DHH at Rails World 2026: Hey is leaving Rails for Rust and native apps, built entirely by LLMs

What About Rails?

DHH opened Rails World 2026 by declaring himself retired from professional programming and now a 'maker.' He says English is the best programming language and hand-written code is no longer economically productive. 37signals is using LLMs to rewrite Hey into six native apps with a Rust backend—Rust is hideous for humans but great for LLMs. He wrote 150k lines of code in August; Ruby dropped to 3% of his output. Rails is reframed as a framework for 'web apps of necessity,' with convention-over-configuration rebranded as token efficiency. The author questions how products differentiated by UI/UX survive if everything becomes CLI-driven by agents. DHH offered Rails devs pep-talk confidence but no actual roadmap.

Why it matters: DHH's Rails World 2026 keynote barely touched Rails itself, instead delivering provocative claims backed by concrete numbers and product decisions. The post is a second-hand reaction rather than the full keynote transcript, and actual Rails roadmap details are thin—hence not p...