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The Pragmatic Engineer surfaced its September 24 Pulse, “The Pulse: RoR creator sparks new ‘death of coding by hand’ debate”. Its public preview reports that 37signals now has agents generate nearly all its code and asks whether professional hand-coding is over. In his Rails World keynote, co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says the company recently made agent-written code its normal workflow; writing code by hand is now the exception.

That is a step beyond DHH’s April description of his own agent-first habits. The claim is now organizational: engineers and designers steer agents toward a product, then judge whether the work is fit to ship. DHH presents this as a new form of making software, not the end of software careers. The keynote pairs the shift with ambitious work at 37signals, including native clients and a Rust rewrite for HEY, though those examples do not show that agent use alone produced the claimed efficiency gains.

This is a useful early case, not proof that the industry can retire manual coding or review. The evidence is a founder’s account and an informal show of hands among Rails World attendees, not a comparison of defect rates, maintenance costs, or outcomes across teams. As code generation becomes cheaper, the scarce work moves toward clear specifications, independent checks, architecture, and ownership. The practical question is whether those controls can keep pace with the volume agents produce.