Over my dead pencil

David Heinemeier Hansson, who created Ruby on Rails, argues that AI coding agents now write most code and that programmers who refuse to work with them risk their careers.

David Heinemeier Hansson is co-owner and chief technology officer of 37signals, which makes the project tool Basecamp, and the creator of the web framework Ruby on Rails. Two weeks after telling the Rails World conference that programmers will stop writing most code by hand, he explains the claim. He describes AI coding agents as fast new coworkers who still need help with some tasks.

• When he asked the Rails World audience who still writes a material amount of code by hand each week, only a handful raised their hands.
• He says it is no longer economically viable to have people type out lines of Ruby, Rust or C++.
• He expects much more software to be built as the price of development falls, because a great deal of work is still not automated.
• He accepts scepticism about the areas where AI agents still get things wrong. He says refusing to work with them is not a viable career path for almost anyone.

An engineering team can treat an AI coding agent as a colleague whose choices a person may reject, and decide who does the rejecting. This is an inference and is not the author's claim; the post is a short opinion piece and gives no figures from 37signals.

7 October 2026: once AI agents do most of the making, checking and choosing become the scarce steps, and teams protect them with author responsibility, automated checks and tools that point to risk.