---
title: 'In the News: September 25, 2026 (Morning)'
description: 'DHH tells Rails World that hand-written code is no longer viable at 37signals, and the AI Coding Dictionary formally defines software factory and dark factory.'
canonical_url: 'https://darkfactory.dev/news/2026-09-25-morning'
markdown_url: 'https://darkfactory.dev/news/2026-09-25-morning.md'
collection: news
date_published: '2026-09-25T07:15:00-04:00'
date_modified: '2026-09-25T07:15:00-04:00'
---

# In the News: September 25, 2026 (Morning)


Two items today, both about naming what this publication has been tracking for months. The lead is David Heinemeier Hansson telling Rails World that his company has stopped writing code by hand. The second is smaller but on the nose: the two terms this site takes its name from just got their first formal dictionary definitions.

## 1. DHH tells Rails World: "pencils down" on hand-written code

**[DHH on X: Rails World 2026 opening keynote](https://x.com/dhh/status/2102936073642869121)** · David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder and CTO of 37signals, creator of Ruby on Rails · X, September 23, 2026

Posting a clip from his Rails World 2026 opening keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote: "It's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. But the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment!" The post has drawn 7,300 likes and 2.1 million views as of this morning, up from 6,600 likes and 1.8 million views the previous evening.

According to a summary of the keynote published by Dealroom, 37signals now treats agent-generated code as the normal course of business and hand-writing as the exception, reserved for fixing the agent when it misfires. Hansson said he wrote roughly half as much code by hand over the past 20 months as in the 21 years before that, including 150,000 lines in August alone against a long-run average near 30,000 lines a year. Hey, the company's email product, is being rebuilt as six agent-written native applications with its mail server core rewritten in Rust. An early attempt to let designers vibe-code the final features of Basecamp 5 reportedly left the architecture "like Swiss cheese," but the agent-accelerated release has since shipped. Hansson's practical demand for other developers, per the same summary: "If your app doesn't have a CLI, I want to see it by next Friday," on the argument that a command-line interface is what lets an agent act on an application the way a person would.

**Why it matters:** Hansson is not a fringe voice making this claim. A well-known, widely-followed practitioner publicly declaring hand-written code obsolete at his own company, with a specific and checkable practice attached (give your app a CLI), is a different kind of evidence than the same argument made by a commentator. Whether "most programmers at most companies" is true is a separate question from whether it changes what people expect a serious engineering organization to look like this year.

## 2. The lane's two central terms get formal definitions

**[The AI Coding Dictionary](https://www.aicodingdictionary.com/)** · Matt Pocock, AI Hero · aihero.dev, updated September 2026

The AI Coding Dictionary, maintained by Matt Pocock's AI Hero, has added entries for "software factory" and "dark factory," the two terms this publication is named for. It defines a software factory as "a system of work where triggers, not humans, start agent sessions, so more work runs AFK and HITL time is saved for what needs it," and a dark factory as "a codebase, or part of one, where a software factory writes the code and no human ever reviews it." Pocock posted the additions on X on September 24; the software factory entry had reached 893 likes and 72,300 views by this morning, up from 779 likes at the same reading roughly 18 hours earlier.

**Why it matters:** A term used loosely and inconsistently across practitioner writing for months now has a short, citable, canonical definition to point to. That matters less for what it changes today than for what it settles going forward: "dark factory" has a specific meaning, a codebase a factory writes with no human review, and it is not just a synonym for "AI wrote it."