David Heinemeier Hansson
Everything David personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
Top picks
Ranked by repeated personal use, excluding sponsorships.
Personal use in 2 episodes
"The ChatGPT Codex tool. Literally within two hours of that announcement dropping, I had it wrapped up and ready to go in Omarchy. If you go to the Omarchy key and then just write ChatGPT, it should pop up as install. And then just hit return. And then it's just gonna install it, and you have ChatGPT."
▶ 1:51:17"I thought it was amazing since day one and been a ChatGPT user since the first days of that interface and just love that we were able to make computers do this right from the get-go."
Personal use in 2 episodes
"When I first picked up Ruby back in the early 2000s, it was an obscure programming language out of Japan that only a handful of people in the West were using. And I went, 'This is incredible. This guy has the right vision for what a programming language should be.' If I take it and apply it to the thing I want to build — web applications, I want to build Basecamp — and then I built the tooling around it, I can get other people to realize the magic of what's here."
▶ 50:05"Ruby is designed to make the programmer feel good. I've now spent well over 20 years just absolutely loving the Ruby programming language."
Personal use in 1 episode
"Pick one of the agents to drive with. I've mainly been driving with Claude, which is actually interesting because I have some other reservations about Anthropic. But the reason I'm sticking with Claude is, in my opinion, they actually have the best harness. The Claude Code is just the nicest setup. They also just keep being a little further ahead."
▶ 1:40:53Personal use in 1 episode
"Grok 4.6 fucking completes the task. 10x speed up, same size executable. $55 worth of per token cost. Absolutely unbelievable. The deal with Grok is that their fast mode is cheaper than the regular mode on the others. And when you've used Grok 4.6 on fast, it's kind of addictive because it almost gets you to this single thread mode where the agent is able to keep up with you."
▶ 1:36:15Personal use in 1 episode
"Copilot, I kid you not, has actually gotten good. Copilot keeps finding stuff that's legitimately broken, which is also incredible acceleration. I think a lot of people actually ended up turning that off. And if they did, they should turn it back on because it's actually quite good."
▶ 1:38:55Personal use in 1 episode
"I've also used OpenCode a lot. I think OpenCode is great. I use OpenCode mainly as my main harness for all the open models, so Kimi K3 and so forth."
▶ 1:40:27Personal use in 1 episode
"November 24th, 2025. Opus 4.5, to me, was the dividing line, where suddenly I give it a couple of tasks, and I realize that the quality of the output is uncannily close to what I would've written. And I remember just leaning back and thinking, 'What just happened?'"
▶ 7:21Personal use in 1 episode
"I would actually rather have two differently sourced sort of... have, let's say Opus 5 and Codex and have one check the other's job. This is my standard operating procedure now. I'll have Opus or Fable do the work, and then I always end it, review with Codex xHigh."
▶ 1:38:29Warned against
"One of the best things that happened for X, in my opinion, was that Bluesky and Mastodon came around, because it kind of was like this honeypot for just the most vicious individuals on X."
"I hate Rust with a passion. Rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to look at the code. But I've written applications in Rust because the output of Rust is actually amazing. The memory safety, the fact that it's a system language, the fact that it's highly efficient and so forth is incredible."
Recent episodes
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Clear filtersMentioned in 1 episode
"The only place you can find a half-decent croissant, of all places, is 7-Eleven, which is hilarious to me. In Denmark, 7-Eleven is this very upscale, super nice convenience store, and they just happen to make decent croissants."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"None of it came true in the sense beyond, like, Microsoft Access databases or Excel spreadsheets. Those are end user programming environments, but it's nothing like what we're able to do now."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Homebrew has gotten really quite good. Homebrew is the missing package manager for the Mac, and no one has done more to move the Mac forward in terms of ease of setup. But still something as simple as Raycast, there's no config file that you can just access."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Lisp was once upon a time presented, Smalltalk was presented as these environments that would let regular people write their own applications, and none of it came true."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"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 DIY experience. They wanted something that just out of the box felt like it was on par in build quality with Macs."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"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, would it make a difference if you didn't go to work?"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The developers of Ladybird are finding that out — like Andreas and his team. Now, interesting with that project was the browser's basically the second most complicated software system in the world, the first one being the Linux kernel."
Mentioned in 3 episodes
"This is what I heard from Shopify and other places with lots of employees who suddenly had a breather, suddenly had a couple of weeks to lean back and just look at what was going on, gave it a try, and had the same mind-blowing experience that these agents were of a different genre than what we had before."
"Now I get a front-row seat to the fruits of that, being on the board of Shopify. I see just how far ahead they are. Half the time when I'm getting the presentation on the Shopify board on internal systems that Tobi has, it's like this is better than anything commercial."
"Shopify last year grew almost 30% year-over-year. I'm like, I would have been happy to go 30% year-over-year. They're doing it from a base that's just unfathomable."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"This is one of those things where it's like both funny and also totally Black Mirror. That was actually one of my favorite episodes of Black Mirror, the one where they get uploaded to the 1980s sea town somewhere."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I think on your podcast, Elon talked about the actual human bandwidth that Neuralink and other projects are trying to accelerate."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"If we had not had Quake, if we had not had Duke Nukem, if we had not had Unreal Tournament, we'd never have gotten AI because we would never have gotten the GPUs."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I saw Chris Williamson, Modern Wisdom had a bit where he was like, 'Yeah, okay, maybe we did go a little overboard.'"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"This has been the other revolution of the last year for me, is discovering these WireGuard networks."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"If we had not had Quake, if we had not had Duke Nukem, if we had not had Unreal Tournament, we'd never have gotten AI because we would never have gotten the GPUs."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"None of it came true in the sense beyond, like, Microsoft Access databases or Excel spreadsheets. Those are end user programming environments, but it's nothing like what we're able to do now."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"One of my favorite video games of late is ModRetro's. He's recreated the Game Boy. It's amazing. Look it up. It's really cool. Wild attention to detail, input lag, and all the other things."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The triggering thing was the Diary of a CEO, where the host was saying something to the effect of, 'I had a glass of wine and the next three days were ruined.'"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The first iteration we talked about last time was called Omakub, was built on top of an existing system called Ubuntu, and it was fine."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"By I think 2007 we had four major products we were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp while we were seven people at the company."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"One of the best things that happened for X, in my opinion, was that Bluesky and Mastodon came around, because it kind of was like this honeypot for just the most vicious individuals on X."
37 recommended · 0 sponsored · 2 warned against · 0 episodes