Made Basecamp and HEY for the underdogs as co-owner and CTO of 37signals. Created Ruby on Rails. Wrote REWORK, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, and REMOTE.
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 International Circuit in the World Endurance Championship. The skyline got a little brighter with every visit, but the smog remained thick. I still recall a taxi driver straddling lanes all the way to the circuit before blasting straight through a red light, horn blaring. Exciting, but in a very frontier kind of way.
Then Covid hit, the WEC stopped going to China, and so did I. For seven years, I watched China's rise from the West. First the electronics, then the services, and finally the cars. Even from afar, it was clear that China was accelerating at a completely different pace from the West.
But until last week, when I visited Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing, it was hard to appreciate just how much the country had changed since my last visit. It might as well have been forty years.
There are still pockets of that gritty look, but the main show is now a gleaming, shiny set of cities radiating The Future. From the bullet trains to the lavish airports, from the impressive skylines to Hangzhou's West Lake. Gone is not just the smog, but the sound of diesel engines too.
I've never seen any country change so much, so quickly. In Shenzhen, they talk about "Shenzhen Speed" (like three floors of a skyscraper in a day). It looks like the entire country has been running at that clock frequency for the past decade. And they have all the results to show for their efforts.
Those efforts are clearly considerable. I repeatedly got replies late into the night and early in the morning during our stay. The pace, and the expectations that came with it, felt almost as jarring compared with America as America's pace does compared with Europe. Everyone was just on it, all the time.
I'm sure that has a cost. The 9-9-6 culture (9am to 9pm, six days a week) isn't free. But it's also obvious that all this effort has been buying results. Extraordinary results.
Take Xiaomi. I visited their nearly fully automated car factory in Beijing, and it looked like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. I've done a lot of car-factory tours in Europe, and never seen anything like this. The production lines we saw were almost entirely devoid of humans, and the few who were milling about were mostly holding laptops and clipboards, overseeing the robotized lines.
The company has gone from launching its first car in 2024 to now delivering over 40,000 cars per month! More than 800,000 cars delivered in under three years. And a halo car in the SU7 Ultra that has over 1,500 hp, lapped the Nürburgring in 7:04, and costs just $75,000 in China.
And that's perhaps the biggest material change from the last time I was there: those cars. Long gone are the Soviet-style taxis, replaced by a dizzying array of Chinese EV brands that don't just rival the best of the German giants in style and comfort, but surpass them.
We kept getting into one luxury electric SUV after another, from brands I'd never heard of. Sumptuous leather, quiet cabins, and reclining captain's chairs. With Didi, the rides were as little as $5.
Then at one hotel, they sent a classic Mercedes MPV. Gas-powered too. It felt like a big step back into the past. What would be a very nice car by most Western standards suddenly seemed cheap by Chinese standards. Crude, even.
But what stood out even more than the material differences from Europe were the cultural ones. Everywhere we went, people were not just incredibly hospitable, but genuinely excited to see us and meet. From executives at major tech companies to students at the GOSIM conference, it was just endless great vibes, great interest, and a deeply informed curiosity.
Sure, I came as a bit of a niche celebrity. REWORK has sold over 100,000 copies in China, GOSIM was full of programmers with experience using Ruby on Rails, and just about everyone was super excited about the age of agents and Omarchy's role in it.
But it's not like those conditions aren't present in the West! And still, this just felt different. Much more optimistic, much more ambitious, much more driven.
The contrast is fresh too. Speaking with large American tech companies about Omarchy, then comparing the quality of those conversations, and the pace of the follow-through, with their Chinese counterparts is eye-opening. Whether it was Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, or smaller players like Beelink. Very different.
And also, yes, tourists are almost guaranteed to get a tinted view of a country through the rose-colored glasses that always accompany a trip as short as a week. China clearly has its own challenges, economically, politically, and culturally. Like any place does.
But it's not at all obvious that those challenges are bigger than what we're dealing with in the West. On the contrary, I'd say. I could even imagine plenty of people in stagnating countries like the UK or France who might not be as bothered by one-party rule as they once were, if it meant a booming economy, national giants sprouting everywhere, and a set of safe, clean cities on the ascent.
As a man of the West, that's a tough pill to swallow. Especially since, while China may well be under one-party rule, the competitive intensity in many of its markets is far greater than what we can brag about in the West. And nearly all the major companies I visited were led by engineers, not MBAs. Difficult not to be a little envious of at least that!
But in terms of the international balance of power and trade, it doesn't actually matter that much what our opinions are. What matters is what is, and that's a formidable country producing remarkable products and services at extremely competitive prices.
There's a lot of work ahead of Europe and America to regain a competitive footing in all these industries where China is now accelerating and ascending.
There's a version of this where it all plays out wonderfully to everyone's benefit. The world gets better, faster, cheaper products and services. The trade imbalances are corrected as Europe and America catch up, reindustrialize, robotize, and revitalize their economies and political systems. Equal players, equal partners.
But there's also a version of this where the West doesn't heed the competitive warnings, and continues to disadvantage itself through eco nonsense, long-term protectionism, and a failure to kickstart moribund growth. I don't think anyone, even China, is interested in seeing where that leads.
Either way, we need more people in the West to realize what time it is. It's not enough to just see the consequences when they arrive in the form of shuttered factories or bankrupt businesses. Not only is it then too late, but it's also hard to understand exactly why, because it remains abstract and numerical.
That Xiaomi assembly line is very concrete. So is going from your first car in 2024 to delivering over 40,000 a month just a couple of years later. And that's just one obvious example.
For Europe in particular, the other is AI. Every single major company I visited had its own models. And China has a whole slew of open-weight labs that are focused just on that too. What does Europe have? Mistral?
The easy answer to all of this is just to go dooming. It's so over! We're never going to catch up! The West, and Europe in particular, just can't meet the challenge!
Nonsense.
Every day is a new chance to make different choices. The world has seen many great empires rise and fall. Some of them more than once.
I have complete faith in the possibilities of the West. In the 1980s, France built more than 40 nuclear reactors! Mercedes-Benz once built the W126. Yes, that's the past. But the present also includes America leading the AI revolution, still dominating in software, and being the home of SpaceX and Tesla. Don't you dare black pill on what's possible in the West!
But enough about the West. This is an account of China, first and foremost. And I've simply been blown away by the ambition, spirit, and scale of what's going on over there. I had an absolutely wonderful time, and I'm excited to go back soon.
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 term of endearment just because small-minded people deploy it to discredit opinions they dislike.
There is even less reason to be ashamed of an earnest interest in computers, the businesses around them, and the merit-based communities that keep forming because of them. You should beam with pride at being part of that progress.
Is the label a free pass to be an asshole or a scammer? Of course not. We can simply call those people assholes and scammers. Their interest in computers, or their skill with them, is not the problem.
Neither is their gender. Yes, men dominate computing. There are many reasons for that; none of them justifies collective guilt. The fact that women are a minority does not diminish the many who work in the industry, and it is more than fine to celebrate their achievements with gusto. Turning the percentages into a struggle session is nonsense.
So if you are a tech bro committed to advancing technology, celebrating progress, and rejecting managed decline, you are indeed my brother. I will always want to shake your hand and cheer you on.
This is what progress usually looks like: redundancy.
Technological advancement has always rendered some jobs unnecessary. That is literally the progress! Freeing humans from a class of work that used to consume their time and talent so they can pursue new problems.
Individually, this isn't a picnic. I'm sure lots of the farm laborers displaced by the combine harvester didn't much care for "progress". They cared about having a job. Same too for the switchboard operators and typists.
This isn't just a history lesson either. The Minneapolis City Council just voted to require self-driving cars to have a human "safety monitor". Lots of jobs are on the line if cabbies are no longer necessary! Thankfully, the mayor vetoed it. But note that New Jersey still requires a trained attendant to pump your gas. This kind of job-protection thinking is widespread.
So it's not hard to see why some programmers are on edge about agents, given the historical precedent of technological progress creating redundancy.
But I don't actually think the majority of them ought to worry. With the price of software creation cratering, we're likely to see an unprecedented bloom in apps and services. There's still so much paperwork and other white-collar toil we could automate, and we'll still need agent wranglers to do the work.
What is entirely possible, however, is that some companies won't need as many programmers as they did before, while others will hire their first programmers or staff up dramatically. It's very unlikely that the labor market for programming will remain static given the magnitude of this paradigm shift. But, again, that's the progress!
That isn't a license to be glib about it. We all need to live. We all need to eat. What's good for humanity at large in the long run may well be temporarily tragic for the individual in the short run. Sympathy and compassion are in order for anyone affected by the changes.
Just don't end up like the Minneapolis City Council and think you can legislate progress to a halt. That has never worked.
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, but it still came as a shock to many to actually hear it.
And I get that shock. Programming has barely been a professional career for a generation, and now it's being completely transformed. That's unsettling, even for a group of people who've seen technologies come and go on a regular basis.
But this isn't just another technology, because AI isn't just another tool. It's far more like gaining some new coworkers who are exceptionally good and fast at a wide range of tasks, but still need a bit of help with some, and whose choices you might occasionally disagree with.
From a certain angle, that looks like competition. Especially when it was barely five minutes ago that programmers were being treated like precious priests whose incantations were necessary to yield even the most low-hanging fruit of the computer. This perceived threat of disintermediation is clearly hitting some programmers hard.
But I don't think anyone who's willing to lean into the future, make the most of this intelligence explosion, and apply their skills to what comes next needs to worry much. We're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world.
I think the only programmers who have to worry about this change are those who refuse to embrace, or drag their feet on, the progress brought by the age of agents. It's fine to be skeptical about the areas where our new clanker colleagues still occasionally get it wrong, but refusing collaboration is not a viable career path for almost anyone.
Don't go down with the pencils. There's so much to build. We need you.
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 threat is credible and immediate! — is a key survival mechanism. This vague, fuzzy dooming about everything outside your control is not.
In fact, nothing will make you more miserable than ruminating over climate tigers, other people's wealth, or thinking machines. Because rumination will break your brain and render it unfit for the purpose of living.
If it turns out that The Terminator really is coming to get you, you'll have gained nothing from the upfront neurotic fretting. And if The Terminator fails to appear, you will have squandered your precious time missing the intelligence boom and the creativity abundance that AI has and will unleash.
Likewise, if the climate really is doomed, you're not going to stop that spiral by planting another windmill or choking on a paper straw. Game theory has already seen to it that rival superpowers will accelerate their quest for power. None of the climate doomer nonsense Europe has wrung it hands about in the last thirty years has managed to curb the growth in global emissions (but it did wreck the continent's economy!).
Finally, envy sits among the seven of deadly sins for a reason. Because freeloader thinking is also a primordial survival tactic, and it sneaks into your psyche when your disappointment with the outcome of your efforts overcomes your rational mind.
There have always been "winners" and "losers", and most of history had the majority of humanity live in abject poverty. The mystery is not "why are some people poor" but "why are some people not". And you won't find the answer to the latter in grievance soups of sorrow and self-pity.
This is not the time to doom, baby. This is the time to bloom. Intellectually, spiritually, and productively. Put down your anxieties, arrest your neurotic impulses, and decide to be happy about the present, the future, and your own ability to make something of yourself and this world.
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 COMPUTERS DO THIS???
I understand the general outline of the underlying mechanism for producing this intelligence: the training, the weights, the math. But the sum effect of those parts is still so wildly, intoxicatingly massive that it's hard to resist reaching for the metaphysical.
Quantum computing is full of similar mind-bending ideas. Superpositions. The multiverse. All very OUT THERE. But quantum computing isn't having an impact today. These incomprehensibly clever AI agents are.
And the impact is that I feel like there's a little genie trapped in my machine now. There to fulfill every wish and every whim. It's taken months to internalize just what liberation this grants those with the ambition to imagine.
Now I could write at length about all the caveats. All the potential dangers. All the ways it's not quite there yet. But it would be an insult to the marvel of this moment. AGI is a nefarious concept to pin down, but I'm not sure how different whatever definition we eventually settle on will look from what I'm already experiencing on the daily.
This is simply the most fun I've ever had with a computer. And I've loved them dearly for over forty years. I loved programming them myself. I loved the games. The configuration. The tactile experience. But none of it as much as I love the power to execute every idea that crosses my mind.
