Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.

It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.

For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.

I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.

I don't understand what is supposed to come next. So its not Ruby on Rails anymore. What is it? Are agents going to magically convert all the RoR ecosystem to Rust or Whatever?

I was hoping there will be news on Rails 9.0. Feels like this is the end of Ruby Rails.

Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.

This keynote is from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37Signals and the Rails core team, but it's actually more about AI coding than Rails and how 37Signals is adapting to this new technology. DHH and 37Signals are pretty famously anti-Venture Capitalist and Silicon Valley hype so they give an interesting unique perspective on tech trends. In the keynote, DHH believes the age of "hand coding" is over and what that means for our industry.