David Heinemeier Hansson stated in his keynote speech at Rails World 2026 in Austin that handwriting code is no longer an economically valuable endeavor for the vast majority of programmers in most companies; this is the current reality, and by the end of this year, it will be true for nearly all fields, all programmers, and all companies, so it is best to get used to it as soon as possible.

He characterized the journey of handwriting code as having come to an end, with a new profession emerging: professional creators. People no longer chisel code line by line but create astonishing things, harnessing intelligence that until recently only existed in science fiction. He asked the audience how many still write a significant amount of code by hand each week, and after scanning the room, he estimated there were only about five people.

37signals has changed its company policy to "pencils down": generating code with AI is the normal state of business, while handwriting has become the exception, only resorted to when the AI makes a mistake, at which point they would pull out the old pencil to fix the machine. He claimed he hasn't handwritten a line since around March 2026; the amount of code written in the past 20 months is about half of what he wrote in the previous 21 years, with approximately 150,000 lines of production code produced in August 2026 alone, compared to his long-term average of about 30,000 lines of production-level Ruby per year.

He provided a pivotal date: November 24, 2025, when cutting-edge models became accessible to everyone, which he referred to as the Kodak Brownie moment of this era, analogous to how portrait painting was replaced by portable cameras. The old debate about 10x programmers has been rewritten by him to state that the gap between the worst programmers who do not use AI and the best programmers who do is nearly 1000x. He also mentioned that English is a better programming language than Ruby.

On the product side, he mentioned that HEY is no longer just a web application and is being rewritten into six native applications created by AI, with the core email service being rewritten in Rust, claiming it can reduce CPU usage by about 99% and memory usage by about 95%; Omarchy Linux has merged over 1,000 pull requests in three months. He insisted that applications must have a CLI because AI needs callable interfaces, not user interfaces designed for humans.

More than a year ago, he publicly resisted allowing AI to write directly into code repositories, believing that not touching the code with fingers would lead to disconnection; now his stance has flipped, calling it one of the biggest events in computing history and warning against black-pilling this moment. Traditional abstractions will become bottlenecks when thousands of AIs modify code simultaneously, repetition is almost free, and blueprints do not yet exist.

In terms of market mechanisms, buyers are software companies delivering functional products, while sellers have shifted from "human implementation capabilities sold by the line" to "model inference sold by token + those who define problems and accept results." The driving force is that model quality has crossed the threshold of being able to replace handwriting, with funding flowing to training and inference providers, as well as those who can schedule AIs as colleagues. Beneficiaries will be creators who can write constraints, verify goods, and take responsibility for results; those under pressure will be those who define their profession as typing syntax, modifying templates, and maintaining human-readable abstractions. Handwriting has not disappeared; it has moved from the main production line to an exception role for fixing machines.

Source: Public Information