David Heinemeier Hansson on REWORK
Pencils down
A solid snapshot of Basecamp 5 becoming 37signals’ first heavily AI-accelerated major release, with useful detail on how faster iteration changes product judgment. Fans who have heard the surrounding AI-focused appearances can skip it, since the warnings about review, architecture, and agreeable agents recur extensively elsewhere.
You end up then settling for something that’s less than your best because either you run out of time or you run out of, in my side, sometimes patience for just redoing the same feature for the oomph time. You know what’s created by agents? Endless patience. You can simply run around in rings with them all day long and they will produce one new instance of your idea after another, and then you can find out exactly what you want.
David Heinemeier Hansson participates extensively, discussing how AI has accelerated Basecamp 5 development while increasing the need for human judgment and finishing work. He also explains why Basecamp’s durable underlying structure allows substantial redesign without abandoning existing data or the product’s core model.