At the Rails World 2026 keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson said he has not written a line of code by hand since around March, after 25 years as a professional programmer. He told the audience that English is a better programming language than Ruby, and that manual coding no longer makes economic sense for most programmers and companies. That economic claim is his, from the keynote.
At the Rails World 2026 keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson said he has not written a line of code by hand since around March, after 25 years as a professional programmer. LavX News reports the same keynote as a retirement from professional programming: Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and a co-founder of 37signals, now calls himself a maker and uses large language models to produce most of his code.[1], [2]
He told the audience that English is a better programming language than Ruby, and he argued that manual coding no longer makes economic sense for most programmers and companies. He also said programmers would become people who steer the tools. LavX News reports the same direction in his own words: developers would describe software in English, ask agents to build it, and inspect the result from the outside, and hand-written code would soon lose its economic value for most programmers. These are his claims from the stage, not measurements.[1], [2]
Hansson said 37signals was building the next version of Hey as native applications for each supported platform, and that the company will use Rust for the server side, a language he has long criticized for its syntax. He described Rust as a good language for machines that generate code. LavX News also reports that Hansson said he generated 150,000 lines of code in August. That figure is his claim about his own output, not an audit of 37signals.[2]
