Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
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56 of David Heinemeier Hansson's claims fit 25 mental models. Most often: Trade-offs, Play long games, Lock-in and switching costs.
A longer horizon makes some problems solvable and some short-term wins look like what they are.
Their wordsHumans are rigid in the short term, but flexible in the long term
Their wordsWhat's good for humanity at large in the long run may well be temporarily tragic for the individual in the short run.
Their wordsWhatever time you take to refine your technique now will be paid back to you for the next 20-40-60 years of your career
Their wordsThere is no shortcut here. You simply just have to be good. And you will not get good if you do not practice. And if you think your place of employment is not worthy of your best, you're cheating yourself.
Their wordsNot every seed of service you plant will sprout and flourish, but if you keep planting, eventually some of them will. That's just the math of good deeds and good faith.
Their wordsWhen the gravy gets spooked, and you have to get by on your own cooked cabbage until you can afford better, that's when you learn the basics
A system moves only as fast as its narrowest point; speed up anything else and nothing changes.
Their wordsThe 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?
Their wordsThe revelation I've had working on Omarchy 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.
Care about the parts nobody sees; quality shows in the details.
Their wordsBuilding for quality, building for readability, and sweating the details is a slow, smooth process. One that gets you to release quicker than the frantic thrashing you hear about from stereotypical crunch sessions
Reason up from what is known to be true, not from what is usually done or said.
Their wordsWe should rethink the entire stack from first principles given the transition to agent-led programming.
Set up your situation, rules and defaults so the good choice is the easy one, instead of relying on willpower.
Their wordsHaving good, curated defaults that integrate all the many tools in a coherent feel and look can help more developers acquire a taste for Linux
Most growth slows as it matures; the question is whether the curve is flattening or something new is restocking it.
Their wordsSo 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 intelligence comes out.
When something becomes cheap and plentiful, the value moves to whatever is still rare next to it.
Their wordsThat 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.
Every choice gives something up, so name the cost; and check, because some trade-offs everyone assumes are not real.
Their wordsIt wasn't ever free FREE, of course, but the price in data and attention wasn't obvious to most before they got hooked
Their wordsAnd 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?
Their wordsThis constant quest for virality might make good ideas burn 10x as bright, but also 10x as short
Their wordsNot all connections benefit from having the friction removed by digital systems
Their wordsAccept that the price we pay for an open, free internet is one which permits the darker sides of humanity
Their wordsBut if I'm content just being in the top 5%, I can be in the top 5% on like five things at once. I can get really good at writing. I can get decent at driving a race car. I can become pretty good at programming. I can run a company. I can have a family.
Their wordsThe opportunity cost of endless planning and contemplation just went way up.
Their wordsDecentralization is wonderful in many ways, but it's very much subject to link rot and disappearing content
People stay with what they would not choose again because leaving costs more than staying; watch who sets that cost.
Their wordsAnd 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%? 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 I've done it a lot of times over.
Their wordsThe absurd egress fees charged by major hyperscalers have been one of the biggest impediments for companies to leave the cloud
Their wordsCutting the egress racket absolutely will improve competition in the cloud
Their wordsUnless you accept the idea that all your passwords should be tied to one computing ecosystem, and thus make it hard to use alternative computers
Their wordsWe can't have competition in the cloud as long as folks are locked into proprietary or overly-complicated setups
Make something cheaper to use and people use so much more of it that the total goes up (Jevons paradox).
Their wordsSo, I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden days.
Their wordswe're getting ambitions we would never have looked at before because suddenly the cost of exploring a hunch has just dropped by a thousandfold.
Their wordsWe're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world.
Shorten the loop between doing and finding out; whatever a loop rewards is what you become.
Their wordsSomething that's doable in a week might be a great investment, but if you spend six doing the same thing, with excess care, you're wasting your time
Their wordsNo 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. So in the agentic age, you should resist the temptation to be overly specific upfront. 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.
Their wordsWaiting until the project is pristine before sharing it with the world creates an aura of perfection that intimidates and alienates
Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.
Their wordsThey put a price on criminal behavior, and if the gains from committing those crimes exceed the cost of the fines, there's a base hyper-rational calculus that says the company should continue to break the law
Their wordsBecause the problem isn't just venture capital, it's other people's money. Once you take other people's money, completely understandably, they want a return and they would prefer to have the largest return possible.
Their wordsGoogle will eventually kill every single service you care about, if they can't find a way to directly monetize it with ads at a scale of billions
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
Their wordsit's much harder to measure how much long-term business is lost by poisoning your reputation with the 99.9% of customers who had to jump hoops and dodge sleazeballs to get out of the subscription
Their wordsAnd we ended up with a lot of PRs that individually perhaps could have been justified for a hot moment, taken all together, 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.
Their wordspushing on by downplaying these deaths might well have harmed the overall trust in vaccines even more
Institutions, code, cities and knowledge run down by default; keeping something alive is work that has to be paid for.
Their wordsDecades of underfunding the European military has lead us here
Their wordsAbilities unused will atrophy, so putting in anything less than your best means giving up on what you're capable of
Keep learning after school, and learn from other people's mistakes as well as your own.
Their wordsEveryone deserves at least a few bad bosses in their career to teach them what not to do, illuminate what really matters to them, and hopefully endow them with a perspective on how they'd operate themselves if they ever got the chance
Their wordsYou can absolutely learn from people you wouldn't want to be
Find the essence and cut the rest; simplicity is hard work, not the absence of effort.
Their wordsNever aspire to a more complicated stack than what your application calls for
Their wordsSo, this is why I'm quite skeptical about all this new AI acceleration we're having is even us, I think it's quite likely that we could use it wrong to build too much software, to get too far away from less software, learnable software. It still has to fit in the mind of a human.
Making a cheap, real version settles questions a description cannot.
Their wordsDesigners at 37 Signals are not just here to make a spec look pretty. They're here to find what the spec should be. They're product managers in many ways.
Their wordsAnd so much of the ability to move your opinion comes from not these abstract ideas, but from touching things, from actually setting up open claw or whatever and getting some experience with it and then having this instinctual feeling of where things are going to go that you're not going to get from just reading someone else do it.
Think in odds, not certainties, and bet heavily only when the odds are clearly yours.
Their wordsI'd rather celebrate people updating their priors than dunking on them for being late. Make it cool to change your mind when you realize the facts have changed!
Their wordsyou can ever be fully, truly certain that any sufficiently complicated system will ever work as intended in production
Every model, word or plan is a simplified map of reality; useful when its structure matches, misleading when mistaken for the thing itself.
Their wordsRefusing to believe reality because it doesn't comport to your mental model of the world is an intellectual failure state
Their wordsThat it's a process for discovering and refining the truth, not the truth itself
Know the edge of what you really understand, and act inside it.
Their wordsTHIS IS WHY WE SHOULDN'T WANT CORPORATIONS WEIGHING IN ON SOCIAL AND POLITICAL QUESTIONS OUTSIDE THEIR DIRECT SPHERE OF OPERATIONS
Your mind jumps to conclusions and defends them; look for the evidence against you and use checklists.
Their wordsWhen a story fits a contentious narrative someone already believes, they tend to become strikingly gullible
What an organisation builds ends up shaped like the organisation that built it.
Their wordsYou cannot produce the kind of software that Basecamp is with a team of a thousand people. You will build the kind of software that a thousand people builds. And that's not the same thing at all.
Much of what people do is a message about themselves, and a signal is believed only when it costs something to send.
Their wordsIt's easy to commit to principles when they don't cost you anything
Trust the judgment of people who pay for being wrong over people who only comment.
Their wordsWhat I love most about underdogs is how they can't help having something on the line
Fast software feels simple, and waiting makes everything feel complicated.
Their wordsThere's no reason a machine from ten years ago shouldn't fly like superman.