David Heinemeier Hansson opened Rails World 2026 with a keynote that barely mentioned Rails. He announced his retirement from professional programming, now identifying as a “maker” who relies on LLMs. Hansson claims English is the best programming language and that reading code is no longer necessary. His team at 37signals is building the next version of Hey using Rust and LLM-generated native apps.

He wrote 150k lines of code in August, only 3% in Ruby. He envisions a future where AI agents interact via CLIs and urges developers to reject AI skepticism. Rails, he says, remains ideal for web apps like Basecamp, but its role has narrowed.

The framework is now valued for token efficiency and stability in agentic development, not as a broad solution for small teams.