Ruby on Rails creator declares ‘pencils down’ on handwritten code

A coding legend is waving goodbye to handwritten code.

David Heinemeier Hansson — commonly known as DHH — is the creator of the popular webapp framework Ruby on Rails. He also runs the software company 37signals, where he just instituted a new rule: “We’re done writing code by hand.”

“We are going, and have gone, pencils down,” Hansson said during the Rails World keynote.

At his software company, 37signals, Hansson said that hand-writing code was an “exceptional state,” only to be performed when something went wrong with the AI-generated code.

When an AI agent isn’t able to produce what the engineers want, they can “get the old pencil out and…