DHH says hand-writing code is over as Pragmatic Engineer unpaywalls AI coding mega-trend piece
IgorCarron · x · 2026-09-24
DHH's Rails World 2026 keynote announcing that 37Signals has gone "pencils down" and now generates all code sparked an industry uproar. Gergely Orosz of Pragmatic Engineer responded by removing the paywall on his January article "When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?" He had already flagged the mega-trend in January: over winter break he shipped hundreds of production lines built with Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.2 just by prompting, reviewing outputs and running tests — even building production software from his phone via Claude Code for Web connected to GitHub, creating PRs that triggered CI. His takeaway: software engineering stays very much alive even when nobody hand-writes code.
Related event: DHH Declares the End of Handwritten Code, Sparking Industry Debate(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- How AI search accelerates counterculture's mainstreaming: hide from algorithms or go Lindy — clarejtbirch · 2026-09-24
- Cambridge's Henry Shevlin: current AI systems may genuinely have beliefs, goals, and agency — dioscuri · 2026-09-24
- dioscuri: Over-ascribing sentience to AI has tragedies 'hard to exaggerate' — dioscuri · 2026-09-24
- Confusing the metaphor of agency with real sentience: an X debate on AI minds — TheoLes367794 · 2026-09-24
- Near-daily AI use among US adults more than doubled in six months, Epoch AI polling finds — dl_weekly · 2026-09-24
- "Metharita" breaks through: AI safety scene explainer goes viral as drama fodder — jd_pressman · 2026-09-24