Pencils Down: Writing Code Has Never Been Less Valuable, Engineering Has Never Mattered More

"It's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies."

Software people have lots of feelings about this statement, and DHH (creator of Rails, co-founder of Basecamp) in general. But he's right on this.

This raises lots of legitimate questions, and it should cause us to pause and think it through.

Lots of people regard writing code as part of their identity. Being able to speak the language of the computer has been an incredibly valuable skill for my entire lifetime, and now there's a universal translator.

But if you have ever been paid to write code, you have to realize the code wasn't the point. It was a means to an end.

So what does that mean for us now? I think it means that the act of writing code has never been less valuable, but the practice of software engineering is as valuable as it has ever been. When trust and dollars are on the line, it is now undeniably our job to engineer the system, not just write the code.

It needs to do what we set out to make it do. It needs to do it securely against an onslaught of bad agents and CVEs, and it needs to stay in a state where it's easy to make the next set of changes. Same as it ever was. As amazing as agents are, they still suck at this without lots of help. You need to not just make the next change, you need to be a gardener of the system.

This is an amazing set of problems to work on! Where there is risk, it's our job to engineer it out. Where there's not enough value for the customer, we get to participate in figuring out why, without having to wait for months and then hope somebody tells us whether it worked. We get to actually address observability and security like we've always advocated for, because now there's no choice.

We get to explore and share what's working and what's not with our colleagues. We get to help people who have vibe coded something of value turn it into something sustainable AFTER they have figured out traction.

It's natural to grieve what is being lost. I think a lot of my fellow software people were triggered by DHH's first sentence. To the point they might have missed the second one:

"But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment!"

Co-signed.

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