David Heinemeier Hansson on REWORK
AI Revisited
A solid early snapshot of David’s shift from AI skepticism to agent-first programming, with unusually concrete examples from Rails debugging and internal operations. Later appearances explore the same workflow, limitations, and product implications more deeply, so skip this if you have already heard those.
And it ends up just figuring it out, pinpoints exactly where the issue is, finds the commit where things went wrong, comes up with a patch that I could just put in the Basecamp code base to work around it until we fix it in the core of rails. And I simply just had to sit back and say, do you know what? I wouldn’t have done this.
David says AI became materially more useful for him in late 2025 when development tools shifted from autocomplete to agents capable of independently using computer tools. He describes practical gains at 37signals and in his own programming, while emphasizing human review, security risks, uncertainty about future capabilities, and an optimistic focus on present-day benefits.