The dynamic and opinionated David Hannson, creator of Ruby on Rails, got on stage this week and shocked the audience with this doozy:
“I have retired from being a professional programmer. […] I think it was somewhere around 4-5 months ago […] I spent a quarter of a damn century chiseling code by hand and loving every moment of it. What a wonderful experience and productive time in that era.
And that’s how I believe we should look at it: not with regret, but with joy at what was. […] It was filled with excitement, and learning, and satisfaction, and flow states. This is not something to look back upon with regret. And we should accept that it is over. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise. […] We best get used to it. We best embrace that we had a wonderful run chiseling that code by hand and that it’s over.
And! On the other side of that is a new career, an exciting career, an energized career, as a professional maker of things. Yes, you will no longer be chiseling that code by hand, but you’ll be making amazing things. You’ll be steering intelligence that was only available in science fiction up until a few moments ago. What a privilege!”
I echo his sentiment. Writing code by hand is a thing of the past.
This year, 2026, my job as a software engineer has completely changed. I’m no longer writing code. Coding agents — for me, GitHub Copilot — do that task for as I command them.
Sure, I review the code. I might push back on Copilot’s code. I still need to understand code. I need to understand architecture. Tradeoffs. How things work at a high level.
But I’m not “chiseling that code by hand”, as Hansson puts it.
It remains to be seen what the full effect of this new reality is. We’ve already seen tech layoffs in the last few years. Maybe the new reality is fewer programmers to do the work of what once took many.
Or maybe it’s roughly the same number of programmers and we just create more stuff, on more ambitions projects.
Hansson believes the new reality means programmers start a new career as technology creators.
Whatever the case, it seems noteworthy to me; enough to write a post marking the occasion: in my 25+ years of being a software engineer, my job is changed forever in 2026. There’s no going back now, no putting this genie back in the bottle.
For decades we’ve been digging ditches with shovels. Now we have a bulldozer. What will we do with it?