DHH declares himself a 'maker,' not a programmer, at Rails World 2026
Original: What About Rails?
Why This Matters
Rails' own creator publicly sidelining the framework at its flagship conference signals a real shift in how small-team web development is being justified.
At Rails World 2026 on September 24, 2026, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson announced he no longer identifies as a professional programmer, claims LLMs let him write 150k lines of code in August alone (vs. ~30k/year previously), and revealed 37signals is rebuilding Hey with native apps and Rust—not Rails.
DHH opened Rails World 2026 with a keynote that spent little time on Rails itself. He declared English the best programming language because LLMs can translate intent into code, and argued that humans reading their own code should become the exception—something he compared to spotting a bug in Sentry. His personal coding output reportedly jumped from roughly 30,000 lines per year to 150,000 lines in August 2026 alone, with Ruby dropping from about half his work over two decades to just 3% this year.
The biggest news: 37signals is rebuilding Hey as native applications across all supported platforms, backed by a Rust server layer. DHH admitted he finds Rust 'hideous' for human developers but considers it ideal for LLMs, since he's not reading the code anyway. He also reversed his long-standing position against native apps, framing Hey's previous web-app form as a practical workaround for small-team productivity—not a preference.
Rails, he said, still makes sense for 'web apps of necessity' like Basecamp, and its convention-over-configuration approach was reframed as 'token efficiency' for AI. He closed by urging the audience to embrace AI maximalism and called skepticism 'the black pill for fucking losers.' No significant Rails roadmap was presented.