Rails Creator Says ‘Pencils Down’ as Coders Split on AI

Rails Creator Says ‘Pencils Down’ as Coders Split on AI
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and technology leader at Basecamp maker 37signals, has drawn a hard line on how his company builds software: AI agents first, human-written code only when necessary.

The declaration follows an uneasy evolution. Hansson had previously said he avoided AI because he could “literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.” Yet 37signals’ attempt to use AI heavily on Basecamp 5 this spring produced “mixed” results, according to reporting on the company’s shift.

At the Rails World keynote, however, Hansson made clear that those results had not softened his conclusion. “We’re done writing code by hand,” he said, describing a company already “pencils down” on routine manual programming. At 37signals, hand-coding is now an “exceptional state”: engineers may intervene when an agent fails, but the aim is then to “fix the machine,” not return to the old workflow.

Hansson’s argument is not that AI is flawless. It is that the central question for software teams has changed. “This is a recognition of what is already happening,” he said, calling the best way to capture AI’s rewards the only “serious question” facing coders.

That certainty is not universal. Tools such as OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor have made agent-led coding feel transformative to some developers, who report building late into the night. Others describe the experience as lonely or tiring. In a January poll of more than 150 engineers, over 45% said they were keeping up with AI tools, while 17.5% said they were avoiding AI code editors entirely.

The split leaves Hansson’s “pencils down” order looking less like an industry consensus than a high-profile wager: that the human programmer’s job is no longer to write every line, but to make the machine write better ones.

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