Rails World 2026: every talk, summarized

The Rails World 2026 recordings are out: 24 talks from Austin. I watched all of them and wrote a summary of each, with the key ideas and what I’d actually try afterwards.

The theme of the year was clear: agents write a lot of the code now, and the talks were about how a Rails codebase, a deploy pipeline and a team should adapt to that.

Keynotes #

• Opening keynote (DHH)
• Ruby, Rails, and the future of programming (Matz, DHH & Jeremy Daer)
• The Most Valuable Engineer Isn’t Shipping Features (Robby Russell)
• Closing keynote (Aaron Patterson)

Coding with agents #

• Agent-Proof Your Rails App: Your Codebase Is the Prompt (Kinsey Durham Grace)
• Harness Engineering on Rails (Joël Quenneville)
• Custom Rails Generators in RubyEvents (Rachael Wright-Munn)
• How a Designer started shipping production Rails (Alicia Rojas & Arely Rivera)
• From Prompt to Rails: An Online Rails App Generator (Paweł Strzałkowski)
• Shipping is your heartbeat: Rails in the agentic era (Ryan Sherlock)

AI features inside Rails apps #

• Agents on Rails: Building AI Pipelines in plain Ruby (Daniela Velasquez)
• I Didn’t Get MCP, So I Built My Way Through It (Enrique Mogollan)

New in the framework #

• Active Search (Donal McBreen)
• Herb in Rails 8.2: Your ERB views, now HTML-aware (Marco Roth)
• Lexxy: a new text editor for Action Text (Jorge Manrubia)
• Durable orchestration on Rails: from continuation to workflow (Vladimir Dementyev)
• A deep dive into Solid Cable (Nick Pezza)
• Practical Hotwire: Stimulus & Turbo on the Ground (Jeremy Smith)

Security, deploys and infrastructure #

• Hot Cell: Securing Active Storage in the age of AI (Mike Dalessio)
• Kamal Deep Dive (Josef Strzibny)
• Distributing Rails applications with ONCE (Kevin McConnell)
• The RubyGems Compact Index: What Powers Every bundle install (Jenny Shen)
• Sharding Is Hard: Let’s Make It Easier! (Tess Griffin)
• Ractors, Rails, and Robots: Automating the Path to Ractor-safety (Andrew Novoselac)

If you only watch three #

1. Hot Cell if your app accepts file uploads. Check your Rails version first.
2. Harness Engineering on Rails if agents write code in your app. It explains why rules belong in tests and linters, not only in AGENTS.md.
3. Practical Hotwire: twelve concrete ways Turbo and Stimulus bite, with fixes.

The lightning talks aren’t on YouTube yet. I’ll add them when they are.

All recordings are on the Ruby on Rails YouTube channel and RubyEvents.