Over my dead pencil · Listed Articles

David Heinemeier Hansson follows up his Rails World talk telling programmers to put down the pencils: coding agents are now good enough that writing most code by hand is no longer economically viable, AI is more like gaining capable new coworkers than another tool, and programmers who refuse to collaborate with agents are the ones who should worry.

Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.

When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this, but it still came as a shock to many to actually hear it.

And I get that shock. Programming has barely been a professional career for a generation, and now it's being completely transformed. That's unsettling, even for a group of people who've seen technologies come and go on a regular basis.

But this isn't just another technology, because AI isn't just another tool. It's far more like gaining some new coworkers who are exceptionally good and fast at a wide range of tasks, but still need a bit of help with some, and whose choices you might occasionally disagree with.

From a certain angle, that looks like competition. Especially when it was barely five minutes ago that programmers were being treated like precious priests whose incantations were necessary to yield even the most low-hanging fruit of the computer. This perceived threat of disintermediation is clearly hitting some programmers hard.

But I don't think anyone who's willing to lean into the future, make the most of this intelligence explosion, and apply their skills to what comes next needs to worry much. We're about to see an absolute bloom in software development as the price of development plummets and everyone realizes how much automation we still have left to do in this world.

I think the only programmers who have to worry about this change are those who refuse to embrace, or drag their feet on, the progress brought by the age of agents. It's fine to be skeptical about the areas where our new clanker colleagues still occasionally get it wrong, but refusing collaboration is not a viable career path for almost anyone.

Don't go down with the pencils. There's so much to build. We need you.