#501 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux

“extrapolate what nine months from now is going to look like. When two years from now, it's going to look like. But as an intellectual experiment, I think the first computer I used was a Commodore 64. Me too. Cool. It had one megahertz CPU and 64K of memory.”

“And it came off the fact that the benchmarking had been screwed so out of whack. You talked about the Commodore 64 being your first computer, right? When you unwrap that Commodore 64 and you hit the on button, in I think about less than one second, the basic interpreter was ready to accept your command.”

“We have the technology. We've had the technology since like 1981 when the Commodore 64 first came out. The fact that we now have a computer that's a trillion times faster and you have to spend 42 minutes or an hour and a half setting it up before it's ready to use is so infuriating to me that it became a passion.”

“Yes. This is how computers were always meant to be. This is how computers started. The Commodore 64. You turn it on. First of all, it boots in a second. Amazing. Second of all, it boots straight into basic. It was the malleable computer from the get-go. It just so happened that you needed to know hieroglyphs to be able to take advantage of that.”

“So he's recreated the Game Boy. Nice. It's amazing. Look it up. It's really cool. But what's even cooler than the fact that he recreated this hardware and the original chunkiness, but brought it up to date with sort of modern screens and so on.”

“get to see what I'm talking about. That is the chromatic Tetris re-implementation. I played a lot of Tetris on the original Game Boy, probably one of my top three favorite games of all time. And they rewrote it with one change.”

“And that speeds up the game by about 400%. It is an incredible game, and it's a new Game Boy game. I think the Game Boy came out in 89 or 88. It's a very old machine. The fact that there's still people writing new old games is awesome.”

“had a glass of wine and the next three days were ruined. Okay. And that to me, I mean, in his circumstance, I'm sure that's true. Like, if you have not drank any alcohol for a very long time and you have just a little, I could see how it can have effect.”

“where I was like, fuck man, I should have a glass of wine just right now, even though I don't usually drink. And in fact, I think the alcohol question is a good microcosm to zoom in on. So we've all stopped drinking, apparently.”

“fuck, I kind of want the opposite. Like, I don't barely drink at all, like a glass of wine once a month, maybe. Like, do you know what? I should start just on the weekends, get a glass, maybe two.”

“We've been running Dell since the mid-2000s, I think. But I never ran their laptops because compared to a MacBook, they just weren't up to the task for me. The XPSs from 2016 or from 2026 with those Intel Panther-like chips are the first Dells that I would personally actually use.”

“It's lighter than a MacBook. And the chip is finally competitive because Intel spent a good five years developing the 18A process node.”

“It was literally almost instant. There was virtually no boot time. Do you know how long it took me to set up a new Mac that I had bought for actually the one app that I still haven't Vibe coded my way into on Linux, which is Adobe Lightroom?”

“bring my laptop and I found out when I arrived I only had a Mac mini. So I was gonna make the best of a bad situation here and set up my Mac in some of the ways I've been thinking about with Linux.”

“And this, by the way, is not a new thesis. David Graeber wrote this wonderful piece, Bullshit Jobs, back in, I think it was maybe early 2010s, based on a poll he did in the UK asking people at that time, I think the question was something like, would it make a difference if you didn't go to work for humanity, for mankind?”

“It's a Dell XPS 14 already set up with Omarchy 4, ready to be configured for you. And once you realize that all your.”

“I love that Framework 13 I think I talked about last time. I still like them. They still make good computers. But I think for a lot of people, they didn't want a DUI experience.”

“I'm like, what if I had 16 cores? What if I had 32 cores? What if I had 64 cores? So, I instantly went out and I bought these amazing KVMs called GLI.NET Comets. And what they do is it's this little box. You plug in HDMI, you plug in USB, and connect it to the computer.”

“Or I think Rolex has one that can go down to 4,000 meters, the deep ocean, the deep diver ocean, or whatever it's called. No one outside of three people in the world, whoever buy that watch will ever put it to the test.”

“get to see what I'm talking about. That is the chromatic Tetris re-implementation. I played a lot of Tetris on the original Game Boy, probably one of my top three favorite games of all time.”

Also filed under Tetris

“Yes. Love, creation, creativity. Same challenges. I read this book, The Fourth Turning. You check that out. It talks about this notion of history working in cycles, and there are these phases to history, and they name them and so forth.”

“They've been incredible. They, for a moment, let go of the XPS brand. Yes, they did last year. And I was like, this is dumb. XPS is awesome. It was not just dumb. Dumb that it got rid of the XPS branding.”