David Heinemeier Hansson on On Rails
DHH: Basecamp 5, Vibe Coding, and the Future of Rails
Worth hearing for the concrete Rails roadmap news, especially the Lexi-based ActionText work and end-to-end passkey support. The broader claims about agent acceleration, human judgment, and architectural discipline substantially repeat his other 2026 appearances.
[00:20:56.09] - DHH Like, well, I need to support this, Trix doesn't, I'm gonna have to roll my own, right? And that's just a useless time sink. So I think that's gonna be a huge level up. The other one, which there already is an open PR for, is to get Passkey support into Rails in a fully end-to-end way. Passkeys is something I've actually changed my opinion on. Partly because the first take I had on passkeys were that they were going to sort of replace passwords entirely.
David Heinemeier Hansson discusses why Rails has remained stable and productive through Basecamp 5, including forthcoming work on rich text editing and passkeys. He is enthusiastic about AI-assisted development but emphasizes human review, architectural discipline, and Rails' potential to make software creation accessible to non-programmers.