What About Rails?

At Rails World 2026, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson announced he has retired from professional programming and shifted to using LLMs for code generation, claiming human hand-coding is no longer economically productive. He revealed that 37signals is moving Hey—the flagship Rails application—away from Rails to native applications built with LLMs and Rust on the backend, dramatically narrowing Rails' role to primarily web apps while he personally reduced Ruby work from 50% to 3% of his annual output. The keynote highlighted his vision that LLMs will soon dominate software development across virtually all domains and companies by year's end, positioning Rails as a mature but limited-use framework rather than the transformative small-team solution it once represented.