Bring your own agent

An app ships a CLI, and users drive it with whatever agent they already use. dhh at Rails World 2026: "Built-in agents are a local maxima... Let me bring my own butler to the party." His demand to every app builder in the room was a CLI "by next Friday".

His own agent, he says, can connect Basecamp to HEY and to other apps through their CLIs, which no single built-in chatbot can do. Agents are also better at search than the tools apps ship with. Through the HEY CLI, his agent found a five-year-old email ("something about sneakers and a podcast", sender and year unknown) that HEY's Elasticsearch search couldn't.

It pairs with agent-skill-file, which teaches an agent how to use the CLI.

Source: Rails World 2026 keynote