Ruby on Rails creator declares 'pencils down' on handwritten code

David Heinemeier Hansson runs a software company. He's also a race car driver. Jakob Ebrey/LAT Images David Heinemeier Hansson said his software firm was "done writing code by hand." At 37signals, engineers only hand-write code when an AI agent isn't able to, Hansson said. "This is a recognition of what is already happening," he said. A coding legend is waving goodbye to handwritten code. David Heinemeier Hansson — commonly known as DHH — is the creator of the popular webapp framework Ruby on Rails. He also runs the software company 37signals, where he just instituted a new rule: "We're done writing code by hand." "We are going, and have gone, pencils down," Hansson said during the Rails World keynote. At his software company, 37signals, Hansson said that hand-writing code was an "exceptional state," only to be performed when something went wrong with the AI-generated code.