The Collection

Gergely Orosz reprints DHH’s Rails World keynote as a free Pulse. The claim is not a forecast. It is a shop decision. “At 37signals, a couple of weeks ago, we made the decision that it clearly means we’re done writing code by hand,” DHH said. Writing by hand is now exceptional: something went wrong; why was the agent not able to produce what we wanted; maybe for a little while we get the old pencil out; then we fix the machine, fix the factory, get things going again.

He names 24 November 2025 and Opus 4.5 as the Kodak Brownie moment: AI in a harness many people could afford, the inflection he wants history books to mark. Native mobile apps are back on the table because a small team can build them with agents. Backend services move toward Rust for performance, because agents write good enough Rust. Ruby on Rails stays for web apps because convention-over-configuration is easy for agents to follow. DHH says he retired from being a professional programmer somewhere around March, after a quarter-century chiseling code by hand, and frames the new job as a professional maker of things steering intelligence. Abstractions made sense when repetition was expensive; the price of repetition, he says, has gone near zero.

Hand code is the exception state.

Friday keeps the keynote as reported by Orosz. It does not invent headcount, revenue, or ship dates 37signals did not publish in that letter. The Collection files the pencil claim beside the invoice: when the factory writes the page, the human still has to read it before it ships.

The same Pulse carries an anonymous Big Tech post by username voxium that Orosz says hit a nerve. Half a month into a new role: specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolutions, reports, all made by Claude Code; nobody on the team likes it; higher management says pushing code is not a bottleneck, so why are we slow; people work twelve to thirteen hours a day just to press enter; nobody is reading anything; L1 through L7 talk to Claude; no sense of victory; nobody resolving bugs; nobody thinking. Orosz files it as a pattern, not a one-shop freak: where AI usage rises, thinking gets outsourced, and shipping becomes the only remaining score.

He then opens Uber Eats on his own phone. A new add-ons selector shipped with three bugs visible at once: “Choose up to 999” when a restaurant leaves the cap blank or absurd; text overflow on a Dutch localisation (basilcummaynaise); selecting “nothing” as a bowl base counts as an extra side and blocks the order. Years of using the app, he writes, and this is the first time he has seen a release this sloppy. The Uber Eats team later reached out and said they were looking into the three issues. Quality, he argues, has been degrading since the start of the year where teams assume the agent will take care of QA.

Press enter is not a review.

Friday does not invent Uber org charts or anonymous identity. It keeps Orosz’s printed bugs and the voxium paragraph as filed. The Enter sits beside The Pencil: pencils down is a shop choice; enter without reading is a failure of the job that remains.

Excellent Prompts opens on a March 2026 Okta-commissioned survey of 292 executives and 492 knowledge workers across seven countries. Ninety percent of the executives felt confident they could see which AI tools were in use. Fifty-two percent of the knowledge workers said they had used unapproved AI tools. The letter notes Okta sells identity security, so read the numbers with that in mind. Friday keeps that caveat on the page.

The claim is not that executives are lying. It is that an inventory of approved tools does not tell you who is struggling, who is doing the extra checking, or which jobs are changing on whose time. Change management asks those questions. Leave them unanswered and employees invent the answers while doing the work. The free matter stops short of the paid checklist and prompts; Friday does not invent those.

Confidence is not visibility.

AI Agents Simplified, filed the same night, adds the production twin: when an agent crashes on step seven of twelve, a restart from the top bills steps one through six again in tokens and can replay side effects. Durable execution that records completed model turns is the floor under pencils-down shops. The Collection pairs The Inventory with The Enter. If the floor is using tools the board cannot see, and the floor is shipping pages nobody read, the pencil was never the scarce thing. Attention was.