Over my dead pencil

Two weeks ago at Rails World, I told my fellow programmers that it's time to put down the pencils. We're not going to write the vast majority of code by hand any longer. Coding agents have gotten so good that it's simply not an economically viable enterprise going forward to have humans typing out lines of Ruby, Rust, or C++.When I polled the room for how many people were still writing a material amount of code by hand on a weekly basis, only a handful put up their hands. So they all knew this, but it still came as a shock to many to actually hear it.And I get that shock. Programming has barely been a professional career for a generation, and now it's being completely transformed. That's unsettling, even for a group of people who've seen technologies come and go on a regular basis.But this isn't just another technology, because AI isn't just another tool. It's far more like gaining some new coworkers who are exceptionally good and fast at a wide range of tasks, but still need a bit of…