At this year's Rails World conference, David Heinemeier Hansson — the creator of Ruby on Rails — delivered what attendees described as an implosion. During his keynote, Hansson revealed that the next version of Hey, his email service built on Rails, will have a Rust backend and native desktop clients, built entirely through agentic coding.
Hansson told a thousand developers that the beauty of a programming language no longer matters. "English is the most beautiful programming language," he declared, urging developers to work with coding agents in English instead. Every programmer at 37signals now works exclusively with AI agents. In a spontaneous poll, only five of the thousand attendees still coded by hand. The Rust backend, he said, reduced Hey infrastructure to ten servers — possibly a single Raspberry Pi.
Hansson did not declare Rails dead, but the signal was unmistakable. The Rails community reacted with shock on X.
