DHH tells Rails World: Rails is dead, LLMs changed everything
The Rails creator announced his flagship app is leaving the framework, declaring hand-written code economically unproductive and pivoting to AI-generated Rust.
What to know
- DHH announced at Rails World 2026 that 37signals is abandoning Rails for its flagship app Hey, switching to LLM-generated code, native apps, and Rust—directly contradicting the Rails philosophy he spent 20 years promoting.
- He declared hand-written code economically unproductive for most programmers and predicted AI-generated code will become standard across all domains by year-end, with humans reading code becoming rare exceptions.
- The community is split: some see this as inevitable modernization, others worry about AI-generated code maintainability, UI/UX differentiation, and security in production systems.
- Rails' future is now uncertain, narrowed from a platform for ambitious small teams to a tool for 'web apps of necessity' while its creator pursues AI-native architectures.
The dispute Whether AI-generated code represents inevitable progress (and thus acceptable for production) versus an unmaintainable liability in anything beyond proof-of-concept, and whether the entire premise is self-defeating once AI can build entire applications without human involvement. · positions read across 59 posts and comments
This represents inevitable technological progress; code generation is the future and Rails had its time.
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“Every piece of software has an expiration date...I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age.”
meerita · Hacker News ↗
AI-generated code is unmaintainable and unauditable; this approach is viable only for trivial applications and risky in production.
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“As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance...you have to have 100% trust, 99.9% is not going to be enough in any serious indus[try].”
bionsystem · Hacker News ↗
DHH is contradicting himself and his own platform; this signals Rails' decline and raises questions about who leads the project now.
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“It is pretty obvious rails is dead as it hangs massively on its founder for good and for bad. And it is quite telling that he prefers to kill it off like this rather than handing the reigns over to someone else.”
chvid · Hacker News ↗
The vision contradicts itself: why build beautiful native UIs if everything should be CLI-driven? Why hire developers if AI builds it all?
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“37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn't good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone…”
Twey · Hacker News ↗
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) Creator and leader of Ruby on Rails37signals Software company owned/led by DHH
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlespostscomments
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AnalysisDHH contradicts Rails philosophy, narrows its purpose
The jardo.dev analysis published on Hacker News highlights the contradiction: DHH used the world's premier Rails conference to announce Rails' flagship app is leaving Rails. The analysis notes his vision has narrowed Rails from a platform for "small teams, ambitious products" to a choice of last resort—"web apps of necessity"—while he himself moves to AI-generated Rust.
“DHH used the opening keynote of the world's premier Rails conference to announce that a flagship Rails app was leaving Rails.”
— jardo.dev article -
2 outlets What About Rails?
first by HN Best, 1d ago · also HN Frontpage
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about 11 months ago [i wrote](https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html#two-key-points): > Bro, it’s cringe af to go to Rails World. I won’t judge you if you went in 2025. But for 2026… just don’t! Why pay money to go hang out with rancid, creepy guys? I’m not one to kink shame but going to Rails World 2026 is a sign that you’re willing to…
2 more of the top 3 · 59 posts in this stretch
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I moved from Ruby+Rails, though some other frameworks that I had no choice in (inherited the projects), to my new place of refuge: Kotlin+http4k.Kotlin is a very acceptable Ruby-with-types. Even better than the new Ruby with optional types. It reads the same, it writes very similar, and it produces very similar "style" of code. I like the be on…
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@ jardo Latest blog post was fire 🔥 Nice work on that. Found it on the front page of lobste.rs, if you weren’t already aware. https:// lobste.rs/s/rvvqos/what_about_ rails
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background
DHH advocates for code humans shouldn't read and CLI-only interfaces — The keynote presented a vision where humans reading code becomes exceptional—"like seeing a bug in Sentry." DHH also called for every service to offer a CLI so that "his agents" (AI) can interact with applications without UIs. He predicts this will be standard across virtually all domains and companies by year-end.
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background
DHH claims 5x productivity surge from AI code generation — DHH stated he personally wrote 150,000 lines of code in August 2026 alone—compared to his historical average of 30,000 lines per year in the pre-LLM era. Ruby, which comprised roughly half his work over two decades, now accounts for only 3% of his current output.
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background
37signals moving Hey from Rails to Rust and native apps with LLM code — DHH announced that 37signals is abandoning Rails for their flagship email product, Hey. The new architecture uses LLM-generated code for native applications across all platforms and Rust on the server side—a language DHH previously criticized as "hideous" but now values because AI will write it and humans won't read it.
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background
DHH delivers Rails World keynote declaring AI-written code is the future — At Rails World 2026, David Heinemeier Hansson—the creator and leader of Ruby on Rails—gave the opening keynote announcing a major shift in his vision for software development. He stated that writing code by hand is no longer economically productive for most programmers and repositioned himself as a "maker" rather than a coder.
What people are saying 21 voices from 3 sites · best of 59 · verbatim
- Today
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> But now it seems that DHH has abandoned those values in favor of LLM written slop Rust code that “you never, ever, EVER have to look at it yourself.” I _really_ do not understand why people do this. We have decades of industry experience suggesting that tech CEOs who understand their products deeply outperform CEOs who are proudly ignorant of…
- Yesterday
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With all that's known about DHH, and the Ruby community in general being pro-human (or at least historically this was the case), it's a bit worrying there's still a large group of people that are seemingly OK with that and will just go to "David Con". My arm-chair theory here is that this is largely due to the US influence on the tech industry…
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I was never part of the Rails community (never did web dev professionally, used Rails once for a pro bono project), but I still resent what it did to the Ruby community I knew before Rails.
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That’s actually been one of the funniest things about all of the LLM tooling… I’ve been pushed for a long time to move away from my very CLI-based workflows and now, amazingly, they’re cool again for people who thought I was a grumpy old man last year.
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I feel bad feelings about what happened to Rails. It’s hard to overstate how important rails was to my career. Like this was the first framework that let a group of amateurs really launch ideas with a super supportive community and the things you launched were (relatively) battle tested. You could scale it in a way that was sort of amazing at the…
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Ahh good catch; they did do a release yesterday. So for just shy of two months a new Rails app did not work out of the box with the latest release. That is really something else to me.
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Meanwhile the current Rails release is broken (and has been for weeks) and users can't even get through the first steps in the official getting starting guide without errors that have no actionable stacktrace and points the user to a csrf tag in a template file.
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but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written software is very reliable and easy to extend and develop. Extremely refreshing to read. The whole thing, not just this statement.Too much discourse creates a false dichotomy of "awesome, wonderful, hand-crafted code" vs "shitty AI slop."A lot of hand-crafted code is pretty bad. This is true even with…
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> I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me.there's an important caveat here - LLMs absolutely can write better code than me, but they can also…
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Rails is in a weird place right now. My favorite line from the Rails “Doctrine” is: > We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor. I believe that, as do a lot of people in the Rails…
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Most managers don't read the code of their direct reports. They just trust that the code is "good enough" and that there are enough other processes in place to catch bugs before they cause too much damage. I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious…
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A chatbot is worse than a CLI app: a CLI app does exactly what you ask for, and has a manual documenting exactly what command do what, and the output is consistent, the same command does the same thing period.A chatbot using an LLM of course not, it suffers from hallucinations, it may do what you want but there is a change it won't and you have to…
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What About Rails?: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664
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> I’m left wondering what the vision for Rails really is now, and who’s going to drive it. It could very well be that projects like Rails do not have much of a future, at least not in the current form. Rails, Django, Flask and other things were there to solve a problem that in this form no longer exists. At least not for people who use coding…
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"If every product is used by an agent driving a CLI, what’s going to differentiate Basecamp or Fizzy from the cheapest alternative?"At that point, why even bother with "driving a CLI"? I have a hard time seeing how this all doesn't go away soon. At the current trajectory, I am not seeing a future where software like Basecamp or Fizzy or the…
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What About Rails? Link: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664
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As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of…
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I code and maintain a Rails stack. About 20% of the time an endpoint takes to respond is spent in Ruby. New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99, and it’s very rare for an endpoint to take more than 100ms. Most respond in under 80ms. I could LLM-port it (and probably will one day), but end-user response performance wouldn’t be the motivation.What does…
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DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech."Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We…
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> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to…
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What About Rails? L: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664 posted on 2026.09.24 at 22:50:16 (c=0, p=5)