Lex Fridman
What programming turns into when AI writes the code
with DHH, 5 h 16 min
More info
- Guest
- DHH
- Published
- Aug 26, 2026
- Length
- 5 h 16 min
- Views when added
- 2,339,365
- Channel subscribers
- 5,070,000
Chapters from YouTube
- A five-hour talk between podcast host Lex Fridman and DHH, who created Ruby on Rails, a popular tool for building websites.
- DHH runs technology at 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, and wrote careful code by hand for about 25 years.
- Agents are AIs that take a whole job and work through it alone on a computer.
- Critics call this AI a parrot and say fans like him have lost it. He says ignoring the change is the delusion.
- His proof is Omarchy, his own version of the Linux operating system, whose latest release agents wrote while he steered.
- Later they move on to immigration, social media, kids and death.
What they say
Tap a line to open it, then tap a bullet to play that part.
Since November 2025, AI agents write code he's glad to ship.
Big companies won't speed up much, he thinks, but solo builders and open source will.
He gets the best results by staying vague and trying what comes back.
Top models finish big jobs alone now, and he keeps about 16 agents going.
Mechanical coding is under threat, he says, but people who love building aren't.
Linux will probably win the desktop, he thinks, because agents work best there.
On mass immigration, he defends speaking up even when it costs him.
Kids give him meaning, and he doesn't want to live forever.
If you only watch 20 min
Best if you write software, or you wonder what AI will do to that work.
Books, people and tools they mention
Books
People
Tools and companies
Written by AI from YouTube's captions and checked against them, so mistakes are possible. Captions don't name speakers. Report a mistake
Watch the whole video on YouTube (opens youtube.com)