Letting Go of Sunk Costs
Many people have a hard time letting go of sunk costs. Not only that: people have a hard time recognizing that something is a sunk cost.
Sunk costs are investments we have made in the past, but that we should no longer consider in our decision making going forward. Seth Godin writes in The Knot:
A sunk cost is a gift from your former self. Your future self is not obligated to accept that gift.
The only way to be creative is to do something new, and the path to something new requires leaving something else behind.
(…) Time, effort, and money spent by the former you is simply a gift. A gift from the old you to the you of today. Like all gifts, you don’t have to accept it.
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, gave the opening talk at the Rails World 2026 Conference in Austin.
Rails is the programming framework for Ruby. It has a very loyal following among developers. Many notable web apps and platforms have been written using Ruby on Rail, including Spotify, the early versions of Twitter (now X), GitHub, Square, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, Goodreads, Instacart, and of course 37signals own products like Basecamp and HEY!
DHH has been a strong and opinionated advocate of Ruby. He considers it the most beautiful programming language there is, and he is considered by some one of the best coders in the world.
To the surprise of many, the point of DHH’s talk this year was this: except for few special cases, coding by hand today is over. It’s been a fantastic ride, but agents are doing the coding today. You program in English, and the agents translate your designs to whatever language you see best for the task. There is no going back to the old ways.
In other words, coding by hand has become a sunk cost. We should be thankful for the knowledge and we can keep the experiences we gained on the way. But to move forward, we don’t need to carry them with us.
Sometimes our identity may be too strongly tied to what we do and what we are good at. Change may feel like a personal threat. However, average lifespan today requires us to reinvent ourselves several times during our lives. Continuous learning may not be enough. There may be shifts that require a change of mindset and to leave behind what we are familiar and comfortable with. We should become comfortable dealing with sunk costs.