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.
At the end of last year, AI agents really came alive for me. Partly because the models got better, but more so because we gave them the tools to take their capacity beyond pure reasoning. Now coding agents are controlling the terminal, running tests to validate their work, searching the web for documentation, and using web services with skills we taught them in plain English. Reality is fast catching the hype!
This is all very evident if you've tried to employ any of the new models — especially Claude Opus 4.5, Codex 5, Gemini 3, and even the Chinese open-weight models like MiniMax M2.1 and GLM-4.7 — in one of the modern terminal harnesses that give them access to all these autonomous powers. The code being produced by this new breed of AI is leagues ahead of where their predecessors were at the beginning of 2025.
I've thoroughly enjoyed putting them all to work in OpenCode, which is a terminal interface for coding agents that allows you to seamlessly switch between all of the models, capture your sessions for sharing, and simply looks astounding when theme-matched with the rest of Omarchy (where we're making it a default in the next version!).
See, I never really cared much for the in-editor experience of having AI autocomplete your code as you were writing it. That was the original format pioneered by GitHub's Copilot and Cursor, but it left me cold. When I code, I want to finish my own thoughts and sentences. That was the sentiment I expressed on the Lex Fridman podcast last summer.
But with these autonomous agents, the experience is very different. It's more like working on a team and less like working with an overly-zealous pair programmer who can't stop stealing the keyboard to complete the code you were in the middle of writing. With a team of agents, they're doing their work autonomously, and I just review the final outcome, offer guidance when asked, and marvel at how this is possible at all.
Yes, I'm ready to give the current crop of AI agents a promotion. They're no longer just here to help me learn, answer my questions, or check my work. They're fully capable of producing production-grade contributions to real-life code bases.
Yet pure vibe coding remains an aspirational dream for professional work for me, for now. Supervised collaboration, though, is here today. I've worked alongside agents to fix small bugs, finish substantial features, and get several drafts on major new initiatives. The paradigm shift finally feels real.
Now, it all depends on what you're working on, and what your expectations are. The hype train keeps accelerating, and if you bought the pitch that we're five minutes away from putting all professional programmers out of a job, you'll be disappointed.
I'm nowhere close to the claims of having agents write 90%+ of the code, as I see some boast about online. I don't know what code they're writing to hit those rates, but that's way off what I'm able to achieve, if I hold the line on quality and cohesion.
But I'll forgive folks for getting excited! Because you don't have to connect many future dots on the current trend line to get dizzy by the prospects. The leaps of improvement that AI agents took in 2025 is simply incredible. This is the most exciting thing we've made computers do since we connected them to the internet back in the '90s. So what might things look like in 2026 or 2027? I get the exuberance.
I also get that some programmers are eager to tune it all out. The hype drones on relentlessly, the most fantastical claims are still far off from being substantiated, and there's real uncertainty about where all this will leave the profession in the future. But that's still not reason enough to miss out on this incredible moment in human and computing history!
You gotta get in there. See where we're at now for yourself. Download OpenCode, throw some real work at Opus or the others, and relish the privilege of being alive during the days we taught the machines how to think.
One of my favorite parts of the early web was how easy it was to see how the front-end was built. Before View Source was ruined by minification, transpiling, and bundling, you really could just right-click on any web page and learn how it was all done. It was glorious.
But even back then, this only ever applied to the front-end. At least with commercial applications, the back-end was always kept proprietary. So learning how to write great web applications still meant piecing together lessons from books, tutorials, and hello-world-style code examples, not from production-grade commercial software.
The O'Saasy License seeks to remedy that. It's basically the do-whatever-you-want MIT license, but with the commercial rights to run the software as a service (SaaS) reserved for the copyright holder, thus encouraging more code to be open source while allowing the original creators to see a return on their investment.
We need more production-grade code to teach juniors and LLMs alike. A view source that extends to the back-end along with the open source invitation to fix bugs, propose features, and run the system yourself for free (if your data requirements or interests maks that a sensible choice over SaaS).
This is what we're doing with Fizzy, but now we've also given the O'Saasy License a home to call its own at osaasy.dev. The license is yours to download and apply to any project where it makes sense. I hope to read a lot more production-grade SaaS code as a result!
The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe's sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn't worked for the past forty years.
But you can see why many politicians in Europe are eager to punish X for giving Europeans a social media that doesn't cooperate with its crackdown on wrongthink. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is personally responsible for 5,000(!!) cases pursuing his subjects for insults online, which has led to house raids for utterances as banal as calling him a "filthy drunk".
It's against this backdrop — thousands of yearly arrests for banal insults or crass opposition to government policies — that some Europeans still try to convince themselves they're the true champions of free speech and freedom of the press. Delulu indeed.
That's primarily because Europe basically stopped creating new, large companies more than half a century ago. So as the likes of Nokia died off, there was nobody new to replace them. In the last fifty years, the number and size of new European companies worth $10 billion or more is alarmingly small:
So cue the talk about security. European leaders are incensed by getting excluded from the discussion about ending the war in Ukraine, which is currently just happening between America and Russia directly. But they only have themselves to thank for a seat on the sidelines. Here's a breakdown of the NATO spending by country:
This used to be a joke to Europeans. That America would spend so much on its military might. Since the invasion of Ukraine, there's been a lot less laughing, and now the new official NATO target for member states is to spend 5% of GDP on defense.
But even this target fails to acknowledge the fact that even if European countries should meet their new obligations (and currently only Poland among the larger EU countries is even close), they'd still lag far behind America, simply because the EU is comparatively a much smaller and shrinking economic zone.
In 2025, the combined GDP for the European Union was $20 trillion. America was fifty percent larger with a GDP of $30 trillion. And the gap continues to widen, as EU growth is pegged at around 1% in 2024 compared to almost 3% for the US.
Now this is usually when the euro cope begins to screech the loudest. Trying every which way to explain that actually Europe is a better place to live than America, despite having a GDP per capita that's almost half.
And on a subjective level, that might well be true! There are plenty of reasons to prefer living in Europe, but that doesn't offset the fact that America is simply a vastly richer country, and that matters when it comes to everything from commercial dominance to military power.
But it's the trajectory that's most damning. In 2008, Europe was on near-parity in GDP with America! But if the 1% vs 3% growth-rate disparity continues for another decade, America will grow its economy by another third to $40 trillion, while Europe will grow just 10% to $22 trillion. Making the American economy nearly twice as large as the European one. Yikes.
These should all be sobering numbers to any European. Whether it's the 10,000 yearly arrests in the UK for social media posts or the risk of an economy that's half the size of the American one in a decade.
But Europe isn't doomed to fulfill this tragic destiny. It's full of some of the most creative, capable, and ambitious people in the world (like the fifth of US startup unicorns with European founders!). But they need much better reasons to stay than what the EU (and now a separate UK) is currently giving them.
Like drastically lower energy costs to for a competitive industrial base and to power the AI revolution, so best we quickly revive European nuclear ambitions. Like an immigration policy designed to rival America's cherry-picking of the world's best, rather than mass immigration from low-average-IQ regions of net-negative contributors to the economy (and society). Like dropping the censorship ambitions and bureaucratic boondoggles like the DSA. Like actually offering a European internal market for remote labor and a unified stock exchange for listings.
There are plenty of paths to take that do not end in a low-growth, censorious regime that continues to export many of its best brains to America and elsewhere. So: make haste, the shadows lengthen.
Kanban is a simple, practical approach to visually managing processes and backlogs by moving work cards from one progress column to another. Toyota came up with it to track their production lines back in the middle of the 20th century, but it's since been applied to all sorts of industries with great effect. And Fizzy is our new fun, modern take on it in digital form.
We're certainly not the first to take a swing at this, not even for software development. Since the early 2000s, there's been a movement to use the Kanban concept to track bugs, issues, and ideas in our industry. And countless attempts to digitize the concept over the years.
But as with so much other software, good ideas can grow cumbersome and unwieldy surprisingly quickly. Fizzy is a fresh reset of an old idea.
We need more of that.
Very little software is ever the final word on solving interesting problems. Even products that start out with great promise and simplicity tend to accumulate cruft and complexity over time. A healthy ecosystem needs a recurring cycle of renewal.
We've taken this mission to heart not just with Fizzy's fun, colorful, and modern implementation of the Kanban concept, but also in its distribution.
Fizzy is available as a service we run where you get 1,000 cards for free, and then it's $20/month for unlimited usage. But we're also giving you access to the entire code base, and invite enterprising individuals and companies to run their own instance totally free of charge.
This is done under the O'Saasy License, which is basically the do-whatever-you-want-just-don't-sue MIT License, but with a carve-out that reserves the commercialization rights to run Fizzy as SaaS for us as the creators. That means it's not technically Open Source™, but the source sure is open, and you can find it on our public GitHub repository.
That open source is what we run too. So new features or bugs fixes accepted on GitHub will make it into both our Fizzy SaaS offering and what anyone can run on their own hardware. We've already had a handful of contributions go live like this!
Ultimately, it's our plan to let data flow freely between the SaaS and the local installations. You'll be able to start an account on your own instance, and then, if you'd rather we just run it for you, take that data with you into the managed setup. Or the other way around!
In an age where SaaS companies come and go, pivot one way or the other, I think it's a great reassurance that the source code is freely available, and that any work put into a SaaS account is portable to your own installation later.
I'm also just a huge fan of being able to View Source. Traditionally, that's been reserved to the front end (and even that has been disappearing due to the scourge of minimization, transpiling, and bundling), but I'm usually even more interested in seeing how things are built on the backend. Fizzy allows you full introspection into that. Including the entire history of how the product was built, pull request by pull request. It's a great way to learn how modern Rails applications are put together!
So please give Fizzy a spin. Whether you're working on software, with a need to track those bugs and feature requests, or you're in an entirely different business and need a place for your particular issues and ideas. Fizzy is a fresh, fun way to manage it all, Kanban style. Enjoy!
Black Friday is usually when ecommerce sets new records. This has certainly been true for Shopify through most of its existence. So much so that the company spends months in advance preparing for The Big Day(s). You'd think after more than twenty years, though, that things would have leveled out. But you'd be wrong.
This year, merchants sold an astounding $6.2 billion worth of wares through Shopify on Black Friday. That's up 25% from last year, when the record was ~$5 billion. Just crazy high growth on a crazy big base. The law of big numbers clearly hasn't found a way to apply itself here yet!
That volume of orders means the Shopify monolith gets put through its paces. The backend API peaked at 31 million requests per minute. The databases carried 53 million reads and 2 million writes per second. Bonkers.
Rarely do the stars align to shine so brightly that a single company is stewarded by a still-active programmer with a stellar pedigree of core contributions, saddled with such unceasing success, faced with a constant barrage of novel technical challenges, and willing to contribute everything they learn and build back into the open-source base pillars. But that's Shopify.
Ultimately, this is all downstream from being a founder-led business. Tobi Lütke not only served on the Rails core team in the early days, but continues to steer the Shopify ship with a programmer's eye for detail and exploration. The latest release of Omarchy even features his new Try tool. How many CEOs of companies worth two hundred billion dollars still program like that?
Despite all this, there's occasionally still some fringe consternation in the Ruby world about Shopify's dominance. In Rails, Shopify employs almost half the core contributors. In Ruby, they have several people on the core team too. Seeing this as anything but a blessing is silly, though.
We wouldn't have such battle-tested releases of Rails without Shopify running production on the framework's edge. We wouldn't have gotten YJIT without the years of effort they sunk into improving Ruby's core performance. And we wouldn't have seen the recent production-proving of Ractors without them either. Any programming community should be so lucky as to have a Shopify!
Now I'm obviously biased here. Not only have I been friends with Tobi for over twenty years, but I also serve on the board of directors for the company. I'm both socially and economically incentivized to cheer for this extraordinary company. But that doesn't mean it isn't all true too!
Shopify is indeed the patron saint of Ruby on Rails. Its infrastructure team is the backbone of our ecosystem, and its continued success the best case study of how far you can take this framework and language. They deserve a gawd damn parade for all they do.
So on this Cyber Monday, I say cheers to Tobi, cheers to the thousands of Shopifolk. You're killing it for merchants, shoppers, and all of us working with Ruby on Rails. Bravo.
It's pretty incredible that we're able to run all these awesome AI models on our own hardware now. From downscaled versions of DeepSeek to gpt-oss-20b, there are many options for many types of computers. But let's get real here: they're all vastly behind the frontier models available for rent, and thus for most developers a curiosity at best.
This doesn't take anything away from the technical accomplishment. It doesn't take anything away from the fact that small models are improving, and that maybe one day they'll indeed be good enough for developers to rely on them in their daily work.
But that day is not today.
Thus, I find it spurious to hear developers evaluate their next computer on the prospect of how well it's capable of running local models. Because they all suck! Whether one sucks a little less than the other doesn't really matter. And as soon as you discover this, you'll be back to using the rented models for the vast majority of the work you're doing.
This is actually great news! It means you really don't need a 128GB VRAM computer on your desk. Which should come as a relief now that RAM prices are skyrocketing, exactly because of AI's insatiable demand for more resources. Most developers these days can get by with very little, especially if they're running Linux.
So as an experiment, I've parked my lovely $2,000 Framework Desktop for a while. It's an incredible machine, but in the day-to-day, I've actually found I barely notice the difference compared to a $500 mini PC from Beelink (or Minisforum).
I bet you likely need way less than you think too.
