Long-form interview (**25-minute read**) with **David Heinemeier Hansson**, creator of **Ruby on Rails** and co-owner of **37signals**, by **Vikas Shah** in *Thought Economics*, published on **September 28, 2026**, five days after the opening keynote of **Rails World** in Austin where he announced that 37signals was going *"pencils down"* on hand-written code. **(A)** The reversal, dated: in summer 2025 he told **Lex Fridman** he would not let AI write his code; what changed his mind was the arrival of coding agents in late 2025, and *"the change has really become vertical, in my opinion, over the last three or four months"*. **(B)** The underlying argument is not technical but political: programmers had become *"a clerical class"* mediating access to the machine, and the agent plays the role of Luther — *"Agent Luther"* — by removing the intermediary. He draws a consequence for himself: his coding skills are no longer *"economically viable as an independent lever"*. **(C)** The sorting of business models: client-side is *"already gone"* (Adobe), client-server still holds because *"people have no desire to run their own servers"*, plumbing moats hold (Shopify, *"payment, shipping, and tax systems"*), and **Salesforce** and **SAP** are *"in serious trouble"* since *"there's no more value in the code, only in process intuitions"*. **(D)** **Omarchy**, his Linux distribution with built-in agents: the **Quattro** version written exclusively by agents, **200,000 downloads in 18 days**, **4,000 plugins** in four weeks, **$21.7M** in donation pledges. **(E)** The forward-looking close: AGI reached, *"pockets of ASI"*, robots, and *"what do you do when you have nothing left to do?"*. To be read against [[lecun-still-far-from-human-level-ai-llm-2026-09-25]] from the same month.
#end of hand-written code#pencils down#coding agents
David Heinemeier Hansson · créateur de Ruby on Rails et copropriétaire de 37signals · interrogé par Vikas Shah dans *Thought Economics*.
X thread by **Dean W. Ball** — **Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI** since July 6, 2026, **principal author of America's AI Action Plan** under the Trump administration (a positioning worth keeping in mind when reading an anti-open-weights argument penned by an insider of the proprietary frontier): **six observations** triggered by the Chinese open-weights model **Kimi**, which quickly move beyond the product to advance a contrarian **geopolitical and ideological thesis**. (1) Kimi is **a very good model**, not reducible to distillation, **on par with the best public models of Q1 2026** in agentic coding — but **very token-hungry**, so not so obviously cheap to operate. (2) Ball says he is **surprised that the Chinese state continues to allow the open-sourcing** of such good models: he attributes this **~75% to a "strategic blindness" / a lack of "AGI-pilledness"** (the PCC allegedly holds a "very Yann-LeCun-like" view of AI), and ~25% to a **lack of inference compute** — making the Chinese open-weights strategy an **unintended byproduct of US export controls** — plus a reflex toward aggressive exports; on the companies' side, the openness is half-ideological, half an admission that "we're behind, no one would pay for sub-frontier Chinese models." (3) Central thesis: **open-weights models are inherently decelerationist** — they **discourage AI capex**. Ball is surprised by the enthusiasm of **"accelerationists"** for open-weights, which he attributes to their taste for the **"cloak of ungovernability"** (an analogy with James Scott's *The Art of Not Being Governed* and its hill peoples). (4) A world dominated by open weights would lead to **"AI communism"** — AI not as a market product but as a **"public good" / "digital public infrastructure"** provided by the state, "precisely what China is proposing"; Ball judges this horizon **"dystopian"** and recounts being lobbied, while in government, for an **11-to-12-figure** federal data center subsidizing startups that would give away their models for free. (5) **Political prediction**: the Trump administration will eventually realize that its best strategy is **not to "ban open source"** (one of the silliest arguments in the debate) but to **create regulatory risk / FUD** via **soft law** from each agency ("a Fed bulletin suspects backdoors in Chinese models"), enough to make **regulated enterprises pull back**, without scaring off the hyperscalers (otherwise startups would turn to shadier providers). (6) These models make **the world a bit more dangerous**, not yet in a perceptible way — until the day they are; an ironic closing line about a "self-replicating agent escaped from a Chinese lab" (a COVID/lab-leak analogy, "color me shocked"). To be read as a **counterpoint** to SFEIR's analysis (Kimi K3, reversibility, [[sfeir-kimi-k3-moonshot-frontier-open-weights-2026-07-16]]) and to Xi's pro-open-source speech at WAIC ([[xi-waic2026-gouvernance-mondiale-ia-2026-07-17]]).
#Dean W. Ball#Dean Woodley Ball#OpenAI
Dean W. Ball (Dean Woodley Ball, @deanwball sur X) — expert américain de premier plan en politique de l'IA et gouvernance des technologies émergentes. **Depuis le 6 juillet 2026 : Head of Strategic Futures chez OpenAI** (petite équipe sur la politique de l'IA de pointe — risques catastrophiques, auto-amélioration récursive, impact marché du travail, relations labos-États-société ; rend compte au Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon). Reste **Nonresident Senior Fellow** à la Foundation for American Innovation (FAI). **Parcours** : Senior Policy Advisor for AI and Emerging Technology à l'Office of Science and Technology Policy de la Maison Blanche (administration Trump) · où il fut le **principal rédacteur d'America's AI Action Plan** ; Research Fellow au Mercatus Center (George Mason) · Senior Program Manager à la Hoover Institution (Stanford) · Manhattan Institute · ex-Executive Director de la Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. Auteur de la newsletter **Hyperdimensional** (21 000+ abonnés) ; Visiting Lecturer à la Yale Law School (cours sur la gouvernance de l'IA de pointe). Diplômé d'Histoire de Hamilton College (2014, magna cum laude) · ~33-34 ans · vit à Washington D.C. **Sensibilité** : libéral classique / libertarien · mais reconnaissant un rôle nécessaire de l'État face aux risques existentiels de l'IA. (Post X personnel ; date d'ajout à la veille : 2026-07-17.)