// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
What About Rails?
David Heinemeier Hansson is, for better or worse, still in charge of Ruby on Rails. I’d love to stop paying attention to him, but I build applications with Rails, so his actions affect me and my clients. Yesterday, he gave the opening keynote at Rails World 2026, where he laid out his vision for the future of Rails.
Or that’s what his talk should have done. His keynote had very little to do with Rails. Here’s what he did talk about, and what it means for Rails.
I have retired from being a professional programmer.
Yes, he said that. No, that doesn’t mean he’s stepping away from software development. He now styles himself a “maker.” He now claims that English is the best programming language (because LLMs) and that we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce.
Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies.
He’s all-in on LLM code generation, so he’s changed his stance on both native applications and the Rust programming language. In his eyes, products like Hey were never really meant to be web apps.
He’s argued for years that the Rails stack allows small teams to build ambitious products. Now, as 37signals are building the next version of Hey, they are going with a different stack. In his telling, the bottleneck is gone, so they’re using LLMs to build native applications for every platform they support.
On the server side, they are going with Rust. DHH maintains that the language is hideous and that humans shouldn’t be subjected to it, but that it’s great for LLMs. Since he’s not reading the code anyway, he can now appreciate the performance and stability of the language.
He claims to have written 150k lines of code in August of this year, having previously averaged about 30k lines per year in the pre-LLM era. (He admits much of it is “verbose” Rust.) While Ruby made up about half his work over the last two decades, it sits at only 3% of what he wrote this year.
The new strategy is rooted in the idea that humans reading code should be the exception, rather than the norm, “like seeing a bug in Sentry.”