DHH’s opening keynote at Rails World 2026 is a must-watch. It's a video about the end of programming as we knew it, and the cool stuff that's awaiting us.
What especially interested me was his argument that now is the time for native applications. We built Electron apps and web apps largely because developers were expensive. Sharing one codebase across platforms made economic sense, even when it meant apps would get worse for the end user.
Agents bring the cost of development down, so that trade-off changes. We no longer have to sacrifice UX for DX and we can finally start building stuff that works great for the platform the user is on.
Another point I liked: we now all have an obligation to build CLIs. We must give people a way to interact with your application through their own agents. This makes a lot of sense. Personally, I've already created countless CLI wrappers around other company's applications I use as part of agent skills, but I would have preferred if those companies had provided the CLIs themselves to save me some tokens.
DHH's argument about native made me think about my earlier post arguing that maintainability beats fast performance, even when agents write the code. Back in February when I wrote that, agents still produced a lot of messy code. My advice was to stick with a familiar, opinionated framework that enforced a predictable architecture, rather than chase "blazing-fast binaries."
Right now however, with the right rules and review loops, keeping the architecture coherent has become almost a non-issue. It still deserves attention, but it no longer feels like the constraint that should dictate my entire choice of technology.
If the progress between February and now is any indication, things are only going to get better in this regard. Like much of the advice I have given on this blog, the advice about sticking to specific tech stacks for architectures sake was only valid for a short time.
I've only vibe-coded tiny native iOS apps until now but DHH's video wants me to start building CLIs and making native apps for all kinds of platforms.