DHH · 2026-08-26 · source ↗ · whole document (10)
Programming setup for AI Agents
And the faster the agents run, of course, the fewer threads I can run, but at the current pace, I can run about 16 threads-
`1:38:53`
I'm writing my lines. And over the course of, like, an hour, I will have written one beautiful controller, one beautiful model. Like, that's one file. And I've really worked on it, right? So maybe there's 60 lines left. So maybe my bandwidth at this moment is, like, 30 lines an hour. I think that's even high. Maybe it's 20 lines an hour. Now I'm running 16 threads. I'm producing at some times hundreds of lines of hour or hundreds of lines of code per hour. Now, let me pause myself there for a hot moment. I hate that metric, right? Like, lines of code is a stupid metric in general to measure these things, and I think it's right from some in the programming community to ridicule the AI psychosis when everyone talks about the number of lines of code they're writing, and then you ask them, "What did you build?" And they're like, "Well, I..." And then no good answer comes out, right?
`1:39:49`
It is a nice shorthand. It is a representation or encapsulation of how much output that's coming out. Now, whether the output is good or bad-... is not a referendum on that. But I was producing and producing so much more now, right? And therefore I'm able to keep all these threads going. So that's the setup. It's still Neovim, but at this point, I'm not writing a lot of code, so I'm using Neovim as a project browser and then as a way to kick off Lazy Git to see the change log for what's there. And even that, I'd say if GitHub was a little faster at showing you your pull request, the web is probably actually a nicer place to do that. I don't know. 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. Oh, yeah, so it changed this file, but actually, what do we have in this other file that wasn't touched but maybe should've been touched? So that's why I still like Neovim as a way of doing it. But it's all happening, by the way, of course, in Amachi. So it's all happening on Linux. And this was the other major breakthrough with agents. Agents love the Unix philosophy.
It loves individual tools that it can invoke through the command line, and there is no operating system on Earth of the majors, I'm counting three here, Mac, Windows, Linux, that works as well with that mechanism as Linux. Everything in Linux is either a config file or a CLI tool. Now, that was its main drawback five minutes ago. This was the reason people didn't like Linux. It's like it's all config files and CLI tools. What great irony that the universe has played it upon us that now the drawbacks of Linux five minutes ago are now its major selling points. This was one of the things I thought I was stuck for a weekend with a Mac four months ago. I thought I had a computer at the place I was going that was a Linux machine, so I didn't bring my laptop, and I found out when I arrived I only had a Mac Mini. So I was gonna make the best of a bad situation here and, Set up my Mac in some of the ways I've been thinking about with, With Linux. And you can actually do a lot now. 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, I don't know if you've used that. That's the- There's no config file that you can just access. You have to go into the GUI, export a file, then take that file, I don't know, in your freaking backpack on a USB key. And then you can import it somewhere else.
You cannot automate the entire setup of your machine. You can't automate at all the configuration of Mac's default key bindings. That has to be a manual process where you're clicking with a mouse like a caveman to set up your machine.
`1:44:03`
There are hacks. You don't have to live like this, Lex. There's a better... Actually, this is a great moment.