DHH Goes Pencils Down

I’m not a Rails developer, but I’ve followed DHH’s work for a long time. Rails, Basecamp, HEY, 37signals, his writing. Even when I disagree with him, which is often, he tends to have a point of view worth paying attention to.

His Rails World 2026 opening keynote last week is a good example. He opened with his great-great-grandfather, the Danish painter Laurits Tuxen, who spent years on royal portraits until the Kodak Brownie made that kind of realism hard to sell. DHH’s Brownie moment is November 24, 2025, the day Opus 4.5 came out. Since then 37signals has gone “pencils down.” Writing code by hand there is now “an exceptional state,” treated like a bug in Sentry. When he asked the room who still writes material amounts of code by hand each week, about five hands went up.

A lot of it lands for me. The Basecamp 5 story is the most honest part: designers vibe-coded the last features, each PR looked reasonable on its own, and together they left the architecture looking like “Swiss cheese.” His demand that every app ship a CLI, so people can bring their own agent instead of using your built-in chatbot, is exactly right. And Rails was always about how far one developer could get, so of course he’s excited.

I’m even with him on Rust. If agents can work well in a language, it’s fine for it to be a black box to the people directing them, because humans don’t need to read every line anymore. Where I get off the bus is the next step, the idea that abstractions matter less now that repetition is nearly free. Not reading the code isn’t the same as not understanding the system. Whoever is orchestrating the agents still has to understand the architecture choices, the integration patterns, and how the whole thing is structured to run efficiently. The Swiss cheese is what you get when nobody owns that. I wrote more about it in The Engineer Becomes the Orchestrator.

It’s worth watching, even if you end up disagreeing with half of it.