The creator of Ruby on Rails doesn’t code by hand anymore

At Rails World conference on September 25th, David Heinemeier Hansson, the author of Ruby on Rails framework, announced something shocking. Since March 2026 (that’s 25 years into his career) he hasn’t written a single line of code manually. Instead, he describes everything in English for an artificial intelligence agent. He believes it’s more effective than Ruby programming language. In his opinion, it’s the greatest event in the history of computing. A year ago, he was against feeding code to AI models.

We develop software at our company in a very similar fashion — by describing tasks to an agent. I agree with David Heinemeier Hansson to a great degree: it’s easier to accomplish tasks if you know how to clearly express them in plain English rather than knowing the syntax. But there’s no exact algorithm for describing complicated tasks to an agent while preserving all the details. David Heinemeier Hansson admits that there’s no such blueprint either. So we need to check the outcomes of our work, especially if the mistakes aren’t obvious.