DHH's Rails World keynote pulls a flagship app off Rails and bets everything on LLMs

At Rails World 2026, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson used the opening keynote to declare he has ‘retired’ from professional programming and now sees hand-written code as economically obsolete for most developers by year’s end. Rather than chart a future for Rails, he announced that 37signals is rebuilding its flagship Hey product off the framework entirely — using LLMs to generate native apps for every platform and a Rust backend he freely admits is ugly but no longer reads. He touts writing 150k lines this year versus a pre-LLM average of 30k, with Ruby dropping from roughly half his output to just 3%, and calls for every product to expose a CLI so his agents can drive it without a UI.

The author, a working Rails developer, reads this as a hollow moment for the framework’s community. DHH reframed Rails from a deliberate choice for ‘small teams, ambitious products’ into a mere ‘web app of necessity,’ offering flattery (‘you’re a fucking Rails programmer, the best of the best’) where a roadmap should be. The piece notes the contradiction between 37signals rewriting Hey as six native apps because web fidelity isn’t good enough, while simultaneously claiming everyone just wants CLIs — and asks who will actually steer Rails now that its creator’s Ruby output has collapsed and rival efforts like Hanami and the Mosscap fork are filling the vacuum.

The critique also picks apart the AI claims themselves. DHH concedes that lines of code is a poor metric and that cross-language comparison is unfair, then does exactly that — stacking terse hand-written Ruby against verbose LLM-generated Rust he never reviewed. Performance boasts like ‘99% less CPU’ and serving peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi are dismissed as apples-to-oranges, since Rust naturally outperforms Ruby regardless of who wrote it. The verdict: the ‘never look at the output’ approach can work for simple products like 37signals’ apps, but the keynote sold confidence and hype in place of an actual vision for the framework DHH built.