What About Rails?

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, recently delivered the opening keynote at Rails World 2026. His speech focused on the future of Rails, though it did not delve into the framework itself much. Instead, Hansson discussed his newfound interests in artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on software development.

He now identifies as a "maker" and has declared English to be the best programming language, thanks to the capabilities of LLMs. Hansson claims that writing code by hand is no longer economically beneficial for most programmers and companies. He is now supporting the use of LLM-generated code, which has led to a shift in his stance on native applications and programming languages.

Previously, he supported the Rails stack for small teams to build ambitious products, but now the trend is moving towards using LLMs to build native applications for all platforms and Rust for server-side development. While Ruby made up about half of his work over the last two decades, it now accounts for only 3% of his output this year.

Hansson's vision for Rails is one where humans reading code should be the exception rather than the norm. His ultimate goal is for every service to offer a CLI, so that agents can interact with it without using the UI. He encourages everyone to adopt AI and to reject AI skepticism and doomerism. Despite Ruby's long-standing reputation as the framework for small teams and ambitious products, Hansson now views Rails as a web app of necessity.

He maintains that Rails is still a great fit for web applications like Basecamp, but now he also advocates for building with AI.