What About Rails?

David Heinemeier Hansson, the influential figure behind Ruby on Rails, recently delivered the opening keynote at Rails World 2026. However, his address was heavily focused on his new perspective on programming and artificial intelligence (AI) rather than Rails itself.

During his speech, Hansson announced that he has retired from being a professional programmer. Instead, he now identifies as a "maker" and believes that English is the best programming language due to advancements in large language models (LLMs). He claims that most programmers don't need to write code manually anymore, as AI can generate it for them.

Hansson's stance on programming languages and application development has shifted significantly. He now advocates for Rust as the language of choice for building native applications, despite previously praising Ruby on Rails for enabling small teams to create ambitious products. The Rails stack is no longer the preferred choice, as seen in 37signals' decision to rewrite their Hey app using native apps and Rust on the server side.

The keynote emphasized the need for every service to have a command-line interface (CLI), with the expectation that humans will interact with applications using AI-generated code. Hansson believes that only 3% of his work in 2026 will be in Ruby, down from an average of 30k lines per year previously. He claims to have written 150k lines of code in August alone, much of it in Rust.

Despite the shift in focus, Hansson still sees value in Rails for web applications and AI development. He urges the audience to reject AI skepticism and doomerism, emphasizing the benefits of embracing AI in software development. However, there is a sense of uncertainty about the future of Rails and its role in the evolving landscape of programming.