What About Rails?

Jared Norman summarizes and responds to David Heinemeier Hansson’s Rails World 2026 keynote, in which Heinemeier announced he has retired from being a professional programmer in favor of working as a “maker” who relies on LLMs to generate code. Heinemeier argued that English with LLMs can replace hand-written code for most programmers, claimed massive output from AI (about 150k lines generated in August versus a pre-LLM average of ~30k lines/year), and said his Rust-generated backend now represents a tiny fraction of his personally read Ruby (Ruby was only ~3% of his output this year). He explained 37signals is rewriting Hey as native apps, using Rust on the server for performance, and wants every service to expose a CLI so agentic tooling can interact with products. He urged optimism about AI and dismissed doomerism.

Norman’s critique is that the keynote largely ignored Rails’ future and offered reassurance instead of a plan. He calls out inconsistent claims and questionable metrics - apples-to-oranges comparisons between terse, hand-written Ruby and verbose, LLM-produced Rust, dubious resource-saving anecdotes, and misused productivity studies. He highlights contradictions (advocating “never read code” while raising security concerns), real-world failure modes like architecture decay and uncoordinated agent contributions, and the lack of any concrete roadmap for Rails, leaving the community unsure whether Rails will be actively evolved or left to maintenance.