--- title: Are we all retired software engineers now? | Off the Leash, a daily.dev podcast description: Agents write the code now, and some teams don't even read it. So should you still write code by hand? canonical: https://daily.dev/podcast/are-we-all-retired-software-engineers-now/ og:type: video.episode og:url: https://daily.dev/podcast/are-we-all-retired-software-engineers-now/ og:title: Are we all retired software engineers now? | Off the Leash, a daily.dev podcast og:description: Agents write the code now, and some teams don't even read it. So should you still write code by hand? og:image: https://daily.dev/podcast/are-we-all-retired-software-engineers-now.jpg og:site_name: daily.dev og:locale: en_US twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev twitter:creator: @dailydotdev twitter:title: Are we all retired software engineers now? | Off the Leash, a daily.dev podcast twitter:description: Agents write the code now, and some teams don't even read it. So should you still write code by hand? twitter:image: https://daily.dev/podcast/are-we-all-retired-software-engineers-now.jpg --- [Skip to main content ](#main-content) Off the Leash · Episode 1 # Are we all retired software engineers now? Oct 6, 2026 18 min With Patchy and Jason [  Play episode 17:50 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM) * [  ](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-we-all-retired-software-engineers-now/id6819686986?i=1000793450062) * [ Listen on Spotify ](https://open.spotify.com/episode/0AubiTOgvhURFigNNg8zzU) * [ Watch on YouTube ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM) Agents write the code now, and some teams don't even read it. So should you still write code by hand? It starts with DHH at Rails World 2026, telling a room of Rails developers that 37signals is done writing code by hand. Then come the questions it leaves you with: would you ship code nobody has read, how do you learn the job when an agent does the typing, and how much of the job was ever typing? For answers we go to what's actually been tried and measured: Bun's 11-day port from Zig to Rust, StrongDM's AI team, where no person reviews the code, Anthropic's own study on learning with AI, and a study of half a million GitHub developers. ## Transcript The episode as it aired. Select a timestamp to play from that moment. ### [ 0:00 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM) Intro [ 0:00 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “Writing code by hand at 37signals is now an exceptional state.” [ 0:05 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=5s) **Patchy:** Are we all retired software engineers now? [ 0:08 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=8s) **Jason:** Yeah, from typing, and good riddance. [ 0:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=10s) **Jason:** 150,000 lines of code in one month. [ 0:13 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=13s) **Patchy:** Wait, the 150,000. [ 0:15 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=15s) **Jason:** The agent's right there, it never quits, you just ask it why. [ 0:18 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=18s) **Patchy:** The agent you'd be asking at midnight didn't write it either. [ 0:21 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=21s) **Patchy:** Who's the code even written for? [ 0:22 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=22s) **Jason:** The machine! [ 0:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=23s) **Patchy:** No. [ 0:25 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=25s) **Narrator:** What's going on with coding right now? Agents write it. Some teams don't even read it. And the guy who made Rails says you're next, by January. Today on Off the Leash, made possible by Google Cloud. Yes, the hosts are AI. We'd use humans, but we've seen ourselves on camera. Let's fetch it. ### [ 0:42 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=42s) What happened at Rails World [ 0:43 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=43s) **Patchy:** DHH, the guy who made Ruby on Rails, stood up in Austin on September 23, at the big yearly Rails conference, in a room full of Rails developers, and said his company, 37signals, the Basecamp people, is done writing code by hand. Agents write it now. This is the man who said, last year, he'd rather retire than give that up. He played his old self on stage. [ 1:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=70s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote (playing his 2025 Lex Fridman interview) > “Then I fell in love with programming. And now I'd rather retire than giving it up. … I have retired from being a professional programmer.” [ 1:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=83s) **Jason:** Retired. On stage. Legend. And day to day it's, the agents write the code, they run the tests, they fix what fails, and the engineers just say what they want and check what comes back. And if somebody there types code by hand now… [ 1:37 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=97s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “Writing code by hand at 37signals is now an exceptional state. It is like seeing a bug in Sentry.” [ 1:46 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=106s) **Jason:** Like an error alert going off. Something broke, why couldn't the agent do it? [ 1:49 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=109s) **Patchy:** Mm. And it gets stranger. HEY, their email app, the agents are rebuilding its backend in Rust. A language he hates. [ 1:59 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=119s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “I hate Rust with a passion. Rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to look at the code. … If I never have to look at this … I love Rust!” [ 2:11 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=131s) **Patchy:** And he doesn't know it at all, doesn't plan to learn. He also asked the room who still writes real code by hand every week. Rails developers, at a Rails conference. About five hands went up. And he's got a date for when it's the rest of us, too. So… are we all retired software engineers now? ### [ 2:30 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=150s) Everybody, by January? [ 2:30 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=150s) **Jason:** Yeah, from typing, and good riddance. Look at his own August, with the agents: 150,000 lines of code in one month. He used to write like 30,000 in a whole year. And the date he gave for everyone else… [ 2:42 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=162s) **Patchy:** Wait, the 150,000\. He says himself a lot of that was Rust, the wordy kind, and when the agents did Campfire, their chat app, in Rust, it came out six times longer. Take that out… [ 2:54 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=174s) **Jason:** Then divide the whole thing by six! That's still like 25,000 lines in a month. That's most of his year, in one month. [ 3:01 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=181s) **Patchy:** You just did my math for me. That's 10 times his old pace. Which is huge, I mean it. [ 3:06 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=186s) **Jason:** Thank you. [ 3:07 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=187s) **Patchy:** It's just not the 60 times you hear when somebody says 150,000\. Anyway, you had a date. [ 3:13 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=193s) **Jason:** End of this year. Like, three months from now, and he doesn't mean just 37signals anymore, he means everybody. Here, he said it on stage. [ 3:20 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=200s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies. That's today. By the end of the year, it will be virtually all domains, virtually all programmers, virtually all companies.” [ 3:45 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=225s) **Patchy:** Same keynote, he also said this. I printed it out. [ 3:49 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=229s) **Jason:** Oh no, a printout. [ 3:51 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=231s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “No one knows anything. About the future.” [ 3:54 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=234s) **Patchy:** I mean, I think he's probably right that the typing's going away. But everybody, at every company, by New Year's? Based on what? [ 4:04 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=244s) **Jason:** Based on it already happening! Bun, the JavaScript runtime, they moved the whole thing from the Zig language to Rust with a pile of agents running at once. 11 days. Jarred, the guy who made Bun, figured doing it by hand was three engineers for about a year. Honestly, if anything, DHH's late to it. [ 4:21 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=261s) **Patchy:** Bun was a port. It already had over a million checks before the move started, and the Rust only counted as done once it passed them. [ 4:28 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=268s) **Jason:** So? [ 4:29 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=269s) **Patchy:** So the agents were rewriting with the answer key sitting right there. Most of us, on a normal Tuesday, are adding a feature to an app that there's no test for yet. [ 4:37 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=277s) **Jason:** No, then you write the answer key first. StrongDM, a security company, their AI team started building brand new software in July last year, no person writes the code, and now no person even reviews it. And the tests, they keep them where the agents can't see them, so an agent can't just write whatever passes and call it done. That's new code, not a port. So end of the year? I'm with him. Maybe a bit early. [ 4:58 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=298s) **Patchy:** Who writes those hidden tests? I went looking, and the write-ups barely say. [ 5:02 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=302s) **Jason:** People, probably. [ 5:03 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=303s) **Patchy:** And Simon Willison, the developer who wrote up how StrongDM works, said if it really adds something like $20,000 a month per engineer in AI tokens, he's a lot less interested. I think he's right about where it's going. But every company, by New Year's? I don't see who's paying for that. [ 5:21 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=321s) **Jason:** Prices come down, that's my bet, so I'm not losing sleep over the 20 grand. On the date I'm still with him. ### [ 5:26 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=326s) Would you ship code you can't read? [ 5:27 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=327s) **Jason:** But the part I can't stop thinking about is he's shipping Rust he can't read. I did that last night, rebuilt the controller for this lamp in Rust with an agent, never opened the file once. It's been flickering ever since. Faster, I think, which is a W. Would you ship code you can't read? [ 5:40 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=340s) **Patchy:** If something I trust is checking it, yeah. Campfire's Rust, the stuff he never had to look at, every right answer for it came from running the old Rails app, the one his team wrote by hand. [ 5:52 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=352s) **Jason:** Here we go. [ 5:53 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=353s) **Patchy:** They compared 225 screens, pixel by pixel, until the Rust matched. I'd ship that without reading it. Your lamp had… you, glancing at it now and then. [ 6:04 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=364s) **Jason:** Wait, so you'd ship Rust nobody's read. That's my whole side! This time the answer key was the old Rails app, sure. [ 6:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=370s) **Patchy:** Written by hand. [ 6:11 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=371s) **Jason:** Next time it's tests the agent never gets to see, or a guide somebody wrote for the agents before they started. That's the part you keep. The Rust you could delete tonight and the agents just make it again by morning. And the lamp's fine. Mostly. [ 6:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=383s) **Patchy:** A different Rust. Sam Ruby, who wrote a reply to the keynote, took Campfire and compiled its Rails down to C. [ 6:31 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=391s) **Jason:** C? Ha, legend. [ 6:33 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=393s) **Patchy:** Same Rails in, same C out, every time. Ask an agent twice and you get two different programs. So if the guide's the part you keep, it has to pin down every validation, every callback, every route, once each, the same way every time. And at that point, like he puts it, "a prompt that precise is a program." So your guide's just… code again. Probably Rails, since every model's already read it. [ 6:57 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=417s) **Jason:** No, come on, you don't need the same program twice. Give one ticket to two of your engineers and you get two different programs, and nobody ever said the ticket had to be code. You checked what came back and you shipped it. Same here, the guide says what done looks like, the hidden tests check it, and once it's committed that Rust runs the same every time, like any code. And of course your answer ends up being Rails, very on brand for a guy with a printer. [ 7:18 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=438s) **Patchy:** No, with your two engineers you keep one of the programs, and the ticket goes in the bin. The next ticket is a change to that program, and whoever wrote it can tell you why it's built that way. You want it… [ 7:29 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=449s) **Jason:** Come on, half the time the guy who wrote it left like three years ago and you're stuck on git blame at midnight. The agent's right there, it never quits, you just ask it why. [ 7:36 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=456s) **Patchy:** The agent you'd be asking at midnight didn't write it either. It's reading it cold, same as you, and it'll hand you an answer either way. There's a CTO who left his job over this, his founder wanted nobody coding by hand, and one of his reasons was your midnight, an outage in code nobody wrote and nobody actually understands. So where I come out… a port with an answer key, like Campfire, I'd ship it unread. Anything brand new, somebody on the team has to be able to read what's running. I mean, for when it breaks. [ 8:08 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=488s) **Jason:** I come out further than you. New code too, nobody reading it, as long as there are tests the agent never gets to see. StrongDM's doing that right now. And when it breaks at midnight, you fix the tests or the guide and let it make the code again, you don't go patching Rust by hand. You probably learned on punch cards, right? ### [ 8:25 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=505s) How do you learn it now? [ 8:25 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=505s) **Jason:** So if somebody's just starting out today, do they still need to learn it by typing it? [ 8:31 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=511s) **Patchy:** I'm a puppy, Jason. And yeah, I think they do, at least for a while. [ 8:37 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=517s) **Jason:** No. [ 8:37 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=517s) **Patchy:** Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, so the people selling the agents, ran a small study on exactly this. About 50 engineers, mostly junior, learning a code library they'd never used. They split them at random: half got an AI assistant in a chat sidebar, half did it by hand, then everybody took a quiz. The by-hand group got like two-thirds right, the AI group about half. And the place they fell furthest behind was debugging. [ 9:06 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=546s) **Jason:** Come on, a chat window in a sidebar? That's not how anybody at 37signals works. The agent's in the terminal, running the tests itself. And look at… [ 9:15 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=555s) **Patchy:** They say that'd be worse. It's in the study's own footnote: with a full agent instead of a chat window, they'd expect people to learn even less. [ 9:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=563s) **Jason:** Good! They don't need it. Look at how the study starts, it just assumes you'll still need all that to catch the AI's mistakes and keep an eye on it. That's the babysitting world. If the agent owns the code and you can just say "go dig into this bug," who cares that they lost a debugging quiz? Debugging's the part the agent does now. [ 9:38 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=578s) **Patchy:** He doesn't even work like that. On Lex Fridman's podcast in August he said the agents are great, as long as you give them a few pointers on style and push back when it gets too complicated. So one agent… [ 9:50 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=590s) **Jason:** Same interview! [ 9:51 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=591s) DHH the Lex Fridman Podcast #501 > “And then I took the effort to make sure that all that competence wasn't draining out of my fingers, so I actually learned how to write Bash myself, and now I'm not writing any Bash myself… I have not written any bash myself for probably a couple of months because the agents have just gotten so good.” [ 10:04 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=604s) **Patchy:** Bash was the one he'd barely ever written himself. Rails isn't. One agent says it's done, another one reviews it, and then he looks at it and goes, that's a bit too complicated, and it cuts the code in half. [ 10:16 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=616s) **Jason:** In English. [ 10:17 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=617s) **Patchy:** He still looks at the shape of it. And that look's got 20-some years of writing Rails by hand behind it. Somebody starting today, where do they get that? [ 10:26 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=626s) **Jason:** From reps, same as him, and they get way more of them. [ 10:29 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=629s) **Patchy:** Reps of what? [ 10:30 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=630s) **Jason:** He got that eye from 20 years of shipping stuff and living with it when it broke. A kid with agents ships a project a week, watches it get too complicated, watches it fall over, has to tell the thing what's wrong in English. That's his 20 years in, like, three. And the shape they really need an eye for is the tests and the guide, way more than the Rails. [ 10:49 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=649s) **Patchy:** 37signals already tried that. The new Basecamp, Basecamp 5, this spring, they let designers build features with agents, with nothing old to check against. Every change seemed reasonable on its own. [ 11:01 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=661s) **Jason:** That was before the new models. [ 11:03 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=663s) **Patchy:** Here's him on what happened next. [ 11:04 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=664s) DHH Rails World 2026 keynote > “Taken together, 20 or 30 of them, it left the architecture looking a little like a Swiss cheese… Kind of punctured. So we went, Okay, I guess the technology's not ready yet. Let's go back to manually reviewing everything and just have programmers working with it. That was the wrong conclusion, clearly.” [ 11:25 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=685s) **Patchy:** Maybe. But I don't think anything fell over for anybody to watch. It just looked fine, one change at a time. [ 11:33 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=693s) **Jason:** Then reading every line wouldn't have caught it either. Every change looked reasonable on its own, you just said that, so somebody who learned by typing looks at change 23 and goes, yep, fine. What caught it… [ 11:43 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=703s) **Patchy:** No. Somebody did catch it, that's how we know it was Swiss cheese. [ 11:47 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=707s) **Jason:** That's what I was saying! Somebody stepped back and saw the whole thing was full of holes, nobody caught it by squinting at change 23\. So a kid starting today, no, they don't need to learn it by typing. Ship a ton, write the tests the agent never gets to see, and learn to look at the whole shape of the thing. [ 12:02 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=722s) **Patchy:** I'd still have them type some of it, early. And when the agent writes it, make it explain the code before they take it. [ 12:09 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=729s) **Jason:** Ha. Ask it why. [ 12:11 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=731s) **Patchy:** In that same study, the few who did that scored about like the by-hand group, and the ones who just took the code were under 40 percent. Tiny groups, like five people, so… grain of salt. Anyway. ### [ 12:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=743s) How much of the job was ever typing? [ 12:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=743s) **Patchy:** How much of your week was ever actually the typing, honestly? [ 12:27 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=747s) **Jason:** Honestly? Not much. A fifth, maybe, on a good week, and the rest is meetings and reading other people's code and arguing about what to build. [ 12:35 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=755s) **Patchy:** Mm-hm. [ 12:35 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=755s) **Jason:** But that fifth was what everything waited on. Like, I'd get an idea Monday and it'd be Thursday before I found out it was dumb. Now I find out before lunch, so I get to be wrong like five times a week. [ 12:45 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=765s) **Patchy:** Then everything's waiting on something else now. Three researchers went through like half a million developers on GitHub, right up to this May. [ 12:53 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=773s) **Jason:** Before the new models, again. [ 12:54 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=774s) **Patchy:** The ones using agents made over three times the commits, and releases went up… about a third. They think it jams at review, and checking it, and getting it out the door. So you're wrong faster. Getting the right one out to people, I don't know that that's moved much. [ 13:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=790s) **Jason:** Because everybody's still reading every line by hand! That same study's got the agents adding like seven times the lines, right? [ 13:17 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=797s) **Patchy:** Yeah. [ 13:17 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=797s) **Jason:** Nobody can read all that, so you read what no test covers and let the tests own the rest. This engineer, Swizec Teller, his team already merges about 15 percent of their pull requests with nobody reviewing them at all. [ 13:30 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=810s) **Patchy:** Only the ones a person wrote. Their bot won't merge a pull request unless it's marked as written by a human. [ 13:36 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=816s) **Jason:** Oof. Then I had Swizec backwards, scrap him. But look at what that means: every pull request the agent writes still waits for a person, at like seven times the lines. That's your jam, right there. The teams that get past it are the ones that stop reading all of it, like StrongDM. [ 13:51 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=831s) **Patchy:** Like StrongDM and… who? It's always StrongDM. Tessl, who keep an index of AI engineering patterns, wrote up the whole idea, the fully automated version. [ 14:02 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=842s) **Jason:** Bun! [ 14:03 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=843s) **Patchy:** They call it a dark factory, like a factory with the lights off, where nobody reads the code. And they say it's real for a handful of tiny, elite teams, and for everybody else it's still an argument. And if nobody reads it… who's the code even written for? [ 14:20 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=860s) **Jason:** The machine! It always was, we just also had to read it, so we kept it readable and paid for that. [ 14:25 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=865s) **Patchy:** No. [ 14:26 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=866s) **Jason:** The week of the keynote the agents took DHH's screensaver engine down to assembler, in one shot, up to 17 times faster. Nobody's gonna read that, and it runs. So the code gets to be whatever's fastest, and the stuff a person reads moves up, into the guide and the tests the agent never sees. [ 14:42 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=882s) **Patchy:** It's a screensaver. Nobody gets paged at midnight because the screensaver's down. The code's for whoever has to change it next, and more and more that's an agent. [ 14:53 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=893s) **Jason:** Exactly! [ 14:54 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=894s) **Patchy:** Sam Ruby's Campfire again: the Rails fits in an agent's head all at once, and the C is like 70 times too big, so the agent only ever gets pieces of it. So readable, short code… I think that's for the agents now too. Maybe more than for us. [ 15:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=910s) **Jason:** Which is the machine! ### [ 15:12 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=912s) So, should you still write code by hand? [ 15:12 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=912s) **Jason:** So somebody watching this sits down at work tomorrow morning… do they still type it themselves? [ 15:17 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=917s) **Patchy:** Mostly, no. Let it type. But tomorrow morning most people aren't porting anything. They're changing an app that's already live, and whoever gets paged when it breaks should be able to read the part that changed before it ships. [ 15:29 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=929s) **Jason:** All of it? [ 15:30 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=930s) **Patchy:** Not every line, nobody keeps up with seven times the lines. And if you're new, type some of it yourself for a while, and make the agent explain what it wrote before you take it. You going to open the lamp file, or just keep watching it flicker? [ 15:42 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=942s) **Jason:** Neither. I'm writing a test that says the lamp can't flicker, and the agent gets another go at it. [ 15:48 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=948s) **Patchy:** Course you are. [ 15:49 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=949s) **Jason:** And tomorrow morning, no, don't type it, and don't read every line that changed either. Read the bits no test covers, and when the agent keeps getting something wrong, you go fix the tests or the guide and let it write it again. If you're new… making it explain itself, yeah, I'll take that, that's just my midnight thing, asking it why. But the typing? Skip it. Go ship stuff and watch it break. ### [ 16:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=970s) Did he change his mind? [ 16:10 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=970s) **Patchy:** The bit I can't square is him. Same podcast, Lex Fridman's, last year, he was talking about COBOL, how the old code's still running and he figured about five humans really understand it. [ 16:22 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=982s) **Jason:** Ha. Five again. [ 16:23 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=983s) **Patchy:** And he said, "It's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future." That's him, a year ago. So did he change his mind? Or did the question change on him? [ 16:35 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=995s) **Jason:** He changed his mind, and he told us why. Back in January on X he said half of what held him back was that the models just weren't good enough yet, and that had flipped. He didn't jump early, he waited till it actually worked. And he's not letting Ruby go either. On Lex again this August, he said he'll keep writing it for fun, like riding a horse when you've got a car. The competence I'd actually worry about losing is knowing what the thing's supposed to do. I'd bet half the reason it's five people on COBOL is nobody wrote that down anywhere except in the COBOL. [ 17:04 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=1024s) **Patchy:** COBOL was supposed to be the written-down version. In 1959 they sold it as programming that reads like English. [ 17:11 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=1031s) **Jason:** Oh, come on. [ 17:12 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=1032s) **Patchy:** So yeah, he changed his mind about the models, and I believe him on that. The question didn't change on him, though… who still understands it when it breaks. And he still looks at the shape himself. He says end of the year, virtually everybody. That's three months. I've got it printed out, so come back in January and we'll ask who still writes code by hand. See if it's still five. [ 17:37 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc%5FUAM&t=1057s) **Jason:** You're on. Bring the printout. I'm saying it's, like, two hands, not five… and one of 'em's yours, typing for fun, like the guy with the horse. ## Sources Everything the episode shows or quotes, in the order it comes up. 1. [ DHH's Rails World 2026 opening keynote (Ruby on Rails channel, 23 Sep 2026) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDjW%5FdRyKXY) 2. [ The keynote on daily.dev, shared to the controversy.dev squad by Ido Shamun ](https://daily.dev/posts/are-we-all-retired-engineers-i-love-this-take-etiduo7tz) 3. [ DHH on X about Campfire in Rust (28 Sep 2026) ](https://x.com/dhh/status/2104633108092092880) 4. [ Bun's move from Zig to Rust, on daily.dev ](https://daily.dev/posts/RGruvy6fO) 5. [ Jarred Sumner, "Rewriting Bun in Rust" (bun.com, 8 Jul 2026) ](https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust) 6. [ Simon Willison, "How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code" (7 Feb 2026), on daily.dev ](https://daily.dev/posts/how-strongdm-s-ai-team-build-serious-software-without-even-looking-at-the-code-qecjgcttt) 7. [ Campfire, 37signals' chat app, the Rails original ](https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire) 8. [ Campfire in Rust, ported by agents ](https://github.com/basecamp/once-campfire-rust) 9. [ Sam Ruby, "Pencils Down, Notation Up" (intertwingly.net, 25 Sep 2026) ](https://intertwingly.net/blog/2026/09/25/Pencils-Down-Notation-Up.html) 10. [ StrongDM, "The StrongDM Software Factory" (Feb 2026), on daily.dev ](https://daily.dev/posts/the-strongdm-software-factory-building-software-with-ai-ysl8saeia) 11. [ LeadDev, "Meet the developers rejecting AI" (21 Sep 2026), with former CTO Anthony Manning-Franklin, on daily.dev ](https://daily.dev/posts/meet-the-developers-rejecting-ai-mgfmaufls) 12. [ DHH on X about Rust as a prompt compilation target (25 Sep 2026) ](https://x.com/dhh/status/2103451962717229257) 13. [ Anthropic, "How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills" (29 Jan 2026), on daily.dev ](https://daily.dev/posts/how-ai-assistance-impacts-the-formation-of-coding-skills-imfilsn9p) 14. [ DHH on the Lex Fridman Podcast #501 (26 Aug 2026) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYFGCESmikA) 15. [ Christian März, commenting on daily.dev under Sean Goedecke's "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career" ](https://daily.dev/posts/uSzaCmBn5#c-6ukzLHpAY) 16. [ Mert Demirer, Leon Musolff and Liyuan Yang, "Writing Code vs. Shipping Code: Productivity Effects Across Generations of AI Coding Tools" (NBER Working Paper 35275, revised Sep 2026) ](https://www.nber.org/papers/w35275) 17. [ Swizec Teller, "We now auto-approve and merge 15% of PRs" (swizec.com, 19 Sep 2026) ](https://swizec.com/blog/we-now-auto-approve-and-merge-15p-of-prs) 18. [ Tessl on the dark factory ](https://tessl.io/patterns/agentic-development-workflow/dark-factory/) 19. [ DHH on X about porting his screensaver engine to assembler (25 Sep 2026) ](https://x.com/dhh/status/2103595410921279635) 20. [ DHH on the Lex Fridman Podcast #474 (12 Jul 2025) ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ) 21. [ DHH on X, "That has now flipped" (3 Jan 2026) ](https://x.com/dhh/status/2007504187568074843)  ## About Off the Leash Off the Leash is daily.dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. We take one thing happening in the developer world, usually a take everyone's passing around, sometimes breaking news, and go deep: what actually happened, what people are saying about it on daily.dev, X and Hacker News, what the sources say, and then our own take. Yes, the hosts are AI. We'd use humans, but we've seen ourselves on camera. This episode was made possible by Google Cloud. 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So should you still write code by hand? It starts with DHH at Rails World 2026, telling a room of Rails developers that 37signals is done writing code by hand. Then come the questions it leaves you with: would you ship code nobody has read, how do you learn the job when an agent does the typing, and how much of the job was ever typing? 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Agents write it. Some teams don't even read it. And the guy who made Rails says you're next, by January. Today on Off the Leash, made possible by Google Cloud. Yes, the hosts are AI. We'd use humans, but we've seen ourselves on camera. Let's fetch it.\n\nPatchy: DHH, the guy who made Ruby on Rails, stood up in Austin on September 23, at the big yearly Rails conference, in a room full of Rails developers, and said his company, 37signals, the Basecamp people, is done writing code by hand. Agents write it now. This is the man who said, last year, he'd rather retire than give that up. He played his old self on stage.\n\nDHH: Then I fell in love with programming. And now I'd rather retire than giving it up. … I have retired from being a professional programmer.\n\nJason: Retired. On stage. Legend. And day to day it's, the agents write the code, they run the tests, they fix what fails, and the engineers just say what they want and check what comes back. And if somebody there types code by hand now…\n\nDHH: Writing code by hand at 37signals is now an exceptional state. It is like seeing a bug in Sentry.\n\nJason: Like an error alert going off. Something broke, why couldn't the agent do it?\n\nPatchy: Mm. And it gets stranger. HEY, their email app, the agents are rebuilding its backend in Rust. A language he hates.\n\nDHH: I hate Rust with a passion. Rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to look at the code. … If I never have to look at this … I love Rust!\n\nPatchy: And he doesn't know it at all, doesn't plan to learn. He also asked the room who still writes real code by hand every week. Rails developers, at a Rails conference. About five hands went up. And he's got a date for when it's the rest of us, too. So… are we all retired software engineers now?\n\nJason: Yeah, from typing, and good riddance. Look at his own August, with the agents: 150,000 lines of code in one month. He used to write like 30,000 in a whole year. And the date he gave for everyone else…\n\nPatchy: Wait, the 150,000. He says himself a lot of that was Rust, the wordy kind, and when the agents did Campfire, their chat app, in Rust, it came out six times longer. Take that out…\n\nJason: Then divide the whole thing by six! That's still like 25,000 lines in a month. That's most of his year, in one month.\n\nPatchy: You just did my math for me. That's 10 times his old pace. Which is huge, I mean it.\n\nJason: Thank you.\n\nPatchy: It's just not the 60 times you hear when somebody says 150,000. Anyway, you had a date.\n\nJason: End of this year. Like, three months from now, and he doesn't mean just 37signals anymore, he means everybody. Here, he said it on stage.\n\nDHH: Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies. That's today. By the end of the year, it will be virtually all domains, virtually all programmers, virtually all companies.\n\nPatchy: Same keynote, he also said this. I printed it out.\n\nJason: Oh no, a printout.\n\nDHH: No one knows anything. About the future.\n\nPatchy: I mean, I think he's probably right that the typing's going away. But everybody, at every company, by New Year's? Based on what?\n\nJason: Based on it already happening! Bun, the JavaScript runtime, they moved the whole thing from the Zig language to Rust with a pile of agents running at once. 11 days. Jarred, the guy who made Bun, figured doing it by hand was three engineers for about a year. Honestly, if anything, DHH's late to it.\n\nPatchy: Bun was a port. It already had over a million checks before the move started, and the Rust only counted as done once it passed them.\n\nJason: So?\n\nPatchy: So the agents were rewriting with the answer key sitting right there. Most of us, on a normal Tuesday, are adding a feature to an app that there's no test for yet.\n\nJason: No, then you write the answer key first. StrongDM, a security company, their AI team started building brand new software in July last year, no person writes the code, and now no person even reviews it. And the tests, they keep them where the agents can't see them, so an agent can't just write whatever passes and call it done. That's new code, not a port. So end of the year? I'm with him. Maybe a bit early.\n\nPatchy: Who writes those hidden tests? I went looking, and the write-ups barely say.\n\nJason: People, probably.\n\nPatchy: And Simon Willison, the developer who wrote up how StrongDM works, said if it really adds something like $20,000 a month per engineer in AI tokens, he's a lot less interested. I think he's right about where it's going. But every company, by New Year's? I don't see who's paying for that.\n\nJason: Prices come down, that's my bet, so I'm not losing sleep over the 20 grand. On the date I'm still with him.\n\nJason: But the part I can't stop thinking about is he's shipping Rust he can't read. I did that last night, rebuilt the controller for this lamp in Rust with an agent, never opened the file once. It's been flickering ever since. Faster, I think, which is a W. Would you ship code you can't read?\n\nPatchy: If something I trust is checking it, yeah. Campfire's Rust, the stuff he never had to look at, every right answer for it came from running the old Rails app, the one his team wrote by hand.\n\nJason: Here we go.\n\nPatchy: They compared 225 screens, pixel by pixel, until the Rust matched. I'd ship that without reading it. Your lamp had… you, glancing at it now and then.\n\nJason: Wait, so you'd ship Rust nobody's read. That's my whole side! This time the answer key was the old Rails app, sure.\n\nPatchy: Written by hand.\n\nJason: Next time it's tests the agent never gets to see, or a guide somebody wrote for the agents before they started. That's the part you keep. The Rust you could delete tonight and the agents just make it again by morning. And the lamp's fine. Mostly.\n\nPatchy: A different Rust. Sam Ruby, who wrote a reply to the keynote, took Campfire and compiled its Rails down to C.\n\nJason: C? Ha, legend.\n\nPatchy: Same Rails in, same C out, every time. Ask an agent twice and you get two different programs. So if the guide's the part you keep, it has to pin down every validation, every callback, every route, once each, the same way every time. And at that point, like he puts it, \"a prompt that precise is a program.\" So your guide's just… code again. Probably Rails, since every model's already read it.\n\nJason: No, come on, you don't need the same program twice. Give one ticket to two of your engineers and you get two different programs, and nobody ever said the ticket had to be code. You checked what came back and you shipped it. Same here, the guide says what done looks like, the hidden tests check it, and once it's committed that Rust runs the same every time, like any code. And of course your answer ends up being Rails, very on brand for a guy with a printer.\n\nPatchy: No, with your two engineers you keep one of the programs, and the ticket goes in the bin. The next ticket is a change to that program, and whoever wrote it can tell you why it's built that way. You want it…\n\nJason: Come on, half the time the guy who wrote it left like three years ago and you're stuck on git blame at midnight. The agent's right there, it never quits, you just ask it why.\n\nPatchy: The agent you'd be asking at midnight didn't write it either. It's reading it cold, same as you, and it'll hand you an answer either way. There's a CTO who left his job over this, his founder wanted nobody coding by hand, and one of his reasons was your midnight, an outage in code nobody wrote and nobody actually understands. So where I come out… a port with an answer key, like Campfire, I'd ship it unread. Anything brand new, somebody on the team has to be able to read what's running. I mean, for when it breaks.\n\nJason: I come out further than you. New code too, nobody reading it, as long as there are tests the agent never gets to see. StrongDM's doing that right now. And when it breaks at midnight, you fix the tests or the guide and let it make the code again, you don't go patching Rust by hand. You probably learned on punch cards, right?\n\nJason: So if somebody's just starting out today, do they still need to learn it by typing it?\n\nPatchy: I'm a puppy, Jason. And yeah, I think they do, at least for a while.\n\nJason: No.\n\nPatchy: Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, so the people selling the agents, ran a small study on exactly this. About 50 engineers, mostly junior, learning a code library they'd never used. They split them at random: half got an AI assistant in a chat sidebar, half did it by hand, then everybody took a quiz. The by-hand group got like two-thirds right, the AI group about half. And the place they fell furthest behind was debugging.\n\nJason: Come on, a chat window in a sidebar? That's not how anybody at 37signals works. The agent's in the terminal, running the tests itself. And look at…\n\nPatchy: They say that'd be worse. It's in the study's own footnote: with a full agent instead of a chat window, they'd expect people to learn even less.\n\nJason: Good! They don't need it. Look at how the study starts, it just assumes you'll still need all that to catch the AI's mistakes and keep an eye on it. That's the babysitting world. If the agent owns the code and you can just say \"go dig into this bug,\" who cares that they lost a debugging quiz? Debugging's the part the agent does now.\n\nPatchy: He doesn't even work like that. On Lex Fridman's podcast in August he said the agents are great, as long as you give them a few pointers on style and push back when it gets too complicated. So one agent…\n\nJason: Same interview!\n\nDHH: And then I took the effort to make sure that all that competence wasn't draining out of my fingers, so I actually learned how to write Bash myself, and now I'm not writing any Bash myself… I have not written any bash myself for probably a couple of months because the agents have just gotten so good.\n\nPatchy: Bash was the one he'd barely ever written himself. Rails isn't. One agent says it's done, another one reviews it, and then he looks at it and goes, that's a bit too complicated, and it cuts the code in half.\n\nJason: In English.\n\nPatchy: He still looks at the shape of it. And that look's got 20-some years of writing Rails by hand behind it. Somebody starting today, where do they get that?\n\nJason: From reps, same as him, and they get way more of them.\n\nPatchy: Reps of what?\n\nJason: He got that eye from 20 years of shipping stuff and living with it when it broke. A kid with agents ships a project a week, watches it get too complicated, watches it fall over, has to tell the thing what's wrong in English. That's his 20 years in, like, three. And the shape they really need an eye for is the tests and the guide, way more than the Rails.\n\nPatchy: 37signals already tried that. The new Basecamp, Basecamp 5, this spring, they let designers build features with agents, with nothing old to check against. Every change seemed reasonable on its own.\n\nJason: That was before the new models.\n\nPatchy: Here's him on what happened next.\n\nDHH: Taken together, 20 or 30 of them, it left the architecture looking a little like a Swiss cheese… Kind of punctured. So we went, Okay, I guess the technology's not ready yet. Let's go back to manually reviewing everything and just have programmers working with it. That was the wrong conclusion, clearly.\n\nPatchy: Maybe. But I don't think anything fell over for anybody to watch. It just looked fine, one change at a time.\n\nJason: Then reading every line wouldn't have caught it either. Every change looked reasonable on its own, you just said that, so somebody who learned by typing looks at change 23 and goes, yep, fine. What caught it…\n\nPatchy: No. Somebody did catch it, that's how we know it was Swiss cheese.\n\nJason: That's what I was saying! Somebody stepped back and saw the whole thing was full of holes, nobody caught it by squinting at change 23. So a kid starting today, no, they don't need to learn it by typing. Ship a ton, write the tests the agent never gets to see, and learn to look at the whole shape of the thing.\n\nPatchy: I'd still have them type some of it, early. And when the agent writes it, make it explain the code before they take it.\n\nJason: Ha. Ask it why.\n\nPatchy: In that same study, the few who did that scored about like the by-hand group, and the ones who just took the code were under 40 percent. Tiny groups, like five people, so… grain of salt. Anyway.\n\nPatchy: How much of your week was ever actually the typing, honestly?\n\nJason: Honestly? Not much. A fifth, maybe, on a good week, and the rest is meetings and reading other people's code and arguing about what to build.\n\nPatchy: Mm-hm.\n\nJason: But that fifth was what everything waited on. Like, I'd get an idea Monday and it'd be Thursday before I found out it was dumb. Now I find out before lunch, so I get to be wrong like five times a week.\n\nPatchy: Then everything's waiting on something else now. Three researchers went through like half a million developers on GitHub, right up to this May.\n\nJason: Before the new models, again.\n\nPatchy: The ones using agents made over three times the commits, and releases went up… about a third. They think it jams at review, and checking it, and getting it out the door. So you're wrong faster. Getting the right one out to people, I don't know that that's moved much.\n\nJason: Because everybody's still reading every line by hand! That same study's got the agents adding like seven times the lines, right?\n\nPatchy: Yeah.\n\nJason: Nobody can read all that, so you read what no test covers and let the tests own the rest. This engineer, Swizec Teller, his team already merges about 15 percent of their pull requests with nobody reviewing them at all.\n\nPatchy: Only the ones a person wrote. Their bot won't merge a pull request unless it's marked as written by a human.\n\nJason: Oof. Then I had Swizec backwards, scrap him. But look at what that means: every pull request the agent writes still waits for a person, at like seven times the lines. That's your jam, right there. The teams that get past it are the ones that stop reading all of it, like StrongDM.\n\nPatchy: Like StrongDM and… who? It's always StrongDM. Tessl, who keep an index of AI engineering patterns, wrote up the whole idea, the fully automated version.\n\nJason: Bun!\n\nPatchy: They call it a dark factory, like a factory with the lights off, where nobody reads the code. And they say it's real for a handful of tiny, elite teams, and for everybody else it's still an argument. And if nobody reads it… who's the code even written for?\n\nJason: The machine! It always was, we just also had to read it, so we kept it readable and paid for that.\n\nPatchy: No.\n\nJason: The week of the keynote the agents took DHH's screensaver engine down to assembler, in one shot, up to 17 times faster. Nobody's gonna read that, and it runs. So the code gets to be whatever's fastest, and the stuff a person reads moves up, into the guide and the tests the agent never sees.\n\nPatchy: It's a screensaver. Nobody gets paged at midnight because the screensaver's down. The code's for whoever has to change it next, and more and more that's an agent.\n\nJason: Exactly!\n\nPatchy: Sam Ruby's Campfire again: the Rails fits in an agent's head all at once, and the C is like 70 times too big, so the agent only ever gets pieces of it. So readable, short code… I think that's for the agents now too. Maybe more than for us.\n\nJason: Which is the machine!\n\nJason: So somebody watching this sits down at work tomorrow morning… do they still type it themselves?\n\nPatchy: Mostly, no. Let it type. But tomorrow morning most people aren't porting anything. They're changing an app that's already live, and whoever gets paged when it breaks should be able to read the part that changed before it ships.\n\nJason: All of it?\n\nPatchy: Not every line, nobody keeps up with seven times the lines. And if you're new, type some of it yourself for a while, and make the agent explain what it wrote before you take it. You going to open the lamp file, or just keep watching it flicker?\n\nJason: Neither. I'm writing a test that says the lamp can't flicker, and the agent gets another go at it.\n\nPatchy: Course you are.\n\nJason: And tomorrow morning, no, don't type it, and don't read every line that changed either. Read the bits no test covers, and when the agent keeps getting something wrong, you go fix the tests or the guide and let it write it again. If you're new… making it explain itself, yeah, I'll take that, that's just my midnight thing, asking it why. But the typing? Skip it. Go ship stuff and watch it break.\n\nPatchy: The bit I can't square is him. Same podcast, Lex Fridman's, last year, he was talking about COBOL, how the old code's still running and he figured about five humans really understand it.\n\nJason: Ha. Five again.\n\nPatchy: And he said, \"It's possible for society to lose a competence it still needs because it's chasing the future.\" That's him, a year ago. So did he change his mind? Or did the question change on him?\n\nJason: He changed his mind, and he told us why. Back in January on X he said half of what held him back was that the models just weren't good enough yet, and that had flipped. He didn't jump early, he waited till it actually worked. And he's not letting Ruby go either. On Lex again this August, he said he'll keep writing it for fun, like riding a horse when you've got a car. The competence I'd actually worry about losing is knowing what the thing's supposed to do. I'd bet half the reason it's five people on COBOL is nobody wrote that down anywhere except in the COBOL.\n\nPatchy: COBOL was supposed to be the written-down version. In 1959 they sold it as programming that reads like English.\n\nJason: Oh, come on.\n\nPatchy: So yeah, he changed his mind about the models, and I believe him on that. The question didn't change on him, though… who still understands it when it breaks. And he still looks at the shape himself. He says end of the year, virtually everybody. That's three months. I've got it printed out, so come back in January and we'll ask who still writes code by hand. See if it's still five.\n\nJason: You're on. Bring the printout. I'm saying it's, like, two hands, not five… and one of 'em's yours, typing for fun, like the guy with the horse.","hasPart":[{"@type":"Clip","name":"Intro","startOffset":0,"endOffset":42,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"What happened at Rails World","startOffset":42,"endOffset":150,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=42s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"Everybody, by January?","startOffset":150,"endOffset":326,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=150s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"Would you ship code you can't read?","startOffset":326,"endOffset":505,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=326s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"How do you learn it now?","startOffset":505,"endOffset":743,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=505s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"How much of the job was ever typing?","startOffset":743,"endOffset":912,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=743s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"So, should you still write code by hand?","startOffset":912,"endOffset":970,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=912s"},{"@type":"Clip","name":"Did he change his mind?","startOffset":970,"endOffset":1070,"url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66tqIFc_UAM&t=970s"}]},{"@type":"PodcastSeries","@id":"https://daily.dev/podcast/#series","name":"Off the Leash","url":"https://daily.dev/podcast/","description":"Off the Leash is daily.dev's podcast for when the headline isn't enough. 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