From DHH’s long-winded keynote at Rails World 2026. He was bragging that Hey’s backend is so efficient because it’s written in Rust (which he hates and refuses to read).
Ain’t this the same guy who vibe coded a distro and somehow managed to land a shitton of money from that?
Basically started as a glorified bunch of dotfiles. Haven’t checked whether or not it’s actually a distro yet.
But yeah, bunch of rich people threw a couple million at him, presumably because he’s a racist and their interests align.
I really can’t imagine that being about his project, especially when there are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of other critically-important and chronically under-funded open-source projects.
IMO it’s 100% who and 0% what.
A racist who went all-in on AI. That’s probably responsible for a lot of the investments - you can get Silicon Valley idiots to invest in anything right now so long as it has those two magic letters in front of it.
It’s a new distro in the same way that Minecraft with a texture pack installed is a completely different game.
I remember when HEY first came out, I got to try it and thought it was kinda useless. Defining an entire email service by the removal of one step from any other email service seems silly. (Coming from a guy who’s actually written a unique email service.)
I do appreciate some of the philosophy of Hey, like cherishing the human-to-human section of your inbox. But it’s simply not worth the price tag. Also now that DHH has proudly proclaimed he does not read any of the code, I don’t think it’s even worth it for free, if I’m gambling with my data. I just self-host Stalwart and Bulwark.
