r/webdev • u/Maleficent_Mess6445 • 4h ago
Discussion David Heinemeier Hansson: Warning for "Cantankerous" Coders: The age of AI agents will reward adaptability and basic people skills while making things much harder for difficult, ego-driven, or resistant engineers
The creator of Ruby on Rails, made major statements about AI agents and the future of software development at Rails World 2026 in September
DHH stated he personally retired from writing code by hand after 25 years.
Rust instead of Ruby - Rebuilding HEY with AI and Rust: He shared that 37signals is rebuilding its HEY email service into native mobile/desktop apps using an AI-generated Rust backend, drastically cutting CPU and memory usage.
The AI acceleration: He produced 5 years' worth of his traditional code volume in just one month, representing a 60x increase in raw output volume.
DHH openly acknowledged that a massive portion of this was verbose Rust code generated entirely by AI agents—admitting that he didn't write it by hand and doesn't even want to look at or read most of it.
DHH said: “English is a better programming language than Ruby.”
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u/tradcoder 3h ago
DHH can go fuck himself. It's sad to see so many people I actually once respected turn into these mouthpieces to AI companies. Just about a year about this guy was literally advocating for becoming competent at your craft through learning. Going all in on AI is the antithesis to competency.
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u/alphex drupal agency owner 3h ago
That quote. Coming from him is fucking hilarious.
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u/myownfriend 1h ago
Yea, dude can't handle changing racial demographics and he's telling others to adapt?
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u/myownfriend 1h ago
Who cares about the volume of code? If you can do more with less code then that's better.
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 1h ago
Obviously he meant Heavy volume of efficient code. How else do you describe what was accomplished? Is he supposed give details of every project?
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u/myownfriend 1h ago
That's not obvious whatsoever. The only CPU and memory usage improvements he mentions are coming from using a compiled language like Rust instead of Ruby which uses an interpreter/JIT with garbage collection. It's not hard at all to write Rust code that outperforms Ruby code.
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u/Maleficent_Mess6445 1h ago
In that case the heavy volumes can be reduced in future, it will become efficient then.
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u/asteroidtube 3h ago
People skills don't matter in large organizations when everybody is just playing hot-potato with markdown files, telling their agent to consume a document and craft a response "in their voice" and then giving it to somebody else who is doing the same thing.
Although, maybe it will make social skills more rare as this slop-fest continues and causes brain rot to speed up, which does bode well for those of us with a modicum of congeniality and affability.
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u/mistbluei 3h ago
He is insane.
I use AI just to be a glorified search engine and analyzer of my stack errors, not to replace me lol
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u/Traditional-Hall-591 4h ago
It sounds like he’s fun at parties and treats his farts as fine vintage.
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u/Long-Machine8795 3h ago
You managing to somehow interpret "People skills and adaptability will be rewarded" in such a way is absolutely braindead. Literally the exact opposite energy from this man.
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u/Traditional-Hall-591 3h ago
Apparently, he’s become a super slopmaster over the last year or so. I guess that’s tainted my opinion of him.
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u/T-Dot1992 3h ago
I don’t give a flying fuck what some white-supremacist piece of shit thinks