DHH · 2026-08-26 · source ↗ · whole document (10)
Programming setup for AI Agents
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.