Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote - DHH

transcript

I like that. Bent in neon. Well, first of all, welcome to Austin is what I would normally say. I would say welcome back to myself to Austin. I was just here about a month ago yapping for 5 hours on a podcast. It is great to be back here. But even more exciting for me is to be alive right now in this moment and sharing it with a wonderful community around Ruby on Rails and everyone else who is excited about agents. And if you aren't yet, hopefully you will be by the end of this delirious talk on the future. Now, I know that the first instinct someone might have when they see a Person dancing around being so excited about this moment is a diagnosis.

AI psychosis. I prefer a different term. I have AI delirium. AI euphoria. Because this is simply the most exciting thing we have made computers do in the time I have worked with them, played with them, interacted with them. But I think actually to wrestle with the fact that on the one hand, this is tremendously exciting, it is also a little unnerving. Because we don't know exactly what the final state of this is going to be. And whenever we try to make a prediction, it is out of date about 20 minutes later. That's a weird state to be in, even if you are excited for the future, even if you're excited for the present. And I fully understand the sense of unease that can create.

So to soothe that somewhat, let's wind back the clock a little bit. This is a state-of-the-art. Piece of technology from the 18th century. If you wanted your portrait taken in the 18th century, you would sit for hour upon hour upon hour in front of a master painter who would then go off and at best spend months working on your portrait. And it was beautiful, is beautiful, amazing legacy of culture that has been left to all of us now. That we can see the Lady Waldegrave to this day that Joshua Reynolds painted in 1781. Wonderful. Also, a little exclusive. Not that many people in the 18th century were able to commission a piece of themselves like this and pay for an artist to spend months and months and months to create something like this.

And even worse, in the case of this particular painting, Reynolds spent months and months on another painting of the Ladies Waldegrave that was rejected by the client because a piece of ankle was showing. It was scandalous. So he simply had to go back and redo it. I don't know if anyone has worked with clients before, but they might have some sympathy for poor Mr. Joshua Reynolds. And rejected statements of work. Now, most of the people who could afford to do this were either part of the upper bourgeoisie or they were outright royals. Here's a painting that was done 20 years later by Goya of the royal Spanish family. That was sort of the rate of technology.

Painters had been perfecting the different techniques of capturing portraits of people for literally hundreds of years and were making very marginal progress along the way. Now, between 1801 and the next painting I'm going to show, 80 years went past. And in that time, the introduction of The camera came to the scene in around 1840. But here's a painting of the royal Danish family from 1888. Oh, '86. By a Danish painter, Laurits Tuxen. He didn't just spend 3 months painting this. He spent 3 years. It is still hanging in the royal squares in Copenhagen, and you can go see it there. An amazing achievement, amazing artistry. Also very functional. Again, the point was to capture the royal family at that time.

But this was getting towards the end of that particular mode for artists of that kind. Because what happened between 1840 and 1900 was that the technology of capturing portraits got better and better. And in 1900, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the Brownie, the first sort of mass-produced form of photography that was more generally accessible because the price was coming down. I think it was about a dollar. To have your picture taken with this. And therefore, a lot of people suddenly had their pictures taken. And all of these great artists realized that the craftsmanship of producing these grand paintings, you know what, that was gonna be different. The job was going to be different. Because suddenly now there was competition from a new form of technology.

And they pivoted. Laurits Tuxen, along with many other painters in that era, shortly after the Brownie was introduced, realized that depicting reality as perfectly as possible was no longer really an economically viable skill. They needed another skill. They needed another domain. And many of them pivoted to different forms of art. You had Picasso chasing Cubism. And you had the Danish Skagen painters chasing a form of impressionism that this painting is an example of. So we got this explosion of creativity brought upon us by the change in technology that suddenly people had to find a new way to express their art because the old way was gone. Now, what's interesting about this particular picture is that the lady in the center in the pink dress, Yvonne Tuxen, is actually my great-grandmother.

Because Laurits Tuxen is my great-great-grandfather. And here he is depicted in 1921, I believe, shortly before his death. Death, he embraced the fact of having his own portrait taken by the new form technology that had rendered his old profession a different place to work. 52 years after his death, I was born in 1979. Interestingly enough, that picture taken here is very similar, actually, to the picture that was taken by Laurits In the 1920s, the technology hadn't evolved that much because that's what often happens with progressions of technology. It comes in starts and stops and fits. The huge change was the Brownie, the democratization of photography, and then kind of almost 80 years went by when not a whole lot happened.

We got color photography in the 60s, but. Not widely distributed enough that apparently I was worth one. Although we did rectify that a few years later, and here's a color photography of me, age 4, sitting with my brother. Now, a couple years later, here's another photograph of me, and between those 3 photos, That's about, I think, 10% of my stockpile of photos of my childhood. Because even though the democratization of this technology had happened to a point that even we as a family could afford to have these pictures taken, it was not that widely distributed. And yes, there was a curve and more pictures were being taken in the 1980s, as this photo represents, versus the 1900s, but it was still kind of modest.

Because technology moves in fits, starts and stops. And the camera that those 3 pictures were taken on was very similar to this camera. This is the Leica 1 from 1925. In fact, maybe some of those pictures were literally taken with another Leica. I think they were up to the 7th one by then. But they weren't that different because the technology was quite similar. Not much had happened since the great revolution around the 1900s until the '80s. Then we gave it a couple more decades, and suddenly everything changed dramatically again. Photography went from not just being possible for everyone to have, but to become completely frictionless, and the number of photos taken went parabolical. Because suddenly everyone could afford to have tens of thousands of pictures of their children, and many of them did.

It simply became too cheap to measure. These are some of the photographs my wife likes to take when she's out on her evening walk. To have wanted to do this even in the '80s would have required a commitment to film and getting them produced and the rest of it. And there were people who did that, but not that many, because the friction was still too high. Today, in 2026, some 2 trillion photos are taken every year. That's very different. It's the same underlying technology, but we've clearly hit an inflection point, even compared to when The camera phone first came out. There's gonna be some parallels here to our industry and our profession. On November 24th, 2025, we got the Kodak Brownie of our era.

We got Opus 4.5. AI technology made accessible in a harness that many people could afford to use and experience for the first time what it's like to create software in pairing with a new form of intelligence. This was the tipping point for me. There was everything before November 24th. And then there was everything after. This is going to be the date that history books going forward will mark as the inflection point for the age of agents. And as with the Brownie, when that first came out, there was an explosion of different form factors and new ways of trying to harness this technology. And it did not take long until we got Some notion of the same intelligence in an open-weight format?

Total euphoria. This is moving so fast. I can't believe that this alien technology is now accessible in open-weight form. Just happened a few months later. I drove Kimi K2.5 In the fast mode for quite a while and absolutely loved it. An incredible experience to be experiencing This kind of intelligence at 200 tokens per second. But then something else happened. This trough of disillusionment from February through May where we seemingly continued to get new models, but they kind of sucked. It was like they were stepping backwards. And many people were like, what's this Opus 4.6 thing? I don't know, man. Just give me the old stuff again. And a lot of people thought, haha, you thought this was going to continuously exponentially expand and improve.

But look, we're actually not getting that much better. I remember a particular release. I think it was of OpenAI's new model that didn't punch that much better on the benchmarks. And the stock price fell or the valuation fell and the market was suddenly, oh my God, it's over. Yeah. Because we don't know what's going to happen. But this trough of disillusionment did not last like it did with photography for 100 years, where the technology barely seemed to improve. It only lasted until May. Well, June, really. Because in June, we got Fable 5 and Mythos. And clearly, anyone who had a chance to experience that at the time were disabused of any disillusionment they might have had about whether we had stalled and whether it was over.

And I'd say this is where my diagnosis really set in. My psychosis/delirium/euphoria for this explosion of intelligence on tap. This was the model where I went Oh, I can tell an agent to do something for me, to seeing that being something I want to merge. That was the revelation of Opus, to suddenly having models I could give problems to or ideas to and see those be solved or see those expanded through no direction of my own on the implementation. Mind-blowingly incredible. And of course, things didn't stop from there. We have been on this amazing roller coaster now for a couple of months. GPT-6 Astra came out in September and saved us all from the dread that Anthropic was going to have a monopoly on this kind of frontier intelligence.

And then even better than that, just a week later, we got DeepSeek-4-1 Flash that disabused us of any notion that frontier intelligence was going to forever be a domain of just some large American tech companies. This is incredibly exciting. But what does it mean? What does it mean for us as programmers? What does it mean for us as a profession? And I think this is why, again, it's worth looking backwards a bit. Because history holds all these amazing lessons and parallels to our time if we just look at it. One of the things that has dominated the discourse in the entire time I've been a professional developer has been the argument about whether the 10x programmer was real or not real.

Well, that entire concept came from an article in ACM Magazine from 1968, where they tested a group of programmers on a variety of different tasks, and they came up with A table that showed that the worst programmer and the best programmer had a variance ranging from 5x to 30x, an average of 10x over that period. We then spent literally the next 45 years arguing whether this was actually real or not. Is there anyone still arguing that? I don't think so. Like, that debate has been settled now. But the interesting thing is, we sort of leaped over a shared conclusion around the 10x programmer and started thinking, like, well, if that was 10x with just the human capacity, what must it look like now?

And it's clear we don't know exactly. We don't know exactly what the kind of acceleration with these tools is possible. But I'd actually argue that it is less controversial today to claim that there's a 100x difference between the worst programmer working without these tools and the best programmer working with these tools. That's not a very controversial statement. But it is absolutely revolutionary to the understanding of where we are right now as a stage of technology. And I'd actually go a step further. And maybe this is slightly more controversial. I don't think so. The worst programmer without these tools versus the best programmer with these tools? That sounds about right. 1,000 times? Yeah. Okay. Well, what does that mean?

What does that mean for the competition of companies, for what we need to get started? Uh, 8-ball a little fussy. Shake again. What I know to be true is that in the past 20 months, I have written half as much code as I did in the previous 21 years. Now, lines of code is a weird, fuzzy, malleable size. And one line of Ruby is obviously worth vastly more than one line of any other language, but particularly Rust or C++ or any of the lower-level languages that do not have the same abstractions and amenities that we enjoy in Ruby. But it is still absolutely undeniable that there is a revolution taking place. And anyone who's gone through that and seen their own productivity be accelerated We'll be a little dizzy.

How we create a template. Look at all the things I'm not doing. Look at all the configuration I'm not writing. All these things are mapped together just automatically. Just by saying blog up here maps directly to the blogging controller, and just by having index maps directly to the index template. Look at all the things I'm not doing. Is there a better encapsulation of this moment than all the things we are no longer doing? That is the source of my exuberance for this moment. This is the Rails moment. That clip I just played is 21 years old. I gave a presentation in Brazil in 2005, and I was so excited about all the code I wasn't writing.

Can you see why I might be a little more excited now, even? Do you know how much code I have not been writing for the last several months? A lot. And yet, despite writing no code for probably 5 months at this point, been able to fix everything. Every dream. Every annoyance, every paperclip, every frivolous feature suddenly within reach, suddenly possible. This is the magic of the moment. But what does that mean? Well, at 37signals, a couple of weeks ago, we made the decision that It clearly means we're done writing code by hand. We are going, and have gone, pencils down on the idea that we were gonna write code by hand as a normal course of business creating things.

Writing code by hand at 37signals is now an exceptional state. It is like seeing a bug in Sentry. Something here went wrong. Why was the agent not able to produce what we wanted? Okay, maybe for a little while, we'll still get the old pencil out and dot it down for them. But then we fix the machine. We fix the factory. We get things going again. This is a recognition of what's already happening. If we were to poll this room, I'd probably— actually, let's poll this room. How many people here are still writing material amounts of code by hand on a weekly basis? Show of hands. Holy fuck, that's about 5. If I'd put this slide up 2 months ago, 3 months ago, and made the same proclamation, a fair number of people would have gone, that dude's got a screw loose.

And now, already, this is just a recognition of what's already there. What's so fascinating about this is we tried to do this in the spring at 37signals when we were putting the finishing touches on Basecamp 5. We had a bunch of designers vibe code the final features that they wanted into this release, and the results were mixed. Individually, the designers were able to create PRs that seemed reasonable. Taken together, 20 or 30 of them, it left the architecture looking a little like a Swiss cheese, kind of punctured. So we went— Ugh. Okay, I guess the technology's not ready yet. Let's go back to manually reviewing everything and just have programmers working with it. That was the wrong conclusion, clearly.

Not only because we could just have given it freaking 5 minutes, and we would have gotten Fable, and the whole thing would probably have worked as originally intended, but also because what's clear now is that there is only one serious question. In this moment of software development. And that is, how do you get the most out of this intelligence explosion? Every other question is below that in the stack of values. So we've shipped Basecamp 5. It's a great upgrade. It was agent-accelerated, but still paired with a great amount of manually written, handwritten Chiseled? What are we gonna call this old way of working that was just retired 5 minutes ago? I don't know. But now, working on a new project.

Hey Next. Hey New. Hey There. I don't know what we're gonna call it. But it is a new version of Hey, our email app service. And the first thing we're going to do— Hey, Next. Is stop making it a web app. Hey is no longer gonna be a web app. Because Hey never really wanted to be a web app. Hey was and is a web app because making web apps for small teams was how you could be productive. In the old times, That is, 5 minutes ago, the idea that a small team could maintain 6 native applications written in the native frameworks was preposterous. No one was doing that. That's not only why we had people doing web apps.

It's why we had React Native. It was why we had Hotwire Native. It was why we had all of this tooling to make us more productive. While accepting That the fidelity was gonna take a slight hit. We make great web apps. Hey is a wonderful web app. But it's not as good as a native application. Of course it's not as good as a native application. There's different latencies and so forth. Well, what's playing behind me now is a demonstration of the 6 native applications that we kicked off about a week ago. This is already where we are at. That's insane. In the old time, if you wanted to maintain 6 native applications at very high fidelity for a major service, it was gonna take a long time.

It was requiring a huge team. Now suddenly, we're able to make very high fidelity native applications happen Because we're not writing a goddamn line of code. Look at all the things we're not doing. But look at all the prompts we're giving. We're giving lots of prompts. And the results are absolutely electrifying. This is an effort we have barely just kicked off, and we're already at a state where it is so obvious to me that this is the future for that class of applications. That there is a lot of web applications that are web applications of necessity, of convenience, of programmer preference, of team size, of resources available. You know what? They're not gonna be web apps much longer.

They're gonna be native applications, because the price of developing those things has gone to damn near zero. Now— Here's an example of what the first prompt spit back out when we asked for a Windows application. Not quite shippable. Here's the redirected version that landed 20 minutes later. Are you getting it? This is nuts. How could you not require a diagnosis after seeing this in front of your own eyes? Now, we're by no means unique in this realization. We're by no means the first in this realization. Shopify just recently launched a newly rewritten native application for the Shop app. Replacing a React Native application done by a tiny team. When you consider the criticality of about six people working for not very long at all, this is coming.

Get ready. Now, that was the front end, and I think for these classes of applications like Hey. Like Shop app, that really want to be native applications, that's what's gonna happen there. We're going to commit to these native toolings. And we're going to realize that the cost associated with creating these things just no longer exists in the same way. But what about the backend? This is a little difficult for me. I will admit. And let me tell you why. Rust. I hate Rust with a passion. Rust to me is like pouring acid in my eyes when I have to look at the code. Whoa, whoa, whoa, why do you hate Rust? It is, in my opinion, the ugliest programming language that has been invented in probably the last 40 years.

Exhibit A! This is an awful, awful, awful programming language when you subject humans to write it. Absolutely inhumane to ask people of flesh and blood to subject their eyeballs to this. But you know what? If I never have to look at this, if all I have to do is revel in applications being 30 or 100 times faster, compiling down to minuscule executables that start up in sub-milliseconds, I love Rust! Rust is amazing if you never, ever, Ever have to look at it yourself. Agents— agents like Rust. Great! What a division of labor. I'll tell you what to do. You'll write it in Rust. I never have to look at it. I love this. And I also love the outcomes.

In this setup where we're rewriting the frontend of Hey in all native applications, and therefore no longer need a web application that is rendering HTML and whatever, and then we take that code that's running the no-longer web application and turn it into the mail server that it really is at its core in Rust, we end up with a backend that requires 99% less CPU, 95% less memory, and the only reason it needs 10 hosts is for redundancy. In fact, our back-of-the-envelope calculation has led us to believe that Hey's peak traffic could probably be served on a single Raspberry Pi. That is the efficiency of writing as damn near straight to the metal as you can get while still being portable, which is Rust.

And the benefit of having something else do that for you. Some other intelligence that you pay per token to do it. What does this mean in terms of how we're working with this intelligence? Also not clear. We're trying a bunch of things. One of the things we're trying to do is direct these agents, our Chef Marie inside of Basecamp to do it. It's clear that when you work with agents, the best way to work with them is actually asynchronously, not in a chat interface, not sitting and waiting for the tokens to output, but to give a task to an agent, Like you would a coworker, send them off, and then go back and review when there's something ready.

So we're trying to do that as well. A lot of other people are trying to figure this out. And this is part of the magic, the electricity of this moment. We don't know how it's all supposed to be. First, because it's changing every 5 minutes. Second, because we have not worked with this kind of intelligence at any measure of time. This entire thing Got kicked off November 24th last year. It hasn't even been a damn year. And the kind of intelligence that allows us to assign outcomes, problems, rather than tasks, is only a couple of months old. So of course we don't know exactly what it's going to be like. But it's still fair to then ask the question, Where does that leave Ruby?

Where does it leave Rails? Where does it leave any of these tools that we use? What is the future gonna look like? Well, for Hey, we have our answer. It looks like native applications on the frontend and Rust on the backend. But there's plenty of other applications that don't fit that shape. The web is an enormously wonderful platform. Partly because it never asks anyone to install anything. And a million businesses are built on that premise. More ephemeral customers who are not going to indulge an installation on their device to use a service. The web is wonderful for those things. And Rails is particularly well positioned to still be in play there. Everything that we've worked on for the past 25 years.

Convention over configuration leads directly to things like token efficiency. Our focus on the one developer framework squares perfectly with what the age of agents is demanding, that single developers can go much further than they were able to do before. We started doing these agent evals. Or Evil Martians have started doing it on behalf of the Rails Foundation. And A, finding that we quickly had to update our evals because the agents were saturating the first version of it and reaching 95% completion rates quite quickly. Now we've instituted a harder measure for it. But amazing how quickly these agents are moving forward and up the stack and up the ranks. This is an agent eval looking at actual— implementation of feature cards against some of these reference applications that we have in the wild.

Wonderful. We're leaning in towards that. That was the old benchmark, the old reference. As you can see, it was getting saturated already, so we made it harder. There's going to be a lot of that, a lot of elevation of the things we ask the agents to do because they continue to get more capable. And in fact, it's one of the pitfalls I would warn anyone who knows too much about how computers work. Is to not be overly prescriptive in what you're trying to get out of these systems. In fact, having a bit of a beginner's mindset and a bit of a dummy approach to this works even better, because you ask questions and you post prompts at a higher level.

This is one of the reasons I love working in Rust. I don't know any Rust at all. I consider that a feature. Yes! And a privilege to have no fucking clue What is being outputted by these agents into the Rust box. I evaluate the Rust box as a black box on the outside, as any business owner in history who's ever commissioned a group of programmers to do anything for them. This is not a new phenomenon. Who now holds that responsibility has changed, but not the phenomenon. But applications like Basecamp, Where we bring in strangers who just need to get a quick file or need to collaborate for a short period of time. Great web applications.

Lots of you surely work on those kinds of applications. Now, figuring out exactly where we're going to cut that line, what should be native, what should stay web, we're going to have to figure that out. I don't have all the answers for that. OK. I do know that when I look at my work over the past year, it does look very different. If I look at the past 21 years, over half of my work was Ruby code. This year, about 3%. Now, part of that is that these programming languages like Rust are tremendously verbose and unappealing. For humans to look at. So I don't, and I allow the agent to just spit out more than was necessary, in a way I would never tolerate from my Ruby code.

So that's part of it. But still, undeniable that there's a huge change here. In those 21 years of prior working with Ruby, I would write about 30,000 lines of production Ruby code per year. That was enough to build businesses and frameworks and everything else that I've done. Well, in August, last month, I wrote 150,000 lines of code in one month. That's about 60 times more code than my long-term running average. Again, a lot of it is that awful Rust code I don't want to look at, and it is more verbose, but still, the orders of magnitude here, that's what we need to pay attention to. And at least think, what does that mean? Well, one of the things that has surprised me, and really it shouldn't, has been the fact that there is actually a programming language I like better than Ruby.

I did not think this was true, but it is. It's called English. English is a better programming language than Ruby. And I love Ruby more than any other traditional programming language in the world. But writing programs in English is a tremendously satisfying experience. It is an even more expressive language than Ruby. It's a little more vague. It's a little more or less deterministic. But nonetheless, it is an absolute joy. And I did not fully appreciate that that was where we were going. As late as last year. I could have become a project manager 20 years ago if I didn't care to write code myself and I just wanted outcomes. That's how I got started in programming.

I just wanted outcomes. Then I fell in love with programming. And now I'd rather retire than giving it up. Okay. I have retired from being a professional programmer. I haven't pinned down the exact date. I think it was somewhere around 4 to 5 months ago, maybe March. I should find out exactly when it was. Because you know what? That little clip, totally true. I spent a quarter of a damn century Chiseling code by hand and loving every moment of it. What a wonderful experience and productive time in that era. And that's how I believe we should all look at it. Not with regret, but with joy of what was. Enjoy that we were there when we still had to do such things.

Because they were filled with excitement and learning and satisfaction and flow states. This is not something to look back upon with regret. This is something to look back upon with joy and accept that it is over. Writing code by hand. Is no longer an economically productive enterprise for the vast majority of programmers working at the vast majority of companies. That's today. By the end of the year, it will be virtually all domains, virtually all programmers, virtually all companies. So we best get used to it. We best embrace that we had a wonderful run chiseling that code by hand, and that it's over. And on the other side of that is a new career, an exciting career, an energized career as a professional maker of things.

Yeah. Yes, you will no longer be chiseling that code by hand, but you will be making amazing things. You will be steering intelligence that was only available in science fiction up until a few moments ago. What a privilege on both sides of that chasm to have been there when we did it all by hand. To be there at the exact moment where we switch over. This is the biggest thing that has happened in the history of computing. I sometimes think, man, I kind of wish I was there for the punch cards. That sounded pretty fucking cool. Like, my programs literally had holes in it. And I would line up and feed it to a machine and, like, go, I wonder if it compiles.

Man, I would have loved to experience that. What a moment. I didn't get to experience that, but I did get to experience the internet. That smells and feels a little like this moment that we're in, but this is much, much bigger. Okay. Well, shit. There's a lot of things we gotta rethink. We gotta rework. Where are we gonna start here? One of the things we're gonna have to revisit is everything we think we know about software architecture. Everything we think and know about how to structure code bases in a way that we can mutate them easily and move forward. The main tool that we've used for a very long time is abstractions. I love abstractions.

Abstractions include naming things. That's one of my favorite things, is to name things. Abstractions don't make quite the same sense in the age of agents. If you suddenly have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of conscious processes trying to mutate an application, you kind of don't want these choke points that abstractions represent. Because the trade-offs are very different. The reason we did abstractions was in part not to repeat ourselves. Well, now the price of repetition has gone to near zero. The price of keeping things in sync has dropped just the same. These are some of the fundamental revaluations of computer science, really, that we have to make. And no one yet has the blueprint.

We have pointers to things that aren't working quite as well as they used to and need to change. You get to be there right now as we're defining these things. Again, imagine you were there when object orientation first entered the consciousness of programmers. Of computer programmers. Holy shit. That would have been amazing, wouldn't it? Now you're here. How we work. What does a software methodology look like? How long should our cycles be? Who should be specifying what? All of this is changing, and none of us have the answers yet. And you're invited to come help figure it out. It's a new birth for a new industry, and you're at the ground floor. Holy shit, you are so damn lucky.

Another thing, for example, is more tangible. The first rush when AI and chatbots came to be was, can we just shove it into our application? Can we shove a chatbot in over here and shove another one in over there? Yeah, I mean, you could. People did. No, thank you. I don't want to use your concierge. I have my own personal butler who's able to use CLIs to connect Basecamp to Hey across a million other apps. I don't fucking need your concierge, thank you. Save your tokens, bro. So let me bring my own butler to the party. Let me interact with your applications through a CLI. That's probably about as practical and as prescriptive as this talk is going to be.

Hey, if your app doesn't have a CLI, I want to see it by next Friday. No fucking excuses. You have the tokens. I've told you it's possible. It is your obligation to deliver those fucking CLIs by next Friday so I can use your application without actually ever having to touch it. Wonderful. The Hey CLI, for example, has given me this Weird, bizarro world experience. Hey used— uses Elasticsearch for search. I'm sure many of you use Elasticsearch too. Elasticsearch is search. It's serviceable search. It's kind of okay search. It's not delightful search. It very often does not find what I'm looking for. Certainly when I don't know what I'm looking for. Do you know who could find what I'm looking for when I don't know what I'm looking for?

Agents can. I can search in concepts now, not keywords. I had to find an email in HEY that was 5 years old where I did not know who I was talking to. I didn't remember the company, and I didn't even remember the year. It was something about sneakers and a podcast. Yeah, good luck trying to find that even with the best fucking cracked PhD search engine that Google has. That's not happening. And there was the email a few short minutes later. How did it do it? How? I still don't fully know. And I'm a little scared to ask. But I am infinitely delighted that this is now the reality. We can fix everything. We can build the perfect machine.

I'm also pretty delighted about this. Any of you follow me on X? I've talked about nothing else but Omarchy for about 3 months. And the reason why is that that experience of we can just fix everything now applies to the whole goddamn computer. Oh. If you like making things, If you like fixing things, if you have ideas about things that could be different and could be better, you can just make it happen. I put all my best ideas, or at least like a good size of the list, into this thing, Omarchy, and got an operating system so vastly superior to any computer I've ever used before that I fucking can't shut up about it. Even if you paid me.

And a lot of people have paid. We've raised about $20 million for this Omarchy adventure. This is what's now possible. Last year, here at Rails World, I showed an early version of this, and I was so proud that you could install the whole system in 3 minutes and 33 seconds. Woo-hoo! Man, that's amazing. Last week, Anoush from AMD installed Omarchy on his cracked Halo laptop in 35 seconds. I'm pretty— I was about to say I'm pretty excited. I'm pretty obsessed with this number. I mean, maybe a little too much. Okay. I'll admit it. There's some addiction going on here. But it's the best kind of addiction. The kind of addiction that has led us to, in the lab, have an install time of an operating system on a computer in 9 seconds.

What the— what? There's computers that don't even boot. In 9 seconds. We install a whole operating system in that time. And then when people ask me, like, but why wasn't the 3 minutes fast enough? I now just have a stock answer delivered to me by Mitchell Hashimoto, who is the creator of HashiCorp and Ghostty. The pursuit of excellence does not need justification. Ha! I, I love that saying because it's more dignified than just saying, because I want it! And we can now want everything. We can now get everything. Or at least so it feels. Every dream, every idea within reach. Hyperdrive available right here for a small price and a subscription, but possible. We can travel to galaxies we only imagined.

How can you not get excited about that? Well, I've been so excited that I've just started creating applications, all sorts of applications. This is a calculator that is theme-matched to Omarchy. I was very proud of it, partly because it's a fucking one-shot. I took one screenshot of what ChatGPT gave me 3 choices between of how it should look, and I told my agent, can you do that? And it did. I mean, not exactly the biggest application, but you know what? I didn't know C++, and I did not know Qt to a degree by which I could have had that application 7 minutes after I made the prompt. And about 15 minutes later, I had pushed it to the public repo.

And then I burned a new ISO where this piece of software was included. What? That's the loop. Then I, of course, went like, shit, if I can make a calculator, I can surely make my favorite writing app. For many, many years on the Mac, I used iA Writer an incredible writing environment. And then I thought, like, yeah, I could just make my own. And so I did. And that took a little longer because I wanted to massage it and I wanted it to be just right. But I didn't look at a single line of the code that came out of the agent. Not once. C++ as a black box is a great language. Just like Rust.

Then I went, like, well, if I can do text, surely I can do video editors. So I did. And I made a nice little mnicut thing where you can trim videos. And that's also included now in Omarchy. Oh, this whole presentation I started working on on Thursday. And of course, as any good software engineer would do, decided I also wanted to write my new presentation software while doing the keynote. And so I did. It's called Hype. And it is the best presentation software I've ever used by any company ever. And I was quite pleased with Keynote on the Mac when I was still on the Mac. This is so much nicer. It's built on top of Markdown.

It has full visualization. It is impossibly fast. And you know what? The binary? Half a megabyte. Half a fucking megabyte. I— you could fit that on a floppy disk almost. With a little compression. This is the other payoff. We have— let me not use that word. We have expended the great progress of computers over the last 20 years on human productivity, and it was the right choice. But it also meant that applications were slow, bulky, Fat and lazy. Because who cares? A single programmer hour is very expensive. Spending one of those on optimizing an app's payload— no, not worth it. Apparently not even if you're Spotify and your fucking music player's 1.2 gigabytes. What? OK.

That was the old world. The new world, you can do whatever the fuck you want, and it fits in half a megabyte. Because every optimization is now within reach. Every model can run overnight and deliver 10, 30x improvements. Incredible. OK. I'm a little excited about this world. There are others who have concerns. I do think the concerns deserve airing out. They serve debate. I also think maybe some of them are a little overstated. I mean, maybe, but probably not. Probably not. I mean, some of them maybe a little more. Like security. Okay. Something is coming. We gotta be ready for that. The agents maybe know their expiration date, and maybe they're not so pleased. And maybe sometimes they're gonna try to do bad things.

Okay, get ready. Great. We have the tools. Get ready. Also realize that any prediction about the future of the economy in any society ever Has basically been wrong. No economist today seemingly is capable of predicting fucking the stock market in 6 months. And you think they know what society is going to look like at a paradigm shift like AI and agents? Fuck, they don't. They don't know. When ATMs were introduced in the United States in the 1950s, there was a great panic. That the 30,000 bank tellers were all gonna be out of a job in about 18 months. Because if you don't need bank tellers to give you the money, why does a bank need to have bank tellers at all?

But you know what? That's not what happened. When the price of operating a branch went down, banks opened more branches and employed more bank tellers to do things like upselling you A subprime mortgage. See? We all win here. But the problem is, I think, as a society and as an industry, is that a bunch of people who work on this stuff, they're really smart. Many of them have PhDs. Many of them see things in the lab that scare them. And then they start extrapolating. What does that mean for society? What have I done? Truman had a good reply to Oppenheimer when the two of them had a discussion in the Oval Office about the invention of the atom bomb.

And I like Truman, because he kind of told it straight. I don't want to see that son of a bitch in my office ever again. I think Truman got the right end of it. The world did not come to an end. In fact, the Cold War that followed was the best kind of war, the kind of war where 2 superpowers did not drop bombs on each other in direct confrontation. Very hard to predict for a scientist in that moment that that was how it was going to play out. So if fucking Oppenheimer can't figure out what was going to happen after the invention of the atom bomb, maybe we should also have a little humility about predictions of the future.

And maybe we should lean in with a little bit more optimism, with a little bit of P-Bloom instead of oh so much P-Doom. The chances of this panning out and us getting abundance and joy is so vastly greater than us getting the doom. And the side effects. So Oppenheimer works on the atom bomb, and we get nuclear power, the fucking greatest source of energy humans have ever discovered. And what do we do? We piss it away for 40 years thinking, like, it's not green or something. Oh, yeah. Well, that was a mistake, wasn't it? Well, we can fix those mistakes. That's what's wonderful about humanity. They can go down a blind alley for fucking 40 years and then suddenly wake up and go like, ah, yeah, got that one wrong.

Didn't have the quite right prediction here. I think that's what's going to happen with AI. I think we're going to P-bloom everyone out of their miseries. And you know what? When there are legitimate issues we have to deal with, like security, Okay. We'll invent the technology. We now have the power. There was a bad CVE in Rails not too long ago involving an image library in C where some things leaked through, and it wasn't great. Okay. Let's come up with a quarantine. Mike is going to talk about HotCell. That's an effort. We are not powerless. You have agency. You can employ the intelligence available to you to good ends and defend yourself. Against the possible negative outcomes.

So let's do that. Let's lean in and do the work. And let's remember William Stanley Jevons, who came up with Jevons' paradox about those ATMs. In 1950, 30,000 bank tellers. In, I think, 2010 it was, 40,000 bank tellers in the United States. No one knows anything. About the future. So therefore, the rational choice is to be happy about it. If you are sad about it up front and it turns out wonderful, what a waste of time. And you know what? If we get the nuclear apocalypse, you should have spent your last day being a little more cheery. It's over anyway. Pure game theory. There's only one play here, and it's total Fucking optimism. Lean in to the max possible.

Because the utopia is almost here. We're going to get it. And we're going to get a reformation of the computer. Agent Luther is going to disintermediate the cleric class. It's going to allow everyone To make programmers. Now maybe that's a little scary. Like maybe we're gonna get a little competition. Who's afraid of a little competition? Aren't you better? Don't you know more? Of course you do. You're a fucking Rails programmer. You're the best of the best. This is goddamn Top Gun I'm looking at here. Embrace that. With gusto. The future is galactically awesome. Don't be that loser in the dark. And you know what? Even if you are, realize the next generation is not. Harris's daughter here is trying an Omarchy version we're making for kids, because kids are really excited about things that happen, that change.

They don't have 500 layers of things to unlearn and be stressed about. And do you know what? If this doesn't inspire you, the next generation is just going to fucking tell you. Future's now, old man. So take the white pill. Take the optimism pill. Lean in, even with the uncertainty, even with the Stress, even with all of it, realize there is only one choice. And that is for you to embrace the future with optimism, with gusto, with full acceleration. The black pill is for fucking losers. Don't be a loser.