GoKawiilDHH says he's stepped back from hand-coding, embraces LLMs and Rust at 37signals
At Rails World 2026, David Heinemeier Hansson said he has retired as a professional programmer, calling himself a 'maker' who directs LLMs to write code in English rather than reviewing the output line by line. He said 37signals' next version of Hey will use LLM-generated Rust on the backend and native apps on each platform instead of the Rails-based web stack he has long championed, and claimed to have produced roughly 150,000 lines of code in August versus about 30,000 lines a year previously.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
DHH's public reversal on Rust and native apps, after years of promoting Rails as the tool for small teams to ship ambitious web products, could unsettle developers and companies who've built their strategy around his prior positions. Because he remains the figurehead of Rails, his personal shift toward LLM-driven, largely unreviewed code generation raises questions about what direction he'll steer the framework itself, even though his keynote reportedly said little about Rails' own roadmap.
- DHH says he no longer codes by hand and calls LLM-generated code in English sufficient, even without full review
- 37signals will reportedly build the next Hey using LLM-written Rust and native apps rather than the Rails web stack
- He claims a roughly fivefold jump in code output, attributing it to LLM-assisted development
Source: jardo.dev — Jared Norman, 2026-09-25
Published there as: “What About Rails?”
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