Be a Loser

DHH's keynote at Rails World 2026 ended with a warning for all software engineers "Don't be a loser". Here's a warning about listening to people like him without turning on your brain.

I think by now very few of you will have missed the controversial keynote session DHH delivered at the Rails World 2026 conference.

Don't worry, I'm not here to remind you that DHH is a shameless fascist.1 That he uses keynote speeches as if they were sponsored talks.2 That he seemingly forgot that he was talking at a Rails conference.3 Or that he bragged about writing a lot of code in 2026 while at the same time bragging about not writing any single line of code.4

I'll instead focus on a few key flaws in his apparatus of (poor) arguments and the language he used to construct them (if anything was actually constructed by him, but more on that later).

And I'll start with a seemingly unrelated angle. DHH, when he's not promoting himself on a stage, is also a rather successful car racer.

The core assumption in DHH speech is that writing code is fundamentally and exclusively an economical activity. You write code to build stuff that accrues economic value. It's a very utilitarianist view of the discipline and a quite depressing one. Which is surprising for someone who used to tell everyone how passionate they were about the craft of writing good code.

His argument can be boiled down to a simple statement: I used to be passionate about writing code, but now that machines can do that faster than me, I'm no longer interested.5

Unsettling, isn't it? But let's go back to DHH's favourite offline activity: racing cars. And let's apply the same economic-utilitarian perspective on it. From that angle, racing cars on a circuit makes absolutely no sense. You spend a lot of time and insane amounts of energy to go from point A to... point A.

Yes, you arrive exactly where you left off, a few minutes or hours later.

Of all the possible ways to achieve that result, it seems to me that only a loser6 would choose racing multiple laps at insane speed as a means to get there. The most reasonable person would simply stay in point A. The tech-bro version would probably take an Uber to do a single lap while they're posting pro-AI statements on X from the comfort of the back seat.

Some of you might already be screaming from your chairs, arguing that the purpose of racing cars is not to be an effective means of transportation for people of good. Or rather, that driving cars can serve many different purposes: utilitarian, aesthetic, competitive, self-determination through betterment, you name it. And you'd be right.

You see, DHH opened his talk by reminding us about how photography apparently replaced painters. Except that he focused on a specific type of painting: portraits. He, deliberately or not, completely forgot about all other forms of painting that existed before the invention of photography and continued to exist. Furthermore, while he seemed to imply that the advent of AI-assisted coding will replace all forms of humanly written code by using the unfortunate painting analogy, he didn't seem to realise that very few painters decided to become photographers as a consequence of the technical transformation. If anything, many painters felt "liberated", as they could focus even more on the artistic dimension of painting and less on the purely mechanical and utilitarian dimensions.

Someone who races cars in the age of Uber is not a loser.

A painter who doesn't give up the brush for a camera is not a loser.

So, why would a programmer/developer/software engineer who keeps writing their own code be treated as one?

DHH doesn't offer any compelling argument besides the usual and weak because I said so.

But let's move on to another flaw: the pretended counter-arguments.

At some point towards the end of the speech, DHH mentioned that there are some reasonable concerns with this technology. I was almost pleased when he showed a picture of a nuclear plant. That didn't last long.

The nuclear plant was a parallel, not a warning.

The only counterarguments to GenAI adoption that DHH mentioned were nothing other than the set of escathological tropes used by the TESCREAL folks: the existential risk for humanity represented by a self-improving superintelligence. Something that doesn't exist and is only possible in the mind of some weird futurists.

While he mentioned the ridiculous doomerist predictions, for which he used nuclear energy as a parallel, he forgot to mention all the harms that the race to AI buildup is causing to real humans today.

No mention of the impacts on the environment, the looming financial bubble, the cost inflation for hardware components, mounting workplace anxiety and distress, skill atrophy, or how the internet has become a scrapyard of single-use slop.

He didn't mention how reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, relies on exploiting low-wage gig workers in Kenya, Venezuela or other devastated countries.

If you want to educate yourself on such harms, I do recommend starting with the egregious Empire of AI by Karen Hao. I covered it last February, in case you want a bit more context before committing to a great read.

The p-bloom vs p-doom is a false dichotomy. They are just the two faces of the same coin. A coin made of pure speculations and sci-fi-infused beliefs. They're a convenient distraction, though, as they allow us to close our eyes on the real, proven, material harms that are being inflicted on humans today.

It looks as if DHH and his fellow tech bros are completely fine with those harms as long as they don't personally have to deal with them.

While shamelessly revealing to a shocked Rails community that he (or rather Claude Code) had been rewriting large chunks of the Hey stack from Ruby to Rust, DHH came up with a line that I'm sure he was very proud of.

You know, DHH has long criticised Rust because in his own words it's an ugly language. Those are subjective remarks. I do appreciate that he might find ugly something that others believe is beautiful, or vice-versa. Cultural norms and aesthetic canons aren't universal. I know how hard it might be to accept that if you're a tech-bro white supremacist, but that doesn't make it less true.

DHH has all the rights to claim a language is pretty, ugly, elegant or disgusting. The problem with such declarations, though, is that they'll invite scrutiny. People will expect you to behave consistently with your words, as your entire credibility relies on your actions following your words. I believe this is something even he understands.

That's why, if he wanted to save his face at least with some of the Rails community, he had to come up with arguments that made him look smart while dodging any potential accusation of treachery.

Any normal, without a hypertrophic ego, would have simply recognised they'd been wrong the entire time. They would have said something along the lines of, 'I've always hated this language, and my aesthetic appreciations of it made me blind to its core advantages. After experiencing them in the past few months I realised I had made a mistake.'

But that would require intellectual honesty and humility. It would require you to accept the idea of ever being wrong. To the best of my knowledge, DHH doesn't seem to be a champion at racing that car.

So, instead, he came up with the perfect smart-ass grifter argument. You see, I still dislike Rust, and I would never touch it. In fact, I'm not. I let my digital butler (slave) take care of the dirty job, while I reap all the benefits and credits. I'm not a traitor because I'm not writing any Rust. Something else is doing it for me. This mediated experience is worth all the benefits in safety and performance I reap.

DHH said it clearly in his talk: "I'm perfectly fine with using Rust as long as I don't personally have to deal with it."

The problem is that he doesn't seem to realise the implication of such revelation.

All of the GenAI castle is built on this same foundation. Everybody is perfectly fine building, selling and promoting AI tools as long as they don't have to personally deal with the consequence: environmental damage and human damage. It's not only them; the same happens to users. AI is the intermediary that hides all the dirty jobs. It does it for you, you only reap the benefits... until we all realise this is the twenty first century edition of the tragedy of the commons.

DHH is perfectly fine with increased carbon emissions or human exploitation, as long as he doesn't need to deal with it.

But this isn't something new that's specific only to AI. It's the scale of the harm that's significantly bigger today. But the same approach has been at the core of the tech industry ever since one existed.

Meta is perfectly fine with causing mental health issues among young teens, as long as they don't personally have to deal with them (their families and friends will).

Apple is perfectly fine with exploiting and pushing workers to suicide, as long as they don't have to personally deal with them (Foxconn is).

Google is perfectly fine with its technology being used by the Pentagon or the IDF, as long as they don't have to deal with the consequences directly (they're providing neutral technology).

Flock is perfectly fine with their cameras being abused by rogue law enforcement agents, as long as they don't have to personally deal with the issue (police and the justice system will have to).

The list can go on forever. And DHH didn't realise (or maybe he did?) that but bragging about how he's able to reap the benefits of Rust in his latest grift without having to get his hands dirty in the process, he just gave out the industry trick to those among us who were still in denial.

DHH doesn't seem to care. In fact, he seems perfectly happy trying to make up with language for what he's unable to achieve with arguments.

I don't know you, but whenever I hear someone saying, "Don't be a loser", I hear a bully. I hear someone who is so desperately out of rational arguments that they need to resort to intimidation. And I don't even need to deconstruct the sentence to make that more evident. There is little to deconstruct, as the sentence is as shallow as it sounds.

In the context of DHH talk, it is basically anyone who doesn't do as he does.

You either do what I'm telling you now, or you're "out". Out of what, exactly? The most depressing and disgusting version we've ever had of a tech industry? But I realise that would be reacting to the provocation on the same terms.

Instead, there's a ludicrous angle to DHH's punchy closing line. He's long been a proponent of capitalism and free markets. He's been repeating the ultra-libertarian "one dollar, one vote" line ad nauseam. And, in recent years, he seems to have become increasingly totalitarian. To the point that he has been adopting some of the worst Soviet/Stalinian attitudes, possibly without even noticing.

Because in essence when DHH says "Don't be a loser", he's saying the following:

This is nothing else but the modern, whitewashed techno-optimist version of the old Stalinian rule:

The only difference is that where one used to be unapologetically autoritarian, the other is pretending to be a cool visionary.

The essence is the same: someone goes on a stage telling you what you're supposed to do, and threatening consequences if you don't align.

To both Stalin and to DHH I respond with a resounding "Fuck you!". Because that's how you treat bullies. It's the only language they understand.

If you're truly, genuinely convinced, that this is the kind of future worth pursuing. That it's in service of the greater good, and the betterment of humanity, by all means go ahead with it, but please make sure to have reasonable arguments to justify its cost. More importantly, don't try to impose your view on the rest of us by threatening repercussions.

If, on the contrary, you feel you're in