DHH’s new way of writing code

DHH’s new way of writing code

From The Pragmatic Engineer by Gergely Orosz

April 8, 2026 · 1h 46m

About this episode

David Heinemeier Hansson discusses his evolving approach to software development and the impact of AI on coding practices.

Brought to You By: • Statsig — ⁠ The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more. • Sonar – The makers of SonarQube, the industry standard for automated code review • WorkOS – Everything you need to make your app enterprise ready. — David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is the creator of Ruby on Rails and Omarchy, co-founder and CTO of 37signals (maker of Basecamp and HEY), and the author of several books including the best-seller, Remote: Office Not Required , co-written with Jason Fried . Six months ago, in an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast , David shared how he doesn’t use AI tools to write code: he types out all his code. But things have changed a lot since then. In this episode, we discuss his approach to building software, how it’s changed in the last six months, and why he now takes an agent-first approach, and how he barely writes any code by hand. We go into how he uses AI agents: which alter how he builds and explores ideas, but also how his standards of quality and craft remain the same. We also discuss how 37signals thinks about product development, from the role of designers to the importance of aesthetics and taste. David gets into how he sees beauty…

People in this episode

Host: Gergely Orosz

Guest: David Heinemeier Hansson

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

Statsig, Sonar, WorkOS

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Ruby on Rails, Omarchy, 37signals, Basecamp, HEY

Books & works: Remote: Office Not Required

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