DHH says he now prefers programming in English over writing code by hand

At Rails World 2026, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson said he no longer writes production code by hand and prefers describing work to AI agents in English. He said he generated 150,000 lines of code in August 2026 versus roughly 30,000 per year previously.

• 37signals made agent-driven development its default; hand-coding is now the exception
• DHH produced 150,000 lines in August 2026 versus ~30,000 per year before
• Basecamp 5 experiment: 20–30 reasonable PRs left the architecture looking like Swiss cheese
• HEY's Rust backend rebuild reported 99% less CPU and 95% less memory usage