DHH: Basecamp 5, Vibe Coding, and the Future of Rails

**Robby Russell** (0:05)
Welcome to On Rails, the podcast where we dig into the technical decisions by building and maintaining production Ruby on Rails apps. I'm your host, Robby Russell, and I run Planet Argon. And for over 21 years, we've helped teams maintain and evolve their long-lived Rails apps. So I tend to approach these conversations through that lens. In this episode, I'm joined by David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and the co-owner of 37signals. We dig into how modern Rails influence the shape of Basecamp 5, whether ideas emerging from the new version of Basecamp might hint at future Rails features, how Ajantic and AI-assisted development workflows are changing his own day-to-day development workflows, and how their team collaborates, and what Rails might offer the next generation of builders entering software development through these AI-assisted tools.
David joins us from Denmark. All right, check for your belongings. All aboard.
David Heinemeier Hansson, welcome to On Rails.

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (0:54)
Thank you. It's about time I got on the show, so I'm really happy to be here.

**Robby Russell** (0:59)
Welcome aboard. So, David, after all of these years, what still keeps you excited about Rails?

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (1:06)
Well, at the core is Ruby.
As a programming language, whether I'm writing it or watching an agent do it, it remains the most beautiful programming language that I've ever laid eyes on. And that remains just a constant delight. It is just so much fun and satisfying to see code come to life, to see ideas come to life in code when that code is as beautiful as it is with Ruby. And the other flip side of that is the Internet. I continue to be a big fan of the Internet for all its flaws. It's the best application platform that we've ever had as software developers. It's the one that allows us the most freedom to distribute our applications without gatekeepers as we have it on many other platforms. So that combination of Ruby and then the Internet and putting those two things together and building great web applications remains just an incredibly compelling mission.
And it's really not something I've gotten tired of. I mean, if you would have asked me 23 years ago or whenever I got started here with Ruby and Rails, whether it was going to last that long, I probably would have said, no, I don't think so. But here we are on essentially the eve of another great revolution in computing with the AI stuff, and it is as satisfying as it ever was. Again, as I say, whether I'm writing the code or an agent is Ruby and Rails just remains a bliss to work with.

**Robby Russell** (2:41)
Are there parts of Rails today that feel more aligned with your original vision than you probably would have expected it to?

**David Heinemeier Hansson** (2:49)
Yes, I have looked a few times at old Rails code through demos or otherwise. And if you look at some of those early videos, including the infamous Look at all the things I'm not doing video I did back in 2005, I think it was, the shape of that code is eerily similar. If you look at those controllers, especially after we just made the transition to REST and the seven actions, they really look quite similar.
And even so with the models. I mean, ActiveRecord has maintained the core of its DSL since basically at the beginning, and then it's gotten a lot more powerful, and we've added a lot more features, and we've sort of tweaked things and continued to polish it. But anyone looking at a Rails application from 20 years ago and comparing it to what we do today on the back end, are going to find things immensely recognizable. I think it's on the front end that things have changed a fair bit. Now, I'm a staunch proponent of hotwire and minimal build pipelines and all of the stuff that minimizes JavaScript. But even if you do all of those things, the front end does look quite different than it did 20 years ago. The back end though, I think we got a lot of things really right from the get-go, and not just in Rails but Ruby as well, that the core package has managed to reward people who invested in learning those DSLs, learning that language that long ago. If you look at the current life of most ecosystems, most frameworks, there's not a lot of dividends left over because you spent time with some JavaScript framework in 2009 Now, there's some general principles, you can learn all those things, but you're not going to be rewarded in the same way as if you really put in the time to understand active record.