DHH · 2026-08-26 · source ↗ · whole document (27)
Obsessing about speed
`1:51:00`
100%. Now, it's not gonna be the only thing. Of course it's not, because these labs now have trillion-dollar valuations, so they need to be able to reach billions of people. And I don't think we're gonna teach billions of people the intricacies of the TUI. So we're gonna have other tools, and we already have other tools, which is, by the way, one of the sweet things about Linux, the ChatGPT Codex tool.
`1:51:23`
Literally within two hours of that announcement dropping, I had it wrapped up and ready to go in Omakub. Already now, if you go to... You can actually hit the Omakub key-... and then just write ChatGPT. It should pop up as, like, install. And then just hit return.
`1:51:42`
Yeah, whatever you put in. And then it's just gonna install it, and it's gonna pop it up, and you have ChatGPT.
`1:51:48`
And that's how a lot of the apps are, and all the agentic harnesses are built in that way. Um, Tailscale, as I talked about, if you wanna hop on that, is that way. Uh, Dropbox. And the reason all these things are in there is because I use them. It's because I built this system for me, and I thought, first and foremost, how do I build my dream computer just for me? And if I get my dream computer, I am assured there are other people who are gonna have the same dreams as I do.
`1:52:27`
First, let me quote Mitchell Hashimoto, who created Ghostty terminal that's awesome and also available on Omakub and was also the founder of HashiCorp, who had this great post on X not too long ago that had the killer line, "The pursuit of excellence deserves no explanation." Wanting to make something as good and as fast and as beautiful as possible has no need for justification. We should want beautiful, fast systems that are a delight to use. Now, the funny thing with the install time is it didn't actually start with a one-minute mission. I was being modest when it got going. I thought if I could set up my entire system in 15 minutes, it would already be such a dramatic improvement over what came before it that I would be perfectly happy. And it came off the fact that the benchmarking had been skewed 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. 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? Brand-new computer, out of the box. I set it up. There's a software update. Before I was ready to install Adobe Lightroom that I had it fully up to date, it took 42 minutes. That's grotesque.
That's absurd. That's an insult to everyone who likes computers, that you get a new computer and before you can use it, you have to spend 42 minutes doing updates on something that was already installed on it out of the box from the factory. That is just preposterous, and it's crazy that that's not even the worst thing. I also got a PC, um, because all these Linux machines, they come as PCs, right?