Pencils down

dhh's name for the 37signals policy announced at Rails World 2026: nobody writes code by hand as a normal part of the job. Hand-written code becomes "an exceptional state... like seeing a bug in Sentry". When an agent can't produce what's needed, someone may still write that piece by hand for a while, but the real fix goes into the agent setup: "we fix the machine, we fix the factory."

He applies it to himself. He calls himself retired as a professional programmer since about March 2026, says Ruby dropped from over half his output to about 3%, and reports 150,000 lines in August 2026 against a long-run average of about 30,000 a year, most of it Rust he never reads.

For the industry, he says hand-writing code "is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers", and he expects that to cover "virtually all" of them by the end of 2026. It's the operational end of vibe-coding and agentic-engineering.

Source: Rails World 2026 keynote