're right."
- LFLex Fridman
See, that, that just, th- those little indications to me show that the programmer is still needed, that intuition, 'cause I think, what, what did you say? I have a sense of the landscape of the code.
- DHDHH
When I build something like Omachi, y- I, I do look at the code. I look at the shape-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... and I look at the proportions.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
Like, I don't have to chisel everything myself anymore. This is, again, when I'm flattering myself for, not, uh... One moment I'm a McLaren, uh, audio, oh, uh, auto engineer, and the next moment I'm a da Vinci, working with his whole studio of students-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... who are doing all the chiseling on the, the fine marble, right? And he goes like, "Ah, no, the proportions are not quite right." That's how it feels working with agents now. That I can give feedback like an editor.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
That, do you know what? I'm not gonna 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 run automated testing, they get that feedback. But you actually do have to tell them, "Make it simpler."
- LFLex Fridman
Do you use voice at all for the interaction? Or, uh, are you... How much are you typing? How much are you-
- DHDHH
I type the whole thing. I actually, in Omachi's built-in VoxType-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... um, 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. Uh, I like when I'm in the car, but when I'm in front of the keyboard, I just wanna type. I also just love typing. Are you using the voice?
- 2:21:05 – 2:37:55
Best AI coding models
- LFLex Fridman
But, you know, when you're sh- shipping that kind of stuff, you do have to start thinking about latency.
- DHDHH
Don't let the, uh, 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?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
Absolutely horrendously slow data connection, very 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
If you're solving a problem that people currently don't have a solution for, they're willing to give it five seconds.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm. Well, I do think, um, there's a few... So, like, Wispr Flow is really good. A few people have stepped up that speech-to-text thing.
- DHDHH
Yeah. Yeah, we're using VoxType.
- LFLex Fridman
VoxType.
- DHDHH
But others have-
- LFLex Fridman
Uh, Vo- VoxType is open source?
- DHDHH
It is. It's j-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... just using one of the open models. I forget which, uh, parrot model it's using or something like that. It works quite well for short commands, so I have used it for that. Uh, I think you just hold down F9-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... and it starts, uh, uh, dictation.
- LFLex Fridman
Oh, so it's already in there?
- DHDHH
You just have to get online. It'll offer you to install-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... the VoxType package.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- DHDHH
Because the VoxType package includes a model that's 150 megabytes, and I was like, "Ah."
- LFLex Fridman
Yep, yep.
- DHDHH
"I don't know if I can carry that." So-
- LFLex Fridman
Yep
- DHDHH
... we don't have that in there, um, 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. So Omarchy Quattro is truly amazing as a malleable operating system where you can add functionality to it just by talking to your agent.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
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 wanna track, uh, Apple and Dell." And just see the agent go off through entirely through voice, both 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-
- 2:37:55 – 2:50:57
Best AI coding harnesses
- LFLex Fridman
You know, I just don't think there's anything that compares to Fable in terms of planning. So I usually do, uh, Fable for planning and for reviewing, uh, and then something else for implementation like Opus 5.
- DHDHH
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
And it's really nice. It's a, it's a really nice setup that allows you to, um, not run out of, out of tokens too much.
- DHDHH
What, what I found, it's really interesting because Fable 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, uh, Opus 5 and Codex-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... and have one check the other's job. This is my standard operating procedure now.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- DHDHH
I'll have a Opus or Fable do the work, and then I always end it, review with Codex X-High.
- LFLex Fridman
Hmm.
- DHDHH
And I've also started using Grok just to, to test it out, and it's also quite good. And it keep 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 GitHub. And then Copilot, I kid you not, has actually gotten good. Copilot keeps finding stuff that's legitimately broken, which is also incredible acceleration because the first version of Copilot that started doing this was literally retarded. It would just constantly 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
Keeps finding things. And if you then take that, and we shouldn't be surprised. Why are we surprised? E- even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it, you're gonna end up with better code. Of course, you're gonna 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 wanna run multiple agents at the same time, you can do arrow left when 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 wanna do this thing where you have multiple threads going on-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... the Claude code is just the nicest setup. They also just... They keep being a little further ahead, which probably shouldn't be surprising. I mean, Boris, uh, one of the guys that's working on that, he was the first one and basically came up with the thing. It's just interesting that that has been an enduring advantage. I've also used, uh, OpenCode a lot.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- DHDHH
I think OpenCode is great. I use OpenCode mainly as my main harness for all the, the open, um, models, so Kimi K3 and so forth, and I, I inference not on the Chinese servers. So I inference on Fireworks-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm
- DHDHH
... 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, uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, I knew. And I, I actually have four.
- DHDHH
I just signed up for my second one this morning-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah
- DHDHH
... because I got up at 4:00 with jet lag, and I started working with the agents right away. And now I'm three days away from re- uh, limits resetting on Fable, and I ran out of tokens.
- LFLex Fridman
So, uh, a- and they, they should really d- they-
- DHDHH
I mean, I don't... Why is that so complicated? Can't you just stack one subscription? Why do I need to log in multiple times?
- LFLex Fridman
And obviously you'll have to develop some kind of tooling-
- DHDHH
Yes, I did that too. [laughs]
- LFLex Fridman
... to move from one-
- DHDHH
Yes
- LFLex Fridman
... to the other. And then-
- DHDHH
Oh, we're building that into Omachi, by the way. So the next version of Omachi is gonna ship with multi-sub support.
- 2:50:57 – 3:10:28
AI video generation and filmmaking
- LFLex Fridman
I've been generating a lot of, uh, video recently with Higgsfield, and so they, they became a sponsor. Created a racing video. Wanted to get your opinion on-
- DHDHH
Oh, yeah? Oh, let me see. Let me see
- LFLex Fridman
... to, to, to see, um-
- DHDHH
If they downshift on the straight like they do in the movies, I'll call it out. That is the worst. [laughs] Let me see.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, see if-
- DHDHH
Oh, that's a real clip
- LFLex Fridman
... this is fully AI generated. So first it goes-
- DHDHH
Wait, what? This is AI?
- LFLex Fridman
Yep.
- DHDHH
Shit, that's my suit. That's my car. Lights go green on a street that never sleeps. Oh my God.
- LFLex Fridman
Do an audi-
- DHDHH
Are you kidding me? But they never came.
- LFLex Fridman
Is it good?
- DHDHH
I got a bad case. 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.
- LFLex Fridman
[laughs]
- DHDHH
And, uh, and that looked like a 60-year-old version of me. But holy crap, the, uh... Wow, that was crazy.
Episode duration: 5:15:50
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Transcript of episode NYFGCESmikA
