DHH Says He Has Stopped Writing Code by Hand, Relying on AI Agents Instead

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, told a room of programmers at the 2026 Rails World conference that his company 37signals has stopped writing code by hand. He framed AI agents as the next abstraction layer, similar to how Rails simplified software development two decades ago. As a cited example, a coding agent rewrote his flagship product Basecamp from Ruby to Rust, reportedly cutting CPU use by 99% and memory use by 95%. The article's author, who started building software in Taiwan and later adopted AI tools, describes a prototype Rails 8 app built with AI in months at a fraction of the cost of a development team.