“English is a better programming language than Ruby. Rust is amazing if you never have to look at it.”
That’s DHH at Rails World, three days ago. The guy who built a career on loving the source code just said the source is no longer the point.
As a minimalist and a fan of everything simple, I’ve been rethinking what simplicity means in the age of AI.
The tectonic plates are moving in the tech world, and they’re moving freaking fast. Everything is lagging behind, including my understanding of what simplicity means in software in 2026.
My old understanding of simplicity still holds up. Simple doesn’t mean dumbed down. It means max signal, min noise.
For a human, that means an interface that makes sense the second you see it. If it’s more complicated than that, I will be lost.
Our idea of simplicity was built around the tiny monkey brain we carry around. That brain is still here. But now it has company.
We have agents.
So what is a simple program in 2026? If I don’t look at the code, is it the design? The functionality? The number of decisions I have to make?
DHH’s answer this week: a program’s value lies in the collection of decisions and designs that define what it does and how it does it. The source is a compile target. A migration? A prompt away.
Now that AI can write it all in Rust and answer all my questions, code size is no longer the measure. We’re designing for humans and machines: the interface has to make sense to me, and the system has to make sense to the agents.
Simplicity still means max signal, min noise. We just have more than one brain to design for.