Shadowing Practice: DHH has gone completely off the rails... - Learn English Speaking with Video

Last week, the legendary developer and creator of Ruby on Rails, David Hannemeyer Hansen, DHH, walked into the Rails World Conference in Austin,

Texas, and made a room of over 1 ,000 Rails developers break down into tears after telling them

that writing Rails or any source code by hand is over.

It's no longer economically viable, and it's time for you to stop being a loser.

The black pill is for f*ing losers.

Don't be a loser.

DHH has gone completely off the rails and used his keynote to promote AI -generated rust, which is like the Pope showing up on Easter to talk about the benefits of atheism.

And this one's personal for me because Rails was my first framework and launched my career in software development, which ultimately led to me creating this Fireship channel.

Watching this keynote was like watching my childhood home get demolished to build a data center, but is DHH right or is just another hype man with AI psychosis?

Well, in today's video, we'll find out by looking at a variety of different skills programmers need to have

and determine if those skills are still relevant for software developers in the future.

It is September 28th, 2026, and you're watching the Code Report.

Let's start with the most vulnerable skill, keyboard martial arts.

Just a couple years ago, it was very in vogue to get good at tools like NeoVim.

And back in the good old days, memorizing hundreds of keyboard shortcuts and spending hours on a great configuration, it could actually make you write code faster.

However, if an agent is making most of your code edits now, being able to delete the contents of parentheses and three keystrokes without touching your mouse is becoming a very niche party trick.

That being said, DHH himself is a NeoVim user and is still a big proponent of command line interfaces, as long as it's not a human using them.

In the keynote, he says every app developer should provide a CLI for developers.

The only caveat is that command line interfaces are no longer for humans.

It is your obligation to deliver those f*ing CLIs by next Friday

so I can use your application without actually ever having to touch it.

The bottom line is that code editors and CLI tools will still have a place, but investing a ton of time mastering them is not going to make you a more productive developer.

But what about programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails, React .js, Svelte, Angular, Tailwind CSS, and the list goes on.

All these frameworks have massive, cult -like fanbases.

Well, at least they used to, anyway.

Ruby on Rails explicitly put programmer happiness at the center of its philosophy, and I can vividly remember, back in 2008, how running Rails new felt like using a magic wand,

which would generate a full MVC crud app in a matter of seconds.

But the harsh reality is that developer happiness is dead, and any framework or programming language built around this idea is not going to end well.

Like, my horse Tinder startup is entirely framework -free.

It's built with vanilla JavaScript and Rust on the back end.

Frameworks used to provide developer happiness, but now they just get in the way, and in many cases, hurt performance.

And I'm not the only one.

DHH used to be a certified Rust hater.

This is an awful, awful, awful programming language when you subject humans to write it.

Absolutely inhumane.

But in the keynote, he shockingly announced that they're rewriting the Hey! email app, not with human -powered Ruby on Rails, but with pure AI -generated Rust.

Rust is amazing if you never, ever, ever have to look at it yourself.

With that Rust rewrite, he was able to cut CPU and memory usage by 95 % on the server.

And that's a hugely important point because the frameworks

that will actually survive in the future are the ones

that require the fewest amount of tokens and thus save developers money or the ones that achieve the highest level of performance.

Unfortunately, developer happiness is almost a non -factor now.

Over the next decade or so, maybe sooner, I think we'll see all frameworks, languages, and runtimes converge down to a single point,

like one universal language that can build any type of software you can imagine, a language optimized for tokens that no human needs to understand.

And that brings us to the big one, coding, or actually writing source code that runs software.

DHH claims he went from writing about 30 ,000 lines of

Ruby per year to now writing about 150 ,000 lines of code per month using agents

but he's just one random crazy rich dude

so he also asked the audience of 1200 developers how many

of them spend a material amount of time each week writing code show of hands holy that's about five

and if we're to trust that trust me bro poll

that means less than one percent of humans are still writing

code by hand the end of coding is not near it's already here i refuse to believe

that though so let me know

if you're still writing code by leaving a comment on this video but something doesn't add up here.

Because if coding really is dead, why haven't there been mass layoffs and why are Silicon Valley companies still hiring developers with six -figure pay packages?

Well, the good news in all of this is that writing code

or any skill closely tied to mechanical execution was never that valuable to begin with.

What's always been far more important is the ability to define a problem, then design a system that can solve that problem securely and efficiently, and AI agents just make that process way faster.

So when DHH told us all to stop being fing losers because we write code by hand.

He wasn't calling us f*ing losers because we still love Ruby on Rails.

He wasn't calling us f*ing losers because our Horsetender app is failing.

He was calling us f*ing losers because of our pessimism.

Like, dude, you have an army of coding robots at your disposal and you're blackmailing.

There's never been a better time to be an idiot with an idea.

Like, after Horsetender failed to raise a Series A, I was able to quickly pivot the idea to Donker, which is like Grindr for gay donkeys.

And now it's already expecting its first funding round, led by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Tim Cook.

But I think Charlie Chaplin says it better than DHH.

You'll never find a f*ing rainbow if you're looking down.

You the people have the power to make this life free and beautiful.

The black pill is for f*ing losers.

Don't be a loser.

But one thing I'm definitely not blackpilled about is CodeRabbit, the sponsor of today's video.

Coding agents have made it so that writing code is basically free now.

But the problem is everything after that.

The teams now have 200 open pull requests, and GitHub only lets you sort them chronologically.

The CodeRabbit triage fixes this by giving you a next best action view for all of your team's PRs across every repo.

It ranks each one based on factors like security risk, review effort, and which PRs are blocking other PRs.

Then it uses that context to tell you which one to review next, how deep you want to go, and who else on your team should see it.

It'll even flag all the PRs that are safe to close, and you can fix failing builds to resolve merge conflicts right from the queue without opening a new tab.

CodeRabbit is the number one most installed AI app on GitHub, and teams using it are merging PRs four times faster on average.

Try it out for free today at the link below.

This has been The Code Report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 83 sentences and 1341 words to shadow. The speech runs for 6:41. The speaker talks fast, about 201 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
developer noun	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
rail noun	/ɹeɪ(ə)l/	A horizontal bar extending between supports and used for support or as a barrier; a railing.
loser noun	/luzɚ/	A person who loses; one who fails to win or thrive.
framework noun	/ˈfɹeɪm.wɜːk/	A support structure comprising joined parts or conglomerated particles and intervening open spaces of similar or larger size.
rust noun	/ɹʌst/	The deteriorated state of iron or steel as a result of moisture and oxidation; it consists mostly of iron(III) oxide (ferric oxide) and iron(II) oxide (ferrous…
happiness noun	/ˈhæpinɪs/	The emotion of being happy; joy; elation.
skill noun	/skɪl/	A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate.
awful adjective	/ˈɔːfʊl/	Very bad.
generate verb	/ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/	To bring into being; give rise to.
interface noun	/ˈɪn(t)ɚˌfeɪs/	The point of interconnection or contact between entities.
keyboard noun	/ˈki.bɔɹd/	A set of keys laid out in a gridlike pattern, used for typing on a typewriter, computer, etc.
pill noun	/pɪl/	A small, usually round or cylindrical object designed for easy swallowing, usually containing some sort of medication.
token noun	/ˈtoʊkən/	Something serving as an expression of something else.
merge verb	/mɝd͡ʒ/	To combine into a whole.
programmer noun	/ˈpɹoʊɡɹæmɚ/	One who writes computer programs.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
add up verb	To take the sum of; to total.
find out verb	To discover, as by asking or investigating.
look down verb	To lower one's eyes; to direct one's look downwards.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 18 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: atheism /ˈeɪ.θi.ɪ.zəm/, parenthesis /pəˈɹɛn.θə.sɪs/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, harsh /ˈhɑɹʃ/, obligation /ˌɑ.blɪˈɡeɪ.ʃn̩/, martial /ˈmɑɹʃəl/, configuration /kənˌfɪɡ.əˈɹeɪ̯.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, mechanical /məˈkænəkəl/, execution /ˌɛk.sɪˈkjuː.ʃən/, legendary /ˈlɛd͡ʒ.ənˌdɛɹ.i/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like developer, rail, loser.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
“Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true	used to provide · used to be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	has gone · have made · has been
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	rust, which is · Donker, which is

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?