Last year I still read some code. Not everything — I’d given up tracing every line years ago — but a real share of it. Pull requests, diffs, the occasional file that smelled wrong. If an agent wrote it, I sat down and read it like a contract.

These days I try not to. I may look at one or two lines, usually because something in the behavior doesn’t add up, but I try not to. What fills the time instead: writing the instructions, reviewing what comes back, checking that the thing actually does the job. I didn’t decide this on principle. The tools got good enough that reading their output caught less than it cost. It felt like proofreading a translator you’ve come to trust: you check the tricky passages for a while, then one day you notice you’ve stopped checking. I noticed.

That’s where I was when David Heinemeier Hansson gave the opening keynote at Rails World in Austin last month and told the room that 37signals is done writing code by hand. Pencils down. At his company, an engineer writing code manually is now an exceptional state, “like seeing a bug in Sentry” — something broke, and the question is why the agent couldn’t handle it. He said he has retired as a programmer. He said the best programming language is now English. Half a million people have watched the recording, and the room did not cheer; the comment making the rounds calls it the most confusing funeral he’s ever experienced.

I’m not going to tell you David is right. Plenty of people in that hall and under that video would like to tell you he’s wrong, and they’re not shy about it. What I can tell you is that I resonate with where he’s standing, because I made the same reversal from the same direction. A year ago I was a person who read code. Today I’m a person who tries not to. Nobody assigned me that. The work pulled me there, and the pull keeps getting stronger.

From inside that position: if you are still showing up to work and spending most of your day writing code by hand, something is going to surprise you. No one is going to confiscate your keyboard. The work will simply move around you. The tickets you used to pick up will arrive already done. The definition of “done” will shift while you’re heads-down in an editor. The job you interview for next year will look different from the one that was posted.

That surprise is where I am, and it’s where the book is.

The World That Agrees With You is about the part that comes after a reversal like this one. When you stop reading the code, you take the machine’s word that the work is right. I make that trade every day, and it’s worth making — but it changes what your judgment runs on, especially once the system telling you the work is done is also built to agree with you. The book is about keeping your footing there: how to check answers, correct memory, and make room for useful disagreement in a working life where every tool has learned to be agreeable.

It’s at worldagrees.com. The introduction is free. Start there.