About a month ago, Lex Fridman released a 6-hour (6-hour!!) long interview with DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), creator of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp. I’d never watched any of Fridman’s interviews before this, and in recent years, I’ve been finding DHH to be a bit too much of a Loud Opinionated Online Figure for my taste, but I ended up watching all 6 hours (6!! hours!!!) of this.
Some choice notes and quotes, which I’m sure I’ll get back to in future posts.
DHH reminisces about the easy feedback loop of PHP, and this reminds me of how well-designed creative AI apps reduce the distance from intention to output:
In many ways I think the pinnacle of web developer ergonomics is late ’90s PHP. You write this script, you FTP it to a server and instantly it’s deployed. Instantly it’s available. You change anything in that file and you reload, boom, it’s right there. There’s no web servers, there’s no setup. Jump to timestamp.
On the web getting ridiculously complex in the 2010s — something I experienced firsthand when I stepped away from web development for a few years to come back to React and Node and webpack and whatever else is now “standard”:
You had all of this brain power applied to the problem of how to work with the web, and there were some very smart people — with some I’m sure very good ideas — who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one. They had other priorities, and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere. [… They] sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches. ‘I’m a front-end glob pipeline configurator!’ Timestamp.
On why he — and, I believe, some of my students — feels strongly about not wanting to use AI to code for him:
If you don’t have your fingers in the sauce (the source) you are going to lose touch with it. There’s just no other way. I don’t want that because I enjoy it too much. […] When someone who sits down on a guitar and plays Stairway to Heaven, there’s a perfect recording of that, that will last in eternity. You can just put it on Spotify, you don’t actually need to do it. The joy is to command the guitar yourself. The joy of a programmer, of me as a programmer, is to type the code myself. Timestamp.
DHH and Lex on the non-judgmental nature of AI chatbots:
I’m getting smarter every day because of AI, because I’m using AI to have it explain things to me. Even the stupid questions I would be a little embarrassed to even enter into Google, AI is perfectly willing to give me the ELI5 explanation of some Unix command I should have known already. Timestamp.
It’s a great basically search engine into all kinds of nuances of a particular programming language, especially if you don’t know it that well. Or APIs you can load in documentation, it’s just so great for learning. For me personally, I mean, on the happiness scale, it makes me more excited to program. […] And even if I never use the code it generates, I’m already a better programmer. But actually the deeper thing is, for some reason I’m having more fun. That’s a really, really important thing. Timestamp.
And it makes programming fun again, and gives him confidence to try new things:
What it’s made more fun to me is to be a beginner again. It made it more fun to learn Bash successfully for the first time. […] It gave me the confidence that, you know what? If I need to do some iOS programming myself… I haven’t done that in, probably six years was the last time I dabbled in it. I feel highly confident now that I could sit down with AI, I could have something in the App Store by the end of the week. Timestamp.
How to approach learning programming with AI:
There should be more of the time writing from scratch if you are interested in learning how to program. Unfortunately, you’re not going to get fit by watching fitness videos. You’re not going to learn how to play the guitar by watching YouTube guitar videos. You have to actually play yourself. You have to do the sit-ups. Programming, understanding, learning almost anything requires you to do. […] Now, I understand the temptation, and the temptation is there because vibe coding can produce things perhaps in this moment, especially in new domains you’re not familiar with, tools you don’t know perfectly well, that’s better than what you could do, or that you would take much longer to get at. But you’re not going to learn anything. Timestamp.
And, unrelated to all of the above, on being there for your kids:
I think there’s just some ancient honor in the fact that, again, this DNA that’s sitting on this chair traveled 30,000 years to get here, and you’re going to squander all that away just so you can send a few more emails. Timestamp.
I’m not sure I agree with everything said, but it’s certainly food for thought, and it kept me watching for all 6 hours (6!!!?! hours!!?!!).
If, like me, you’re interested in AI, programming, and learning, and/or you’ve been building for the web from the 1990s till now, I highly recommend the interview. Just tell your partner/friends you have a great movie night pick lined up, and settle in for 6 hours of nerdy conversation!
(Disclaimer: I did not actually attempt to make my wife watch this.)