1000 ex-programmers

I spent too much of the weekend in the Rails World feed.

On Wednesday DHH said he’d retired as a professional programmer, and that he’s a maker now. At 37signals they went pencils down: agents write the code, you only pick up a pencil when the agent fails, and then you fix the machine. On the HEY rewrite he said Rust is great if you never have to look at it, English is how you steer, and Rails is still fine for web apps. He did not kill Rails. The headlines did that for him. (Keynote.)

I think he’s mostly right about the direction. Typing got cheap. Owning what ships did not.

I don’t buy the calendar. He said hand-writing is already a bad deal for most people, and by end of year basically for everyone. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s next year, maybe it’s two. Nobody knows, and anyone who pretends they do is selling tickets.

On Thursday Aaron Patterson opened with the 1000x slide, then “fixed a typo,” and the new slide read 1000 ex-programmers. The room laughed, and that gag is the fear under the whole week. (clip)

We’ve seen this before. Translators didn’t vanish when machine translation got good. A lot of them became post-editors who check the machine, fix the bad parts, and own the final text. Same seat, different name. Programming is sliding there fast.

Last week I wrote about Anthropic’s CI flood in Code Gen Isn’t the Constraint Anymore. CI Is.. Gen scaled, the queue moved to tests and pipelines, and review is already the awkward middle. Their own write-up says output jumped and review became the bottleneck, while humans still approve the PRs.

DHH goes further than that middle. Stop treating line-by-line reading as the default, judge outcomes instead, and fix the agent when it fails. Volume goes up, humans get scarce, and then someone invents guardrails and auto-merge so the queue moves again. Some bugs will ship. Human bugs already do.

Ken Greeff made a reaction video with a loud title and a quiet ending: Rails isn’t dead, don’t panic-rewrite everything in Rust, and today he still wants eyes on backend code because brand and customers were always the moat. (video) Other people want a source of truth a human can still edit. Fine. Shops will disagree. That’s normal.

So what am I, if I’m not typing all day? I pick what to build, say what proof looks like, review what matters, own the bugs, and keep the system from going soft. Later that review layer might get thinner too. I don’t know when.

The change already started. The year is fog. Great time to make things, and a weird time not knowing what the job is next year.

I’m fine sitting in that. I’m not fine pretending I have it figured out.