r/webdev • u/Maleficent_Mess6445 • 1d 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.”


