I was at the gym yesterday, talking with a relatively new CrossFitter named John, and naturally he asked me what I do for a living. I said I write software all day. But it hit me—I don’t actually write software anymore. I told him that, nowadays, Cursor writes all my code—I just tell Cursor what to do.
I’ve written about how code isn’t important anymore and that we won’t be writing code much longer, but somehow that truth finally hit me. And of course, when a truth hits me, someone else has already spoken that truth. Ruby creator David Heinemeier Hansson just a few weeks ago told us to “put down our pencils” at Rails World 2026.
The simple fact of the matter is that Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc., are better coders than we are.
This dawned on me over the past week at my day job where Cursor found a startlingly large number of threading issues in some code that I had written. I’m not ashamed—except for a handful of savants, we all have a very hard time reasoning clearly about complex multithreading. We just don’t have enough RAM in our heads to hold all of the possibilities in our brains.
Leave it to Cursor
But you know who does? Cursor. We use Cursor at work, and we have it wired into our pull request process to examine the code we are reviewing and see if it can find any problems. And boy, does Cursor find problems. In that code I wrote, Cursor found more than 20 different scenarios where race conditions could occur. And then, Cursor fixed them. In minutes. Although I felt a little dumb as a result, I was pleased that our agent found these issues before our customers did.
I think we all know that multithreading bugs are all but impossible to track down and fix when a customer reports them. Cursor? It found them and fixed them no problem. It was humbling, to say the least.
This has happened before. If you have seen or read Hidden Figures, you know how important a group of Black women were to the early American space program. They were called “computers” because they would compute, by hand, the trajectories and orbital mechanics of spacecraft. But it wasn’t long before those “computers” started becoming programmers, as they literally put down their pencils and picked up their punch cards.
And so it goes with me. I realized I haven’t written more than a few lines of code here or there in a few weeks. And I doubt I will write much code at all in the future.
We were coders once
The crazy thing is how fast this has happened. A few months ago, we were still writing code. Then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we were using coding agents all the time. It happened so fast, I can’t even remember it happening—it just did.
I’ve written about how AI coding agents will change things, but DHH deftly points out another advantage: better user experience. He tells how at his company, 37signals, they originally built Basecamp as a web app because that was the easiest way to deliver an application to multiple devices and operating systems. But having put their pencils down, they will be using coding agents to provide a native experience everywhere—something they never could have done with humans writing all the code.
You may be a great coder. You may love to write code and relish the challenges, the problem solving, and all the cool intellectual exercises that coding brings. You may even be a 10x developer.
But the fact of the matter is your coding agent is better, faster, and stronger than you are. So the next time I’m asked what I do, I’m going to say “I used to write code, but now I develop software with AI.”
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