The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
Short summary
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, announced that his company 37signals has stopped writing code by hand and now treats manual coding as an exception—a shift he compares to photography's impact on painting. The move reflects a broader industry transition where AI agents are becoming the primary code writers, raising concerns about software quality and what engineering work actually means.
- DHH declared he's retired from programming after 25 years and now sees himself as a "maker of things" steering AI agents rather than writing code directly. 37signals is shifting to native mobile apps and Rust backends because agents can produce adequate code in these areas, while keeping Ruby on Rails only because its conventions work well with AI.
- Software quality is visibly degrading across the industry. Engineers are shipping untested features, working 12-13 hour days just reviewing AI output without understanding it, and outsourcing all thinking to LLMs. Recent examples include Spotify outages and Uber Eats bugs that suggest zero QA testing.
- This transition is happening faster than predicted—model improvements since November 2025 have made AI coding genuinely viable, not theoretical. Non-engineers at companies like Craft Docs and OpenAI are now using AI agents for customer support, marketing, HR, and finance work, not just engineering.
Full summary
David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, announced at Rails World that 37signals has stopped writing code by hand. He compared this shift to how the camera transformed painting—framing November 24th, 2025 (when Claude Opus 4.5 became widely accessible) as the inflection point where AI coding became genuinely capable. At 37signals, hand-coding is now treated as a bug: if an AI agent can't handle it, they fix the system rather than revert to manual work. The company is making concrete changes: moving to native mobile apps instead of web, switching backend services to Rust for performance, and keeping Ruby on Rails only because its conventions make it easy for agents to work with. Hansson himself announced he's retired from professional programming after 25 years, saying hand-coding is no longer economically productive for most programmers. He argues that software architecture will need rethinking since abstractions—historically built to avoid repetition—matter less when repetition costs nearly nothing.
The shift away from hand-coding has been predicted but is now accelerating across the industry. Earlier this year, the author made several predictions about what happens when AI generates most code: sloppier code, weaker engineering practices causing earlier problems, fewer pure coders, harder work-life balance for engineers, and junior engineers forced to become seniors faster. The transition is messy—engineers are now responsible for vast amounts of production code they didn't write. Non-engineers are also getting access to AI tools. Craft Docs, a 30-person startup, built an AI harness for non-engineering teams, enabling customer support agents, bug report triage, and even marketing teams to build websites without developers. Similar moves are happening at major companies: OpenAI's finance, recruitment, and legal teams moved to their own coding tools in June 2026.
The current state is chaotic. An anonymous Big Tech engineer recently posted a rant that resonated widely, describing engineering as "horrible" right now—the excerpt cuts off mid-sentence, but the fact that it struck a nerve suggests real friction between the speed of AI adoption and the messy reality of managing production systems, code quality, and team dynamics during this rapid transition.