It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
- A layperson can now build one a solo developer can do
- A solo dev can now build what an agency of web development can do
- An agency of web development can now build native apps similar to what large corporation can do
- Large corporation can now tackle even more ambitious projects
Which makes sense given what got automated. This is with the current tech, people still exploring the full potential, but if that turns out to be the case then I'd argue the software market will grow substantially and we are just having an adjustment period.
Have you seen the older apps built by devs? or all the other bootstrap themes?
He is just promoting Shopify's vibe coding for merchants. I bet on Shopify pivoting to vibe coded Rust soon because of "security".
He explicitly said he still loves ruby as a language and thinks Rails is well suited for a future with AI coding.
It's interesting how this stuff gets spun on social media by people who don't watch the content.
I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.
I don't think he believes in Rails any more.
It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.
To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?
That sounds like layoffs lol.
as a solo: you can build and ship more in your own time
as a startup: you can iterate and scale more with more velocity and less growing pains
as an enterprise: people with ideas but not a technical background can put their tokens where their mouth is and build their own interfaces, personal apps, ask their own questions, ship their own features without having to navigate layer 8 and play games for resources
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
Making the widget cheaper doesn't necessarily create demand either. I will not buy 10 times more toothbrushes or writing pens if their prices suddenly decreased to 1 cent.
The demand for software or features will not increase at the speed of our ability to produce them.
It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.
To each their own, but I think using Rails in the era of agents is probably a mistake. It has 2 big problems IMO.
(a) A ton of footguns that an agent can and will miss on occasion, and as we manually review less and less code, we will also miss it, and
(b) security on the web has become increasingly important due to hostile AI agents, and while rails has great secure conventions (see (a)), it's still easier to screw up something and not catch it until after it's deployed because there are simply less guardrails in place (dynamic types, no compile, slow tests, generally bad performance profile).
All this static vs dynamic stuff doesn’t really matter anymore. AI doesn’t care. You just need to close the feedback loop with tests, linting, a compiler, or whatever else gives it a clear signal.
Simple as that.
I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.
That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
That DHH is into AI agents everywhere is easy to see, but if you go to rails-con, would you not expect this to be about rails as such, and people? Now it's about rust - and AI. Controlled by big corporations. Yikes - some people must be upset about having gone there to listen to DHH preaching about an agentic future.
Edit: I also watched parts of the recent youtube video about rails. I could not focus on the content because DHH's style was so strange. I've seen that style before - nothingburger talks. Look at phrases he used such as "I have retired from being a professional programmer/software engineer". This is all aimed to hype up "agentic coding is the future". Rails is dead - that video is all the proof one needs. DHH shifted gears to AI, and it is quite similar to when he first promoted rails. But now it is about AI, not rails.
Also, I hate native apps. FWIW most devs I know actively try to avoid them.
(1) https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/
Most users don’t care. What they do care about is performance, and native is usually the easiest way to get there.
For your AI workflow questions, it depends. With or without AI, those decisions depend on the organisation’s direction, the team’s capabilities, and their preferences. Did your org have a single answer for the best programming language, framework, or workflow even before AI? There was never a single right answer to any of that.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.
(They can, of course, still be wrong)
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Is it types? Are types the answer? Is it rust?
As time has gone on Rails has gotten better about this, but it still means that "your rails" and "my rails" are different enough that AI could easily get confused.
As you say, the other aspect is the intense dynamism which works against AI, which again prefers to have everything explicit and reasonable about from the text.
So I ended up going back to Javascript after a brief 12 year digression into Ruby. I still love Ruby but it's just not the right language for the current environment and team structures - typescript is "worse is better" in the right ways that it's a much better choice for both frontend/backend being the same and better type systems.
However Rust has one serious problem, BUILDS. It’s slow and it takes up a ton of space and memory. You will be working around this on any sizeable codebase. Using cargo check to ration your compiles, a dedicated build box, etc. Now imagine you're using it for a web application with compiled maud templates... you're potentially waiting minutes to see your changes.
If we accept that over half of the people building with rust are using agents (I'm sure this is much higher in reality), then you should also accept that there is a ton of time and resources spent on building / compiling. Optimizing this should probably be a top priority. They need someone who will be fanatical about shaving time and memory use from the build process.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
When designing systems, you want the important details to be right. Especially with authentication and authorization.
From an architecture level, you can know which classes are important to review and which ones are not.
In Software Engineering, we learned about requirements, testings, system design, UMLs, etc, and those seems to be more relevant than ever.
You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.
> Agents do currently work well with Rails
According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.
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The bigger question to me, is the original implementation, are agents going to do that, or will humans hand code it. My two cents, I’ve been using agents heavily now, I review thousands of lines of code a day, I don’t think this works unless I have a clear idea of the spec I want to build in my mind already.
I get a better understanding of what the architecture should be and how I should build it by actually doing the thing, which means typing code at human speeds. I don’t reason my way into a good architecture, I don’t think I ever did that much in the past and I definitely don’t get it by asking the agent to check its plan and explain it to me the hundredth time. And then once I know the architecture, I don’t think the agent even speeds me up that much. It changes 7 days of coding to 1, but those 7 days weren’t worth much and I generate even more ideas and mental models in those 7 days that pay dividends for years to come.
Would you have told a tailor that using the industrial sewing machine improves his skill at making delicate, beautiful clothes? Of course not, actually even in 2026, large swathes of high quality delicate clothes are hand sewn. There will be an equivalent for coding, even DHH admits it, when he hedges with “most”.
I think, for me I’ll navigate my career to focus more on extremely high quality, delicate custom code and leave this agentic coding to the sweatshop workers. I wanted to do this anyway before agents, now I need to accelerate it. yes FAANG is sweatshop work.
But I assume you didn't use to build anything substantial.
As of now, but we are talking in a perspective.
Business people I work with tend to have all kind of ideas in different places, I cannot count all the Trello boards they have abandoned. Users are usually lazy and don't want to fill in data properly, well yeah chatbox with llm is cool interface, but you still have to enforce structure for data so it is useful.
With AI problem is still there "garbage in, garbage out", models are not going to imagine correct data to fill in blanks, in the end if you need someones birthday, someone has to type it in.
Web app I am working on is organised only because we get engineers and quality assurance and we get paid for maintaining application. Data is structured and we can deliver insights because the application enforces structure.
There are far more requirements than AI can deliver on its own.
I want to learn a couple of things once they are done:
1. Once the test suite assistance is over, how do features get built in their backends and continue to maintain the same quality. LLM test writing is a bit trickier as it often favors what Randy Coulman called tautological tests back in the day. It takes a lot of work to get them not to do this, so I am guessing folks at 37Signals will read at least this part. I can't imagine zero Rust read at all.
2. Over the years they had a few innovations in their domain design, ones that Rails made easier to do, for instance their delegated type pattern. Will Rust replicate this, and how would one know without reading it, or perhaps it does not matter? Furthermore, how do newer patterns emerge? and how does our arsenal of better abstractions keep growing?
I don't have the answers but I am glad there is a chance we can learn said answers.
Edit: it's his conference because the actual Rails conf banned him. Sad victory I guess.
For reference, here are the definitions:
racist: a person who believes that a particular race is superior to others, or who discriminates against other races
fascism: any right-wing, authoritarian, nationalist ideology characterized by centralized, totalitarian governance, strong regimentation of the economy and society, and repression of criticism or opposition
Before that I'd have said he was on the edge, but now it's pretty clear cut.
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.
Where will we be in 5 years?
Examples:
It doesn't make much sense to use a human language like Ruby and leave so much on the table when you can use a language like Rust or C to squeeze a LOT more out of correctness/types/performance.
Also - what he is talking about was true for well over a year. It is just that a lot of day-to-day gaps between prompt and output were closed in the meantime. In a sense, Ruby on Rails/37 Signals is a late adopter.
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Have a look at fly.io facing similar issues, another platform whose value prop was dev ergonomics: https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites/
There is an issue with this idea - we write software, we read it, we make sure it does what it should do, that it’s implement in a sensible and efficient way, and, most importantly, we make sure the tests do what they should do.
If you no longer write the code, it’s harder to understand it. If you don’t write the tests, you need to trust the LLM did both jobs correctly (multiple adversarial LLMs can help), but, ultimately, it’s code you can no longer claim you understand. And you can’t really be sure it does what you want until you understand it.
What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.
I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.
Additionally, the features available in the BEAM and OTP mean the agents have built-in tools for many things that would require reaching for 3rd-party libraries or even additional services. This means less variability in design as the models will happily use all the language features human developers would have to learn about and understand over time to use effectively. Not that this isn't important, but I believe models do a better job steering you to obvious and optimal solutions with Elixir.
The new type system is only going to make it better.
Elixir runs on the BEAM which lets you do hot code reloading process at a time. And these are much more lightweight than your typical OS process. So you can do things on the BEAM which would be just crazy to do on other achitectures. Like if you have a server which needs to support a million users, it would be insanity to run a million separate OS processes for the job. But BEAM processes are so lightweight that you can do that, which gives each one isolation from misbehavior of the others.
And since these support hot code reloading, without restarting the BEAM's OS process, you can patch the code for your user's sliver of the server and do a sort of "what-if" experiment. Other architectures would require you to implement separate test environments or complicated feature flag systems, but the beam lets you just reach out and change it for just the process you care about--you're not baking the experiment into an OSI image or anything so dangerous as that... blast radius is kept small.
And the steps for carrying out this experiment, it's all doable at the elixir shell. You connect to the BEAM and make changes. That's a tremendous reduction in context that an agent needs to load--context which would otherwise instruct the agent about how to reason about the deploy process and how to wall off your experiment from others so as to not cause problems with it is just answered implicitly by how the BEAM works.
Elixir compiles to BEAM bytecode, so you get all of this because the BEAM is cool. As for Elixir as a language... I don't think there's anything agent-specific about it. Gleam might be a better choice since it's statically typed and also compiles to BEAM bytecode except that it's not as popular as Elixir, which is probably more important.
You can also do all of this in the language that started it all: Erlang (Java : JVM :: Erlang : BEAM) but it's not exactly fashionable at present (similar to java vs like... kotlin or clojure or something).
Disclaimer: I'm more of a fan than a seasoned pro. I'd love to actually be working with this stuff daily, but my team wouldn't have it because they prefer familiar things and pain.
All DHH's AI opinions are sponcon.
But he has great flagging support and his perception management agency will suppress this one, too.
dhh says 37signal's apps for Hey (their email platform moving to native)
backend for their email platform is now Rust - written by agents
says Rust produces small binaries - cutting number of servers needed from 110 to 10. hell they could serve peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi
says now that agents write all the code - use faster / native languages.
rails or ruby hardly get a mention besides that they might be well placed to capture web apps written by agents.
Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.
Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.
So even if we can generate an app easily now, is that a wise choice for every business?
Server side rendering makes sense for mostly static content, but for web applications, a front end framework and a back-end API are a much better match.
> It is impossibly fast. And you know what? The binary? Half a megabyte. Half a fucking megabyte. I— you could fit that on a floppy disk almost. With a little compression. This is the other payoff.
The guy now(?) thinks like a lossy abstraction that speaks in tropes.
He has become the LLM - I would say, if I didn't know that even a 9B one can tell me with absolutely certainty how much space there is on a fucking floppy.
There is no reason to get into all the politics stuff when this is where the guy is at. Basic fact retrieval.
(Pedantically, one could now argue that it was not clear which floppy format the guy was referring to. And yes, that would be true, but by thinking that thought, you have thought about the sentence more than its author has.)
I'm missing something (as usual) because I don't see what's wrong with his statement.
Overanalysing someone's spoken sentences isn't the badge of honour it might appear to be.
- A lot of this is looking at an existing app and/or code for reference.
- The people doing/guiding this are skilled.
- Skilled people have thought out what to make.
Otherwise they hear "20 minutes" and think AI can spit out a logical or good product from no reference or planning.
Ruby is an interesting language to work with. I don't know it like Python, but it's a language that finds problems developers would run into and built solutions in to make it easier.
As for Rails, as a total novice: It is a lot of Convention over Configuration, and it's almost a second language on top of Ruby. Everything works together implicitly so you have to recognize what's happening when you look at the code. I don't know if any Ruby/Rails oriented IDEs exist that guide the developer with hints and shortcuts to how the pieces of a Rails app fit together, but it sure would be handy.
I can see how typed, high-performance languages with explicit references to all the integrations would be easier for AI to handle. But as long as humans sometimes have to look at the code, I would think Rails still has a place.
I guess the death of Ruby is a silver lining to AI at least.
There are lots of languages I don't use, but I can't imagine saying that about any of them.
Alongside this framing is seemingly no admission or acknowledgement that crimes have been and still are perpetrated by "normal Brits" as well; the focus is entirely on the barbarians coming from outside to maraud. It's as though he attaches criminality to foreignness.
He also steps all over the line of what a "native" Brit is. Seemingly not someone born there, but, according to statistics he is certainly referring to white Brits.
The list goes on. The man is racist. I don't think being anti-large scale immigration is inherently racist at all. As a Canadian I have substantial concerns about how immigration is conducted, and I don't consider that racist. But very, very little of what DHH thinks, or how he frames his ideas, ever crosses my mind. I don't think about preserving 'real' or 'normal' Canadians. I think a lot about how immigrants have made my country better. I don't internally or explicitly associate crime with immigration. It's much different.
Also generally in Denmark gypsy is a pejorative (sigøjner). One could go on and on, there's no overreach to the racist claim by any means.
He's not bumbling into these situations, he knows very well what he's doing.
I don't particularly like DHH either but web software is definitely serious. Shopify (which you seem to have confused with Spotify) runs on Rails. So does GitHub.
Those are both huge platforms handling a ton of traffic. If GitHub isn't "serious software" then what is?
Reddit would have about 15 comments alluding without never revealing, all of them smart, classy and funny. The rest would be complete trash probably.
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
p(bloom)
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
I know some people might disagree, mainly because AI isn’t a new architecture or a new programming language in the traditional sense. But I still think it’s worth revisiting the assumptions and having the discussion.
You have to adhere to bizarre requirements, you can be taken down on a whim without possibility to appeal.
You have to pay for a developer account at least to Apple each year $100, Google one time fee $25.
Nothing like that for a web app.
To be fair, this is true of most of AFK world. Things start seeing a lot less doomy and gloomy when you're actually outside talking with other humans. Seems to mostly be online and various darker corners where they're dooming and glooming.
Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.
To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.
If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.
If he's hiring new people they won't be engineers or the people that used to do engineering.
They'll be people that are better suited to writing English than code.
There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).
It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.
I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.
People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.
https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195
Looking it up: Planet Argon is a Ruby on Rails development agency.