Pencils Down, Eyes Open: A Rails Developer After Rails World

DHH's Rails World keynote left the reporter uncomfortable, but they see it as a useful discomfort. With over a decade of building Rails apps, the reporter isn't ready to treat their love for the job as obsolete. DHH's "pencils down" policy at 37signals, where writing code by hand is now an exception, is a radical choice. He also shared a story about Basecamp 5, where designers submitted pull requests that seemed reasonable individually but caused architectural issues.

DHH believes better agents and better workflows are the way forward. He didn't show an agent fixing the particular problem, but he argued that the web still matters and Rails' conventions help developers. The reporter agrees that Rails conventions are valuable and that writing code by hand isn't a virtue. They also questioned DHH's economic prediction about handwriting code becoming uneconomical for most programmers and companies by the end of 2026.

The reporter admired DHH's nearly 95% success rate in an earlier, simpler Rails agent test, but pointed out that the harder feature-ticket slide only achieved 35%. They also pointed out that the best model passed 53% of runs on a set of 20 tickets, but this doesn't necessarily equate to production reliability or a reason to skip review.

DHH suggested automation can create new demand, but his historical dates and counts didn't match available reporting. The reporter emphasized the importance of knowing what will help developers understand and safely maintain a particular system, including testing queued, scheduled, and retrying jobs in Sidekiq and limiting an agent's network access and permissions.