DHH at Rails World: 37signals is 'pencils down' on handwritten code, and HEY is moving off Rails to agent-written native apps
The Decoder / jardo.dev (Jared Norman) / Rails World·high signal
DHH opened Rails World 2026 in Austin on Sep 24 by saying hand-writing code "no longer makes economic sense" for most programmers. He said he hasn't written a line by hand since March and that "English is a better programming language than Ruby." Write-ups of the keynote report 150,000 lines shipped in August and HEY being rebuilt as six agent-written native apps with a Rust mail-server core. Jared Norman, who was in the room, answered with 'What About Rails?' (HN front page Sep 25), arguing that "the one moment he talked directly to Rails developers, he chose to say nothing about Rails."