David Heinemeier Hansson shifts to AI-driven development

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails, has announced a significant shift in his professional approach, stating that he no longer writes code by hand. During his keynote at Rails World 2026, Hansson described himself as a ‘maker’ rather than a professional programmer, emphasizing that English has become a superior programming language due to the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Hansson noted that writing code manually is no longer economically productive for most programmers. He reported a massive increase in productivity, claiming to have produced 150,000 lines of code in August alone, compared to a previous average of 30,000 lines per year. This shift includes a change in his technical preferences; while he previously advocated for the Rails stack, his company 37signals is now utilizing Rust for server-side development and LLMs to build native applications, citing the efficiency of AI-driven development.

This stance marks a reversal from his previous skepticism regarding AI-assisted programming. Critics have raised concerns regarding the reliability of this approach, citing instances where AI-generated code, such as API endpoints, was deployed without proper authentication due to a lack of human oversight.