DHH’s recent keynote talk, given at Rails World, has been all over social media:
My god this is such a good speech that every SWE needs to hear. You know what? Every person should hear it
— Scott (@scottstts) September 25, 2026
Keep the happy memories, eyes on the reality, be excited about the future. That’s the best that anyone can do pic.twitter.com/KKFUXfesFb
I’ve gotta say, I agree with him. It is over. The whole writing code by hand thing. And, probably like many of you, I’ve had a cavalcade of feelings about it.
I vividly remember when I realized it, too. It was summer of 2025 when Claude Code first was making waves. At that time, I was developing Alyx, trying to hit the iOS 26 release. After carefully reviewing some documentation and watching a W.W.D.C. session, I handcrafted Alyx’s first app intent.
And that was it.
I pointed Claude at what I made, and it proceeded to develop the other 49 intents. I played product manager and code reviewer. Claude did the grunt work.
Initially, this made me feel useless. The craft I’d spent years honing? A large language model could not only do it, but in several cases, it could do it better. Let alone faster.
Then, over the months, I learned to embrace it. Figure out its nuances, little levers to pull and buttons to push. As time went on, I became a bit more comfortable. All the while feeling a bit uneasy about it, like I was giving up my automony and expertise to this mythical CLI tool. But I didn’t want to give it up, either. It was an odd stockholm syndrome type of situation.
Still later — acceptance. Software Engineering? It is irreversibly different. There is no going back, and the toothpaste is not going back in the bottle.
Which brings me to today. And, now? Joy. I think that’s something a lot of us are missing in this whole thing. We were there when it was done by hand, and now we’re literally living in, and experiencing in real-time, the next tipping point in our craft. How awesome is that!
Has our industry always not been about dealing with change: the new tools, APIs, languages, models, architecture, the way we do things? The best engineers I’ve ever known have always embraced it, and they are right now.
I’ve always leaned on being an optimist, it feels like a waste of time and a life to really be anything else. And, I feel optimistic as a builder of things. That’s what we are now more than ever, and the tools and the means to get to the “thing” have dramatically changed.
So yeah — it’s over. And when things are over, something else begins.
Until next time ✌️