Ruby on Rails Creator Stops Writing Code by Hand

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, took the stage at Rails World on September 25 and made an admission. In twenty-five years as a programmer, he had not written a single line of code by hand since March 2026. He said English turned out to be a better tool than Ruby for describing tasks to an AI agent. He called this the biggest event in the history of computing. Just a year earlier, he had publicly argued against the very idea of handing code to an AI model.

At my own company, development also runs through stating a task for an agent rather than writing code by hand. Here I largely agree with Hansson: a clear description in plain language solves more than knowledge of syntax does. But there is still no exact recipe for handing an agent a complex task without losing something along the way. Hansson himself admits that no one has drawn up that blueprint yet. So the agent's output still needs checking, especially where a mistake does not show up right away.