The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate

The newsletter's September 24 preview reports that David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, used a Rails World keynote to declare the end of writing code by hand for professional work, at 37signals at least. The company has moved to agents generating nearly all of its code. The preview is paywalled, so its fuller analysis is not covered here.

In an October 6 essay, Hansson extends the argument to programmers generally. He says typing out code by hand is no longer economically viable, and he expects cheaper development to produce a surge in software as more problems become worth automating. He describes agents as capable coworkers that still need help on some tasks. These are his forecasts, supported in the essay mainly by an informal show of hands at the conference, not a measured finding about the profession.