The Future of Ruby on Rails and the Shift to Agentic Development

DHH's Pivot to Agentic Development and Rust

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails, has signaled a fundamental shift in his approach to software engineering, moving away from hand-written code toward a model of "agentic development." During his Rails World 2026 keynote, DHH announced that he now considers himself a "maker" rather than a professional programmer, asserting that English has become the primary programming language due to the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Key takeaways from DHH's new technical strategy include:

Abandoning Hand-Written Code: DHH claims that writing code by hand is no longer economically productive for most programmers. He advocates for a workflow where humans rarely read the generated code, treating code reviews as exceptions similar to investigating a bug in Sentry.
Shift to Rust for Backends: While DHH has historically criticized Rust as "hideous" for humans, he now advocates for it because it is highly effective for LLMs. He reports that Ruby now accounts for only 3% of his annual code output, while LLM-generated Rust has surged.
Native Apps over Web Apps: 37signals is rewriting its flagship email product, Hey, as six native applications for various platforms. DHH argues that the previous reliance on web apps was a productivity workaround for small teams that is no longer necessary given the efficiency of LLM code generation.
CLI-First Integration: DHH envisions a future where every service provides a Command Line Interface (CLI) to allow AI agents to interact with services without needing a graphical user interface (UI).

Implications for the Ruby on Rails Ecosystem

DHH's announcement that a flagship 37signals product is leaving the Rails stack has created uncertainty regarding the long-term vision for the framework. For two decades, Rails was marketed as the tool for "small teams, ambitious products," but DHH's current trajectory suggests a narrowing of that scope.

The "Maintenance Mode" Debate

There is growing discussion within the community about whether Rails has reached a state of maturity that equates to being "done." Some developers argue that Rails is now a stable, mature framework suitable for maintenance and agentic development because its conventions are "token efficient" for LLMs. Others, including the project Mosscap, suggest that the framework is effectively finished and requires only maintenance.

The BDFL Influence

Critics argue that the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) culture in open source creates volatility when the leader's personal interests shift. The lack of a concrete roadmap for Rails in the keynote—replaced instead by general optimism about AI—has led some to call for a hard break from DHH's leadership to ensure the framework's continued evolution.

Technical Critiques of the Agentic Thesis

Industry professionals and developers have raised several concerns regarding the viability of "never looking at the code" and the claims made during the keynote.

Architectural Degradation

Critics point to the "Swiss cheese" architecture of Basecamp 5 as evidence that unreviewed, agent-generated contributions lead to structural decay. This is echoed by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, who has warned against "slop grenades"—low-quality AI-generated code that can compromise a codebase.

Performance and Metrics

DHH claimed that moving Hey to a Rust backend resulted in 99% less CPU and 95% less memory usage. Technical critics argue these numbers are misleading because they compare a native backend to a full web application; a pure-Ruby backend without a web frontend would also show significant gains, making it impossible to isolate the impact of Rust.

The Trust Gap in SRE

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) have questioned the safety of trusting LLMs with 100% of the code. The consensus among skeptics is that while 99% accuracy is impressive, the remaining 1% of hallucinations can be catastrophic in production environments, especially when LLMs are also tasked with writing deployment code.

Community Perspectives on the Shift

The Case for the New Paradigm

Some developers agree with DHH, arguing that the industry is moving toward a model where the "mechanical part of programming" is automated. They suggest that statically typed languages like Rust are better suited for agentic feedback loops because the compiler provides a rigorous safety net that Ruby lacks.

The Case for Continued Web/Rails Utility

Other developers maintain that for many applications, the performance overhead of Ruby is negligible. They argue that as long as an application is I/O bound, the productivity gains of Rails—even when augmented by AI—outweigh the benefits of rewriting in Rust.

The Native App Trend

Some observers suggest that DHH's move to native apps reflects a broader industry realization: the web was used as a delivery mechanism because managing OS versions was previously too labor-intensive. If AI reduces the cost of building native apps to near zero, the industry may shift back toward client-server architectures that offer better UX and performance than HTML/CSS.

Summary of Key Arguments

Perspective	View on Rails	View on AI Coding
DHH / Optimists	A stable tool for web apps; no longer the only way to be productive.	Humans should be "makers" who direct agents; reading code is obsolete.
Skeptics / Traditionalists	At risk of stagnation without a clear vision; needs new leadership.	"Slop grenades" and architectural decay are inevitable without human review.
Pragmatists	Still highly effective for I/O bound apps and fast prototyping.	AI is a powerful tool for boilerplate, but not a replacement for engineering.