At Rails World 2026, DHH says he has retired from professional programming

On September 21, 2026, developer Jared Norman published "What About Rails?" on jardo.dev. The post reviews the opening keynote David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) gave at Rails World 2026, arguing that the talk had very little to do with Rails itself.

"I have retired from being a professional programmer"

In the keynote DHH said he has "retired from being a professional programmer" and now styles himself a "maker". He claims English is the best programming language because LLMs write the code, and that we do not necessarily need to read the code those models produce. "Writing code by hand is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies," he said.

He reports writing 150,000 lines of code in August 2026, against a pre-LLM average of roughly 30,000 lines per year. Ruby, which made up about half his work over the past two decades, now accounts for only 3% of what he wrote this year. He has also changed his stance on native apps and on the Rust language.

Hey moves off Rails to native apps

37signals is rewriting the next version of Hey as native applications for every platform it supports, with a Rust backend. DHH maintains that Rust is "hideous" for humans but excellent for LLMs; since he is not reading the code anyway, he says he can now appreciate its performance and stability. He also wants every service to expose a CLI so that his agents can interact with it without a UI.

He says the new backend needs 99% less CPU and 95% less memory, and that it runs on ten hosts only for redundancy, with Hey's peak traffic theoretically servable from a single Raspberry Pi.

The critique: numbers and a missing vision

Norman notes that DHH used the opening keynote of the flagship Rails conference to announce that one of his own products is leaving Rails. In his reading, Rails is now framed as the platform for "web apps of necessity", and convention over configuration has been recast as "token efficiency".

The critic disputes the figures. Lines of code is a poor measure, he writes, and 150,000 lines of LLM-generated Rust are not comparable to concise hand-written Ruby; DHH himself concedes that he tolerates Rust from models that he would never accept in his Ruby. The 10x programmer claim, Norman adds, rests on a study of developer tooling rather than productivity, and the "average of 10x" is folklore rather than a result in the paper.

He also questions the ATM analogy DHH invoked, saying its decade, economist and teller numbers are all wrong, and argues that optimism is not a strategy. His conclusion: Rails developers were told a great deal about the future of AI and almost nothing about the future of Rails.