Hand-coding websites is over
37signals has stopped writing code by hand, and websites are next. They will look alike, machines will read them, and original design will become rarer and worth more.
In September, David Heinemeier Hansson got on stage at Rails World in Austin and asked a room full of programmers how many of them still write a lot of code by hand every week. About five people raised their hands. DHH created Ruby on Rails and co-founded 37signals. In that talk he said his company has stopped writing code by hand. If someone at 37signals writes code themselves now, they treat it like a bug: the AI agent didn’t do its job, so instead of writing the code, you fix the agent. You can watch the whole talk on YouTube: Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote.
Websites are no different. Hand-coding is already over. If an AI can build a website in a fraction of the time, nobody’s going to pay for the hours a person would have spent on it. If you keep writing every line yourself, you’ll be slower and more expensive than everyone else, and clients will see it as soon as they compare two quotes.
DHH said one thing about this that stuck with me. He looks back on 25 years of writing code by hand with joy, not regret. It was good work, he learned a lot, and now it’s done.
Every website looks fine, and they all look the same
Speed has a downside: everything starts to look alike. An AI model doesn’t come up with anything new. It puts together pieces of what it’s already seen. Ask it for a café website and you’ll get a decent layout, decent copy and decent colours. The café two streets over gets the same decent website with a different logo. Once most websites are made this way, you won’t be able to tell them apart.
Your visitor is a machine now
The people around me don’t use Google anymore. They ask an AI chat about everything, from finding a plumber to planning a holiday to what to do about back pain. The chat reads the websites for them, picks out what it needs and gives them an answer. Most of the time, nobody opens the website itself.
DHH talked about the same shift from the other side. He doesn’t want the chatbots that apps keep offering him. He has his own AI agent and sends it to get things done. Websites work the same way: more and more, the visitor is an agent, not a person. So your website needs to be written so that an AI can quickly find what it’s looking for and understand it correctly. What matters is the text and a clear structure, and for a lot of websites that will matter more than how they look.
Ads you can’t spot
This is the part that worries me most. On Google you can spot an ad because it says “Sponsored”, and most of us have learned to scroll past it. An AI chat gives you one answer in one block of text, and there’s nothing to scroll past.
When ads make their way into AI chats, they won’t look like ads. A recommendation for a company or product will sound like advice from a friend who knows the field, and you won’t know if someone paid for it. The chat also has your whole conversation. It knows what you’re dealing with, how much you want to spend and what you’re worried about, so it can slip in an offer right when you’re most likely to say yes. Next to that, Google’s paid links look harmless.
When a chat recommends a specific company, ask it why that one, and check the company’s website yourself.
What happened to portrait painters
DHH didn’t open his talk about AI with agents. He opened it with painters. In the 18th century, you’d sit for hours, and then the painter would work on your portrait for months. Only nobles and rich families could afford it. The Danish painter Laurits Tuxen spent three years on his 1886 portrait of the Danish royal family.
In 1900, Kodak released the Brownie, a camera that cost one dollar. Suddenly anyone could get a realistic picture of a face, and portrait painters lost their main source of income. But they didn’t disappear. They moved on to things a camera couldn’t do. Picasso got into Cubism, and Tuxen and the other Skagen painters got into Impressionism. DHH calls it an explosion of creativity.
Websites will go the same way. AI-made websites are our Brownie: cheap, fast and good enough for most people. They’ll flood the internet the way photos flooded family albums, and that’s exactly why anything different will stand out.
That’s how things balance out. The more websites look the same, the more a different one is worth, and the more it pays to know how to make one. Photography didn’t kill painting. It freed painters from having to copy reality, and they started painting light, mood and shapes that a camera couldn’t catch.
The same thing is coming for websites. AI will take over the ones that mostly need to work and answer questions. Designers will get the kind of work that few people used to pay for: websites with personality, the kind you recognise at a glance. I’m looking forward to that.