DHH Told Rails World He's Moving Hey Off Rails. He Didn't Say What's Next.
What About Rails?
At Rails World 2026, David Heinemeier Hansson announced he's no longer a professional programmer, now writes 150k lines of LLM-generated Rust a month, and is rebuilding Hey as six native apps with a Rust backend—moving a flagship Rails product off Rails. His keynote offered Rails developers little vision beyond "you're the best of the best," leaving the framework's future unclear.
The problem is that he stood up at Rails World and told everyone that he was moving his product off Rails and the best thing he could come up with to say to people still using Rails was that we're "the best of the best." Thanks, I guess.
- Twey
> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wil […]
- captainclam
"If every product is used by an agent driving a CLI, what’s going to differentiate Basecamp or Fizzy from the cheapest alternative?"
At that point, why even bother with "driving a CLI"? I have a hard time seeing how this all doesn't go away soon. At the current trajectory, I am not seeing a future where software like Basecamp or Fizzy or the cheapest alternative are competitive with "Claude, build a basecamp-style project management tool for my team."
I don't mean to say that thoughtfully built, opinionated software doesn't have intrinsic value, I believe it will always be "better" in certain aspects...I just can't fathom that a market for it will exist in very short order.
I would LOVE to be talked out of this perspective.
- bionsystem
As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of human understanding on what is going on under the hood. Which is fine if you trust the LLM to write great code, and great tests for the code, but fundamentally you have to have 100% trust, 99.9% is not going to be enough in any serious industry, would it ?
Also eventually you'll also have to trust it to write the deployment code or even run the deployment itself, otherwise SRE is going to be the bottleneck. And only then should I feel anxiety about the rest of my career (that, or my employer decide LLM are good enough to get rid of me, even if they are imperfect).
- paultopia
Two slightly disconnected thoughts:
1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.
2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).
- strfry
No surprise.
2007-01-20, by David H. creator of Rails:
(15:11:12) DHH: before fastthread we had ~400 restarts/day
(15:11:22) DHH: now we have perhaps 10
(15:11:29) Zed S.: oh nice
(15:11:33) Zed S.: and that's still fastcgi right?
The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day.
- meerita
Every piece of software has an expiration date. You can extend its lifespan, but technology keeps moving. What was considered standard on the backend five years ago may look completely different today. I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured.
We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.
- fhub
I code and maintain a Rails stack. About 20% of the time an endpoint takes to respond is spent in Ruby. New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99, and it’s very rare for an endpoint to take more than 100ms. Most respond in under 80ms. I could LLM-port it (and probably will one day), but end-user response performance wouldn’t be the motivation.
What does make me consider switching is reading about things like how Shopify’s native apps are moving towards superfast product cores that can be tested incredibly quickly, with the slower UX layer kept separate. I think that model is the future, and in that world Rails starts to look pretty dead.
- Lio
DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech.
"Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"
You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We listened to him because of Rails not Hey or Basecamp. They were just application of Rails as a technology.
If he no longer has a vision for Rails' niche, what do we need him for? What's his pitch?
He might as well just be a Danish Barry Gibb impersonator that can't sing but instead drones on and on about politics. :P