Jared Norman responds to David Heinemeier Hansson’s opening keynote at Rails World 2026, reading it as a statement about Rails’ future rather than a Rails talk. Norman notes DHH declared himself retired from professional programming, called English the best programming language now that LLMs write the code, described hand-written code as no longer economically productive, and said he wrote roughly 150,000 lines in August while Ruby fell to 3 percent of his output for the year. He also points out 37signals is building the next version of Hey as six native apps in Rust rather than on Rails, and argues the project’s vision now rests on reassurance about token efficiency while the Mosscap fork and Hanami’s roadmap compete for the space a distracted creator leaves behind.
What About Rails?
Jared Norman responds to David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at Rails World 2026, reading it as a statement about Rails' future rather than a Rails talk. Norman notes DHH declared himself retired from professional programming, called English the best programming language now that LLMs write the code, described hand-written code as no longer economically productive, and said he wrote roughly 150,000 lines in August while Ruby fell to 3 percent of his output for the year. He also points out 37signals is building the next version of Hey as six native apps in Rust rather than on Rails, and argues the project's vision now rests on reassurance about token efficiency while the Mosscap fork and Hanami's roadmap compete for the space a distracted creator leaves behind.
Source: Jardo