RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
The Pragmatic Engineer ● Covered by 5 sources
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
DHH says 37signals is done writing code by hand. He thinks AI has crossed the point where that’s the exception, not the rule.
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David Heinemeier Hansson has kicked off a fresh fight over AI coding, and he did it from a stage built for engineers who still care about the craft. In his Rails World keynote, the Ruby on Rails creator said 37signals had gone “pencils down” on hand-written code as a normal way of making software. At a company that helped create Rails, values code quality, and is both 27 years old and profitable, that lands with a thud.
DHH’s argument is blunt: writing code by hand should now be the exceptional case, the thing you do when the machine didn’t get it right. He compared the shift to photography changing painting, and said November 24th, 2025, marked the “Kodak Brownie” moment for his era because of Opus 4.5. In his telling, there was everything before that date, and everything after it.
The practical fallout at 37signals is already visible. The company, which long preferred web apps over native mobile, is now betting AI will make native iOS and Android work easier for a small team. It is also moving backend services to Rust, with DHH saying agents write “good enough” Rust. Ruby on Rails is still there, but mainly because its convention-over-configuration style makes it easier for agents to handle.
He also made the philosophical break explicit: he says he has retired from being a professional programmer, after roughly a quarter of a century of writing code by hand. His bigger claim is that software architecture itself needs revisiting, because abstractions were built partly to avoid repetition, and repetition is now cheap. That is a neat line, and also a dangerous one if taken as an excuse to stop checking the work.
This is not a new argument, just a louder one. The decline of hand coding has been predicted for a while, and the messier part is what comes after: more code, more accountability, and more pressure on engineers to understand systems they did not personally type into existence. The debate now is less about whether AI can write code. It’s about who is going to notice when the agent confidently writes the wrong thing.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
The hand-coding-is-dead crowd always sounds most certain right before the bugs show up in production. Replacing typing with prompting is not the same thing as replacing engineering, no matter how stylish the keynote sounds. The real winners here will be the teams that treat AI like a junior coworker, not a priest.
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