David Heinemeier Hansson

I first went to China in 2011, racing for the Lotus/Jetalliance team at Zhuhai in the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup. It was a delightful experience, but also a glimpse of China's gritty side. Zhuhai had an unapologetically industrial look, with a permanent, low-hanging haze. The parade through the city felt like the crowd had been instructed to attend on pain of... consequences. Brutalist aesthetics through and through.From 2013 through 2019, I raced nearly every year at the Shanghai…

We should all strive to be our brother’s keeper: to look after each other, inspire each other, and simply enjoy each other’s company. For men this usually requires a shared mission or interest. Mine has always been computers, so I happily consider myself a tech bro.I know the term has been used to denigrate anyone who has done well with computers or who dares to be excited about them in ways that rub some people the wrong way. But who cares? There is no reason to surrender a perfectly pleasant…

In the 18th century, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture to feed themselves and the nation. Today, it's around 1%. In the 1950s, there were hundreds of thousands of telephone switchboard operators. Today, they're all gone. There used to be well over a million professional typists too, but word processing largely killed those jobs as well.This is what progress usually looks like: redundancy.Technological advancement has always rendered some jobs unnecessary. That is literally the progress!…

Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this,…

Paradise is not lost, the world is not ending, and most material metrics of humanity have never been better. Yet the endless, incessant dooming about the climate, the inequality, and AI is everywhere. We may have killed God, but we clearly didn't bury the devil's anxieties with him.Yes, we're born with a negativity bias to keep us safe from starvation, saber-toothed tigers, and rival tribes. Good! But you don't have to let your caveman instincts run your whole life. The gift of fear — when the…

The age of agents has brought us endless execution. Every idea, every hunch, every experiment is now within immediate reach. For people with endless ideas, this is nirvana.It's also the most fucking sci-fi thing I've ever been privy to. The internet was a revelation, but it all felt understandable. The science, the standards, the methods.But working with agents truly is magic. In the best possible sense of the word. Technology so advanced that it seems scarcely comprehensible. HOW ARE WE MAKING…

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey has always been an incredible movie, but its value as a cautionary tale has increased exponentially since AI took off. The iconic scene with HAL 9000 refusing to open the pod-bay doors captures the whole alignment question in pulsing-red cinematic poetry.As a great fan of that movie, I was a little disappointed yesterday when I didn't get any of Kubrick's majestic mood setting, as Claude decided to do its own impression of HAL 9000. Instead, I just got…

Jason and I have been making the same argument for over a quarter of a century now: Small teams can do incredible things when they embrace their constraints. And when they work in software or media or other intellectual realms, they don't need loads of capital to get going, so they can skip the investor rat race, focus on their edge, and find customers to fund the journey.With the rise of AI, this argument has never been more potent. When Jason and I got started, you could only do this if you…

In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as many as 80 by the end of 2024, and probably close to a hundred today.At first glance, this is a heartwarming story. The wolf, in the abstract, is a majestic creature. It's great to…

The decline of Europe is not inevitable, despite how much Americans love to joke/proclaim that the continent is doomed to become an open-air museum. Sure, it's possible that things have to get worse before they get better, but believing that "it's over" is just loser talk. It's never over, but the old world also won't recover by itself.So here's my pithy prescription for how Europe can find its way back to The Good Times.#1 End mass migrationNo single issue has cost Europe more than mass…

We've been buying servers from Dell since the 2000s at 37signals, but I was never too impressed with their personal computers. They either felt cheap or enterprisey to me. Like they were made exclusively for people who are handed standard-issue laptops by corporate, and not something discerning techies would buy with their own money. But the new XPS line has completely changed my perception.I've now spent several months with the 2026 XPS 14 and 16, and last week I added the MacBook Neo-fighting…

In the 1980s, France started 43 nuclear reactors across 14 sites. On average, each reactor took just seven years to build. Forty years later, all but one of these reactors are still running, and they continue to produce nearly half of France's electricity.Can you imagine France doing something like this today? Or any other country in the West for that matter? The past is a foreign country. But why is this? Why did the West lose the will to power?A popular meme would explain it as the…

It's no mystery to me why the Tesla Model Y is the world's best-selling car. As a total package, I could make a fair argument that it's simply because it is the world's best car. I'm no stranger to Teslas at this point. We've owned a Model S Plaid, the Model X we traded in on the Y, and we still have the Cyberbeast too. But as impressive as all those cars are, the Y towers above them in several key respects, but first and foremost, value.The premium all-wheel-drive white-on-white seven-seater…

Europe is finally waking up from many decades of naive pacifism. While the continent is loath to give America credit, this is largely where it's due, as Trump has pulled back on blanket security guarantees. Well, that and a major war on its doorstep going on four years now.That's the thing about delusions. Their upkeep seems free until reality intrudes. And that reality has finally gate-crashed the European continent with all the tact and timing of a drunken sailor. So now what?"Buy, buy, buy"…

Rupert Lowe, member of the British Parliament and leader of the Restore Britain party, released The Rape Gang Inquiry yesterday. It details the industrial-scale sexual atrocities committed by predominantly Pakistani Muslims against mostly White British girls in the United Kingdom over decades. It's the stuff of nightmares. In fact, it's so grim, so vile, and so dark that I can't in good conscience recommend reading the graphic details directly (even just a summary of the accounts is…