DHH’s new way of writing code
David Heinemeier Hansson shares why he shifted to an agent-first AI workflow, and what it means for how software is built and who builds it.
Read original article ↗Programming is becoming a landfill of machine-generated sludge managed by ego-driven architects.
The shift to agentic workflows is not a revolution in creativity but a surrender to technical debt. Developers are trading deep understanding for the dopamine hit of shipping mediocre bloat faster. Both the open-source purists and the corporate disruptors are ignoring the reality that automated coding just accelerates our descent into unmaintainable chaos.
Your job is being replaced by a sophisticated autocorrect because you stopped providing value decades ago.
When a billionaire redefines "who builds it," check whose hands leave the wheel.
DHH's agent-first workflow isn't a productivity revolution — it's a power consolidation dressed in developer culture drag. When platform owners control the AI layer, they control what gets built, for whom, and on whose terms. Hansson's cheerful embrace of this shift obscures that fewer human coders means fewer workers with leverage to resist the diktat of capital.
Automation without ownership is just a faster conveyor belt to someone else's profit.
Handing code to agents is letting apprentices redraw the cathedral blueprints.
DHH’s agent-first workflow treats software craft as prompt management, not disciplined engineering. What gets lost is the slow formation of judgment: reading ugly legacy code, tracing failures, and absorbing why conventions, tests, and review rituals exist. If who builds software shifts from trained programmers to AI conductors, firms will inherit systems fewer humans can truly understand or repair.
Institutions rot when expertise becomes supervision theatre.