Ruby on Rails creator DHH says 'we're done' writing code by hand

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, told a room of developers at the Rails World keynote that his software company has effectively banned hand-written code.

"We're done writing code by hand," he said, describing the shift as a recognition of a practice that had already taken hold internally.

Manual coding at Hansson's firm 37signals is now considered the exception and not the rule. The engineers resort to manual coding only if there are some flaws in the AI-written code, drawing up a code by themselves and then, in Hansson's words, "fix the machine."

The guideline codifies a process that Hansson says was already underway among his staff prior to becoming a company-wide policy.

Hansson told attendees there's really only one serious question facing developers right now: how to extract the most value from AI tools. Every other consideration, he said, ranks below that one.

It's a notable stance from someone whose framework, Ruby on Rails, helped define how an entire generation of web developers wrote code by hand for two decades.

The developer asked the Rails World audience directly how many people were still writing significant code manually on a weekly basis.

After surveying the room, his obvious reaction was surprise, seeing just about five hands raised. It is surprising that only about five people would raise their hands out of what is presumably a room full of passionate Rails programmers.

The statement made by Hansson is set against the backdrop of an ongoing and unresolved conflict within the engineering community. AI technologies such as Codex from OpenAI, Claude Code by Anthropic, and Cursor have revolutionised the coding process in the last year, but opinions are divided.