AI Revisited

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined this week by David Heinemeier Hanssen, cofounder and CTO of thirty seven Signals. Well, we have gotten a lot of questions over the years about AI and incorporating AI into our products. We've typically said, like, we're just not quite there yet. We're seeing how things go, but I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift recently internally, at least, from announcements that I've seen. So I thought we would talk a little bit about that today. David, why don't you just jump right in? I know we've kind of not been hesitant. I don't know if hesitant is the right word, but it seems like we're, like, jumping in a a bit more now. Yeah. I think, for me, AI really changed in the later half of 2025. The models got better as they've been getting better for a while, but we gave them more powers, especially when it comes to development. There's a new or not even that new, but approach of instead of having the AI be in your editor, auto completing things, trying to help you write something that you're in the process of writing, they moved out of that and into the terminal running in agent mode, which basically just means that they're running on their own from a script, from a plan where you tell them to do something, and they go off using the tools available on the computer. They use your terminal. They run bash commands. They might even run some programming. They start looking things up on the web. They've been doing that for a while. But when you combine these things that they have control over your computer, which sounds a little scary, but when you see it in action as a agent doing development alongside you, not sort of on top of you, it really changes the game. Not just in how it feels, which to me was a really important part of it. I played around a fair bit with the auto completion paradigm of AI as it was for developers in the initial phase, and I didn't like it at all. I did not like this idea that I have a thought in my head coming out through my keys and then boom, the AI tries to did you think of this? Did you think of that? Can you shut up for a second and just let me type the damn thought out of my head? Now I know there are others who rather enjoyed that and saw some great benefit out of it. I didn't like it. And that was where a lot of my opposition to using AI as a developer tool was coming from that I could see the advantages. I could see the promise, at least I should say. But it didn't feel like it was in …