David Heinemeier Hansson
37 things David uses or recommends, from 3 episodes.
David's top picks
What David uses or recommends most, ranked by how often and how strongly. Paid ads are left out.
Uses and recommends it · talked about 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."
Uses and recommends it · talked about in 2 episodes
"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."
Uses and recommends it · 1 episode
"One of the things we've started experimenting with at Basecamp is that we put the agents inside of Basecamp, and we treat them as coworkers. We assign them tasks inside of Basecamp, so they will do work on a to-do in Basecamp, or they'll do work on a card. It turns out that a collaboration tool that's optimized for asynchronous communication is actually the right format versus these harnesses are a little more like chat."
Uses and recommends it · 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?'"
Uses and recommends it · 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."
Uses and recommends it · 1 episode
"Here's the machine I use, which is the same one I use, but it's now yours. It's a Dell XPS 14 already set up with Omarchy. The XPS from 2026, with those Intel Panther Lake chips, are the first Dells that I would personally actually use. They fixed the battery life. They fixed the performance. They fixed the compatibility. They fixed the weight. They fixed the screen. That's a tandem OLED screen, which means it's actually better tech than what you'll get in a MacBook. It's lighter than a MacBook."
What David warns against
Things David says to avoid or be careful with. Other experts don't always agree.
"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."
Experts most like David Heinemeier Hansson
They use many of the same things David does. Pick the ones you trust and see what they all swear by.
All 37 of David's picks
- Ruby Uses and recommends it 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." +1 other
- ChatGPT Uses and recommends it 2 episodes "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." +155 others
- Basecamp Uses and recommends it "One of the things we've started experimenting with at Basecamp is that we put the agents inside of Basecamp, and we treat them as coworkers. We assign them tasks inside of Basecamp, so they will do work on a to-do in Basecamp, or they'll do work on a card. It turns out that a collaboration tool that's optimized for asynchronous communication is actually the right format versus these harnesses are a little more like chat." Only David
- Claude Uses and recommends it "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?'" +245 others
- Claude Code Uses and recommends it "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." +107 others
- Dell XPS Uses and recommends it "Here's the machine I use, which is the same one I use, but it's now yours. It's a Dell XPS 14 already set up with Omarchy. The XPS from 2026, with those Intel Panther Lake chips, are the first Dells that I would personally actually use. They fixed the battery life. They fixed the performance. They fixed the compatibility. They fixed the weight. They fixed the screen. That's a tandem OLED screen, which means it's actually better tech than what you'll get in a MacBook. It's lighter than a MacBook." +1 other
- Herdr Uses and recommends it "As of late I've switched to this thing called Herdr. And Herdr is essentially tmux plus agent notifications. So whenever your agent is done and needs something for you, it goes ding, a little bell telling you it's ready. It also keeps track of whether it's in working mode or not." Only David
- Tailscale Uses and recommends it "This has been the other revolution of the last year for me, is discovering these WireGuard networks. Tailscale is essentially turning all the computers you have into a local network wherever you are. Like right now on my phone, I have direct access to all the computers in my Malibu office. I also have access to all my computers in my Copenhagen office. And I can treat them as though I sat right next to them without having to punch holes in a firewall or set up complicated VPNs." +3 others
- Tetris Uses and recommends it "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. If you hit up, the brick slams. And that speeds up the game by about 400%. It is an incredible game, and it's a new Game Boy game." Only David
- Arch Linux Uses and recommends it "I'll take Vaxry's cracked Hyprland and I'll slap it on top of Arch Linux and we're going to make Omakase. Arch — that's the Linux distribution run by a gang of volunteers for the past 20-plus years. It doesn't have an organization, it doesn't have a lot of fundraising, it doesn't have a commercial structure. It's just a bunch of nerds who share the burden of distributing Linux. Amazing." Only David
- Brother HL-2340WD Uses and recommends it "The Brother HL-2340WD — I think that's the model number of my beloved printer. The reason why it's so beloved is it was the first printer I ever bought that I just plugged in and it worked. There was no firmware. There was no nothing. There was just functionality. I just need black and white prints. This is a solved problem for me. And I love the printer." Only David
- Codex Uses and recommends it "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." +96 others
- Fireworks AI Uses and recommends it "I inference on Fireworks, which is a really nice service where you can just pay by the token, and if you're using these open weight models, they're not that expensive by token. So that's a great way to do that." +3 others
- GL.iNet Comet Uses and recommends it "I instantly went out and I bought these amazing KVMs called GL.iNet Comets. What they do is it's this little box. You plug in HDMI, you plug in USB and connect it to the computer. You connect this thing in, you go to a webpage, log in once, set one password. Now this thing can hop on your tailnet." Only David
- GitHub Copilot Uses and recommends it "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." +4 others
- Grok Uses and recommends it "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." +35 others
- JetBrains Mono Uses and recommends it "Omarchy uses the JetBrains font, which is an awesome font, beautiful font, and actually a font I didn't like at first glance, but then it was the only font I could get to look perfect in Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty." Only David
- Kdenlive Uses and recommends it "Kdenlive is a video editor, timeline editor, which is great. I edit all my videos with that." Only David
- Open Code Uses and recommends it "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." +2 others
- iA Writer Uses and recommends it "iA Writer, which was my real love on the Mac, for a clean, simple Markdown writing environment. That's where I write all my essays." +1 other
- mise Uses and recommends it "This package manager for fast-moving development tools. This is how we manage all the agent software and so forth. Normal package managers are not built to be updated seven times a day. And all of these agent harnesses are updated about seven times a day, so we needed an out-of-band package manager, and mise just turns out to be perfect for this." Only David
- r/unixporn Uses and recommends it "On Reddit, there's this amazing subreddit called r/unixporn. It's basically a showcase for these nerds who spend in many cases hundreds of hours personalizing their Linux distribution and setup to the point that it doesn't look like anything else you've ever seen. When I discovered that, I went — if these nerds individually are able to make Linux look this cool, I can make something that's competitive with the Mac." Only David
- Civilization Uses and recommends it "My favorite game of all time is Civilization 1, the original Sid Meyers game, which is obviously about world building." Only David
- Framework Laptop Uses and recommends it "I'm doing this call from my Framework desktop running Omakase and my delicious mechanical low-profile keyboard and it all just works beautifully." Only David
- Hey Uses it "I had already set it up with hey.com, an email address. We have a CLI that's in beta right now. So I set it up with that so it can send to email. That's how it gives me reports about outstanding issues and PRs." Only David
- Hunk Uses it "There's also this other tool I've been playing with a bit called Hunk, which just produces diffs in a really nice way. So you could look at that too. But I find that when I look at Hunk, I only see the change set, and when I'm reviewing output from an agent, I often want to see the surrounding context." Only David
- Kimi Uses it "In February I had a tweet about 'All I need is Kimi K2.5.' And in that brief moment, that was true. When I was instructing the agent, I was like, 'Oh my God, Kimi's just as good as these other models.' But then the game moved forward and I haven't used Kimi a whole lot recently because the frontier models have gotten so good." +2 others
- Louisiana Museum Recommends it "If it's lunch, it's at Louisiana, the museum north of Copenhagen. It is the best lunch I've probably ever had in my life. The chef there is just unbelievably good. Even in Paris, I've never had whipped butter that tastes as delicious as the butter does at Louisiana in Copenhagen. Literally, I would drive 30 minutes to have bread and butter at the cafeteria in Louisiana." Only David
- TextMate Uses it "It's crazy to think about now, but yeah, I used TextMate for almost 20 years. I used TextMate starting in 2005, I think. I helped get the first version out, and then I just wasn't interested. I wasn't in the market for an alternative." Only David
- TikTok Uses it "This is one of the reasons I've liked TikTok so much. I only use TikTok when I travel, and there it's such a marshmallow test." +23 others
- Ubuntu Uses it "I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago and first I had this soft on-ramp as most people switch to Linux. I used Ubuntu — that's the most popular Linux distribution." +1 other
- Smalltalk Best Practices Recommends it "My favorite book on the nitty-gritties of programming is a small book he wrote in the 90s called Smalltalk Best Practices. It is the most influential book on how I write software that I've ever read." Only David
- Puente Romano Recommends it "There is this place in Marbella called Puente Romano. It's a hotel, and down by the beach, they have this beach restaurant with fresh seafood. Unbelievably delicious. The beach seafood place at Puente Romano is incredible." Only David
- Stoicism Recommends it "Stoic philosophy, amor fati, loving your fate, is an incredibly liberating way to live." +4 others
- The Fourth Turning Recommends it "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." Only David
- Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Recommends it "Gary Vee has this book Jab Jab Right Hook. Love the book. Love the concept in basis is give, give, give, jab, jab, jab 100 times." Only David
- Maverick Recommends it "Amazing book. Amazing story. He really gave us certainly gave me permission to think very different ways about how to do things." Only David