This keynote is from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37Signals and the Rails core team, but it's actually more about AI coding than Rails and how 37Signals is adapting to this new technology. DHH and 37Signals are pretty famously anti-Venture Capitalist and Silicon Valley hype so they give an interesting unique perspective on tech trends. In the keynote, DHH believes the age of "hand coding" is over and what that means for our industry.
I was hoping there will be news on Rails 9.0. Feels like this is the end of Ruby Rails.
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
I hadn't connected the dots until you mentioned it, but yeah this keynote indirectly says it's the end of Ruby and Rails. Ruby was designed to be coded by humans, and DHH says it's the end of coding by hand.
Even the concept of "framework" as we knew it becomes different in this age. If you only want reusability, why not use plain good old libraries and let the AI assemble them as needed for your project?
Unfortunately yes because Rails has always been a framework of extraction. Now they are not even coding anymore there is nothing to extract. No one is a programmer but everyone is a maker.
I actually believe new frameworks and languages will pop up that are explicitly made to supercharge agentic engineering workflows. We're still super duper extra early! November last year was the START of all this. We're still in September! Not even one year has passed!
It doesn't make much sense to use a human language like Ruby and leave so much on the table when you can use a language like Rust or C to squeeze a LOT more out of correctness/types/performance.
We're going to have a bunch of hardly used libraries/frameworks that might converge on a single one. Similar to the surge in JS frameworks/libraries from a few years back and where we are now.
Is squeezing a lot more performance beneficial to a business? or is it a small amount of VPS cost per month difference?
It helps to be clear, at least with yourself, about if you're doing something because you can/want to or if there are actual business reasons.
This is a question I have been circling around. The agents are good at Ruby/Rails. It’s probably a confluence of things, but whether the L in LLM benefits from Ruby’s emphasis on human readability is something I’d love to see a study on. Or more generally, how key is (human) language itself in the performance ceiling of LLMs. A machine specific coding language/framework/process could obviously be more efficient, but if language itself is the hard limit, those would be dead in the water with LLMs. Or put another way: if language wasn’t the ceiling, why didn’t we see machine first coding implementations before LLMs?
Those performance numbers mean nothing considering they went from rendering every single view of a highly interactive app solely on their servers to moving all rendering to the clients. It’s possible the backend logic of the app could have run on 10 hosts running Ruby as well.
I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.
> Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
Let's see how that goes.
Personally, I wouldn't want all my emails stored on a service where the dude doesn't even look at the code anymore.
And Shopify has been sponsoring Ruby JIT developments, exactly for the same reasons Facebook created their own PHP fork with a JIT, and how Twitter moved into the JVM after so many thinking whales.
I don't understand what is supposed to come next. So its not Ruby on Rails anymore. What is it? Are agents going to magically convert all the RoR ecosystem to Rust or Whatever?
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Shit, I'm also hosting with them. Somehow I missed that post. I've been watching Kurt's AI-pillness advancing over time, but I didn't expect it to metastasize so quickly.
What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.
> Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
There is an issue with this idea - we write software, we read it, we make sure it does what it should do, that it’s implement in a sensible and efficient way, and, most importantly, we make sure the tests do what they should do.
If you no longer write the code, it’s harder to understand it. If you don’t write the tests, you need to trust the LLM did both jobs correctly (multiple adversarial LLMs can help), but, ultimately, it’s code you can no longer claim you understand. And you can’t really be sure it does what you want until you understand it.
Microsoft has a huge market share, and immense testing and QA resources, and it’s reasonable to assume this has driven down the number of unknown issues a lot.
That said, why do we think compilers produce correct code?
Write a solid piece of software by hand. Spend 20 plus years working all the bugs out and perfecting it. Build a giant community around it. Then use llms to rewrite it in another language, as the last step. Once that becomes unmaintainable, and there really is no community you can start over again by writing another working piece of software in a new language, perfecting it, building out a large community and then at the final step translate again with an llm, repeat.
I think what's next is the harness. Ruby on Rails brought conventions to web development. It could morph into brining conventions to building any kind of software using AI. AI on Rails. Many such efforts already exist and perhaps in short order such a project would be obsolete, but it's one potential path forward.
Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
I literally just patched an AI-generated API endpoint on a new service at work that shipped without any auth whatsoever, because AI was re-implementing the auth token check method individually in each child controller instead of implementing once in a before_action hook. That's Rails 101 stuff and the app is small. It was so obvious that I saw it right away just reading the code, I didn't even set an agent loose to do an initial inspection. It was a real "yeah I still got it" moment for me.
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Interesting that all the patterns Rails adopted for humans to write better code can't easily be funneled into the LLM doing the job now. Seems like it should be.
I think the issue with Rails, as a long time developer in that ecosystem, is that much of the default assumptions are a) not common (not so far off-piste that a human can't get used to them, but outside the center of the bell curve), and b) not explicit. So it's very common to do things like install a plugin that has across-the-repo effects but that is only documented in e.g. the config directory and the bundle. Unlike, say, NPM, when you install a new package where you explicitly have to e.g. import it everywhere you want to use it.
As time has gone on Rails has gotten better about this, but it still means that "your rails" and "my rails" are different enough that AI could easily get confused.
As you say, the other aspect is the intense dynamism which works against AI, which again prefers to have everything explicit and reasonable about from the text.
So I ended up going back to Javascript after a brief 12 year digression into Ruby. I still love Ruby but it's just not the right language for the current environment and team structures - typescript is "worse is better" in the right ways that it's a much better choice for both frontend/backend being the same and better type systems.
Types are great. No nulls are great. Exhaustive switches are great. Derive macros and Serde are great. Detailed errors are great.
However Rust has one serious problem, BUILDS. It’s slow and it takes up a ton of space and memory. You will be working around this on any sizeable codebase. Using cargo check to ration your compiles, a dedicated build box, etc.
If we accept that over half of the people building with rust are using agents (I'm sure this is much higher in reality), then you should also accept that there is a ton of time and resources spent on building / compiling. Optimizing this should probably be a top priority. They need someone who will be fanatical about shaving time and memory use from the build process.
Sounds like OCaml has the answer then. It has the equivalent of all the great things you described in Rust, plus compile speeds similar to or better than Go. Agents should be able to blaze through changes with it.
> Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
I still review PRs, but rarely suggest changes. The most meaningful reviews come from our review bots. I mostly review broad architectural decisions as a way to keep abreast of changes in the codebase. There's a cohort of engineers I work with who I would be perfectly okay with letting the clankers review, approve, and merge their PRs. But there's a larger cohort of engineers who need what I would call a directional code review.
Agile is dead. It presumed writing the code was the slowest part of the cycle. Now it makes more sense to only start writing code when the requirements are known as the code is quick and low cost to change if/when the requirements change later.
Agreed, this is very critical point, I always thought big part of software engineering is the art and science of managing ever-growing complexity.
The part I'm still not sure about is the 2nd point, I just don't know how good those LLMs will get at managing complexity and how important is for human to under details of the code. I'm not sure yet, I could imagine a future where we have have much more higher level tools to manage the comprehension and complexity challenges. Or it could be that LLMs will never fully comprehend the full architecture and humans will always be needed for that kind of big-picture analysis. I really don't know, and frankly I don't think anybody knows.
> That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.
His article was literally in support of Tommy Robinson's marches, there isn't really any further right on the political spectrum than you can go, these politics are so extreme that no political party no matter how far right would risk association with and they go out of their way to vet and exclude them.
This is just so silly. There's plenty of space left to go right of Robinson. He's not even advocating a christian theocracy, and there's plenty of people in the US that do.
Lying about your opponents just make them look good. We should all have learnt this lesson from the Trump fiasco.
There is no viable political party in the UK that is right-wing enough to be endorsed by Robinson. When the normie racist party (Reform) isn't racist enough so you have to go to the even more racist party (Restore) there might be an issue with your beliefs.
If you like his politics then good for you, no need to make things up about a country you don't understand.
> There is no viable political party in the UK that is right-wing enough to be endorsed by Robinson
Ok. And? This was not the statement I objected to. Just because there isn't a mainstream major party right of him, doesn't mean he's to the most right there is in the universe. Those are completely different things.
No, fascism has a pretty clear definition, just read Ur-Fascism. DHH fits that to a T. You just don't know what fascism is, or maybe you're uncomfortable with it.
I have never heard of this work, but thank you for sharing it. It's terrifying how nearly every single point is something that AI companies are embracing and marketing under.
> No, fascism has a pretty clear definition, just read Ur-Fascism. DHH fits that to a T. You just don't know what fascism is, or you're struggling with some cognitive dissonance.
DHH repeatedly presents electoral democracy as the legitimate mechanism for resolving political disagreement. He has also repeatedly emphasized free speech, including criticizing European restrictions that he regards as excessive, and has argued for keeping political disagreements from destroying ordinary social relationships.
Historians generally use fascism for something considerably more specific than nationalism, anti-immigration politics, or right-wing populism: typically an authoritarian ultranationalist movement hostile to liberal democracy and political pluralism, historically associated with a powerful centralized state, suppression of opposition, and political violence.
I find it interesting to see the different dimming levels of comments in this thread. This person calling DHH a fascist and racist is undimmed while the previous much more mild (but implied right leaning) comment is almost disappeared.
It's a bit more nuanced than that though. If someone breaks into your house and you ask the police to remove them you aren't a fascist. If Russia invades your country and you fight them for every inch, you aren't a fascist. If Romanis invade your city and threaten, assault, and rob your citizens and you remove them, you aren't a fascist.
The issue with the Romani is that they refuse to integrate. Or rather, the people we call the Romani are the people left after parts of their population DID integrate and now are just a part of society. It's selection really.
What do you do with a population like this that is actively belligerent? The Nazis solution was extermination, and I obviously think that's very immoral. Just letting them walk all over us is also immoral. Forced integration by breaking them up into individual families isolated from each other and performing cultural genocide? Also immoral.
This is a classic dilemma. There's no good option here. But pretending there isn't a dilemma is just fooling yourself.
I think a lot of people haven't actually watched his talk and don't understand what he is saying. If you watch the talk, he is not anti-rails. He is just very pro- agentic coding.
What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
> Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails
To each their own, but I think using Rails in the era of agents is probably a mistake. It has 2 big problems IMO.
(a) A ton of footguns that an agent can and will miss on occasion, and as we manually review less and less code, we will also miss it, and
(b) security on the web has become increasingly important due to hostile AI agents, and while rails has great secure conventions (see (a)), it's still easier to screw up something and not catch it until after it's deployed because there are simply less guardrails in place (dynamic types, no compile, slow tests, generally bad performance profile).
Not sure if you’re speaking from experience or just being theoretical here. We’re using Rails and it’s been great. Maintenance and upgrades have been a breeze.
All this static vs dynamic stuff doesn’t really matter anymore. AI doesn’t care. You just need to close the feedback loop with tests, linting, a compiler, or whatever else gives it a clear signal.
Rails dev here, still using it, still plan on using it, use agents, don't see them making food gun decisions with rails apis just code.
Rails comes with the console by default, so production inspection of a bug is something the ai can do without a ton of bs to be set up, and that console can be forced to be auditable (using standard gems) or read only (using flags).
I used to love rust, still do sorta, but yeah I think this is really not a good argument against a tool that operationally is better at most things at being observed or poked or prodded or tested in production
Do the teams fully understand the code that they are committing? Are the teams reviewing each others code or are agents? When agents do all the coding, and perhaps the reviewing, and the patching what is left of the team? Knowledge transfer, acculturation, and so forth seem increasingly futile, and the social bonds between workers begins to erode.(1) DHH's speech seems like a weird eulogy for the entire Rails community, although many of us saw this coming several years ago.
Most devs I know who hate native apps are either web devs trying to embed web tech into everything they touch, or they just hate Apple.
Most users don’t care. What they do care about is performance, and native is usually the easiest way to get there.
For your AI workflow questions, it depends. With or without AI, those decisions depend on the organisation’s direction, the team’s capabilities, and their preferences. Did your org have a single answer for the best programming language, framework, or workflow even before AI? There was never a single right answer to any of that.
I hate native apps. There are use cases better suited to native apps but often it's just not what I want.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
Users absolutely care, people hate downloading random shit on their phone they don't want but are forced to.
What has always been true is that users often have no choice or voice to express their actual desires. It's not like there is a public alternative here (when there should be).
One of the things I admire most about Basecamp is that they are a bootstrapped, profitable business. There's no shame in running a business this way. The world would be more resilient if more business owners grew sustainably instead of soaking up endless invester funding and losing money year after year before enshittifying in a desperate attempt to repay their overlords.
Here, I will give you my upvote! That's how Issuetrak is. The founder (me), still owns a majority of the stock, there's no outside investment, and we have customers who've been with us more than 20 years. Multiple employees as well!
>His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps
I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.
as a solo: you can build and ship more in your own time
as a startup: you can iterate and scale more with more velocity and less growing pains
as an enterprise: people with ideas but not a technical background can put their tokens where their mouth is and build their own interfaces, personal apps, ask their own questions, ship their own features without having to navigate layer 8 and play games for resources
At least within my circle, that’s not really the case. Instead, what I’m seeing is more of a hiring freeze, with the budget being used to empower existing employees through AI. Which I think is a more reasonable take.
That's often layoffs in disguise. If you want to cut 10%, but you don't want to do it as a single layoff, because that's expensive, can trigger certain laws depending where you are, and might disrupt teams, who do you cut?
Instead you can do layoff by attrition, you stop hiring, and you don't backfill seats, as people naturally leave or get pip-ed, the team shrink, you don't rehire into the position, and in a year or two, you cut down by 10%.
Also, I wouldn't trivialize a freeze in hiring growth, it means to get a job you have to wait for someone to retire, and also wait for people looking for jobs with more experience as they're more likely to fill the roll to also retire. Basically there's now way more demand for jobs than hiring, so that will drive compensation down for those currently employed.
Adding on to your point about attrition: if internal promotions in engineering are decided by your ability to be a force multiplier, to facilitate cross team collaboration, mentor and help others to skill up, how do any currently employed engineers demonstrate that with no one new to mentor or train? How do you collaborate when teammates work with AI tools more and coworkers less? Would they just have an easier time getting into a higher responsibility role looking elsewhere?
> We can't hire or give anyone raises, but we will expect you to be more productive via throwing money into the slop void.
i see your point and i want to tell you it's pretty much the same with cloud computing, which is so much more expensive than running your own hardware... and yet nobody's really questioning cloud computing (except the oxide people, but they're still tiny)
the company i work for could probably spent half its yearly cloud bill in hardware and be fine for 3-5 years.
guess who discovered the same thing and booted google cloud off their books? dhh
Why does it sound like layoffs? If you keep the team size the same and use the productivity increase to deliver more business value, how is that layoffs?
If I figure out a way to make my workers produce 10 times more widgets each, it doesn't automatically follow that there is a market for the extra 9 widgets. Otherwise I would have hired 9 extra workers before that invention to fulfill the market demand.
The demand for software will not increase at the speed our ability to produce it does.
That is the fallacy of all those MBA degrees with exponential growth expectations, they never take into account the physical limitations of goods, like your very good examples.
Thus layoffs, no need to keep as many employees around.
There is no MBA like magical growth, the amount of customers is a physical limitation of inhabitants on planet Earth that are willing to actually use a specific piece of software, regardless of how productive it was made in first place.
If every engineer is 10-100x more productive with AI, and one company slashes its workforce to maintain the same level of productivity at reduced cost, it will lose out to its competitor who retains the same workforce and does far more with it.
Right now, the vibe at my company is not “we can save so much money with AI” it’s “here’s an infinite budget, use all the tokens you can to expand our moat because we’ve never been more sensitive to competitive disruption than we are now”
> TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding.
That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:
That DHH is into AI agents everywhere is easy to see, but if you go to rails-con, would you not expect this to be about rails as such, and people? Now it's about rust - and AI. Controlled by big corporations. Yikes - some people must be upset about having gone there to listen to DHH preaching about an agentic future.
Edit: I also watched parts of the recent youtube video about rails. I could not focus on the content because DHH's style was so strange. I've seen that style before - nothingburger talks. Look at phrases he used such as "I have retired from being a professional programmer/software engineer". This is all aimed to hype up "agentic coding is the future". Rails is dead - that video is all the proof one needs. DHH shifted gears to AI, and it is quite similar to when he first promoted rails. But now it is about AI, not rails.
It seems to me, so far, everyone moved one level up.
- A layperson can now build one a solo developer can do
- A solo dev can now build what an agency of web development can do
- An agency of web development can now build native apps similar to what large corporation can do
- Large corporation can now tackle even more ambitious projects
Which makes sense given what got automated. This is with the current tech, people still exploring the full potential, but if that turns out to be the case then I'd argue the software market will grow substantially and we are just having an adjustment period.
This matches my experience. My solo projects are now bigger than I ever would have accepted alone. The one I’m going to finish soon is one I actually refused a year ago because it was too big.
It’s the top of the chain that I wonder about. Agentic development is so fast (and in the process I’ve developed so good) that I’m thinking there is actually a maximum size a company doing this work could get. Beyond that top end size the management overhead is what’s limiting or the market size total. Maybe not, maybe mega dev houses will find other problems to solve, but I have a hard time imagining it.
I do suspect there will be many mega projects. Things like new operating systems, new apps ecosystem (not just apple/android), new virtual reality environments, massive interconnected web of agents, in-house models etc, also alot of re-writes and update of existing infrastructure.. competitors to existing social networks and many established players..I think the entire software ecosystem will grow larger, wider and deeper from all directions.
From what I have seen the pie will get way larger, but there is growth pain and adjustment period for sure.
But to your point, I also think solo devs/freelancer are now seeing the most gains, that's because they can adapt the fastest and they don't need to deal with existing overheads.
Larger organizations might need more tooling/agents and better internal processes before they can see the full potential. I don't think ww, as an industry, are there yet, this tech started truly working less than a year ago.
It’s not his message, it’s the forum. Why host a rails conference, that he explicitly created because he was silenced from the main one…to them not talk about rails?
Why not adapt rails for this next generation?
Why do it this way? It’s like walking into a temple to yell about Jesus. It was absurdly obnoxious.
But he himself promotes such a future too. This is a conflict of interest.
You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.
> Agents do currently work well with Rails
According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.
Nothing that he said is just him espousing the truth. It is the world as he and all the other AI-pilled people wish it to be. It is a world they want to convince everyone is inevitable. There are still a lot of people outside of tech bubbles that don't like the direction AI is going and don't want to embrace what these companies are doing or how the government is handling it.
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
AI is not as big of a productivity boost as compilers were but it is not zero. Back then, SQL was created and marketed as something “managers could use”, another parallel to the current cycle. This whole hype cycle is something we’ve seen before and IMO, we should know better how to handle it this time around. It’s a bit disappointing to hear the same arguments every time.
> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
People say "background" here, because the default assumption is HN readers have software expertise, but it's frequently unclear what else, if anything, they have here.
I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.
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That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?
Because I understand what sociology is and isn't, since I too have "a background" in sociology and urban development. As well as statistics, history and even futurology.
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
I'm glad you found that interesting, whoever you are. KingMob is right, though: I have college degrees in those subjects, and I work in urban planning. However, that doesn't make my post an appeal to authority. He discusses topics that have been very thoroughly studied over the course of decades, and he seems unfamiliar with these studies. He seems to go for a "it's just basic logic, right?" approach in many of his posts. It's not very effective writing - but perhaps it is if you have no background in these subjects?
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
Haven't heard him talking about urban development, except for a general preference for European-style urban design (safety, efficiency, for people), and the overall terrible American car-centered design. Please correct me if he did say something incorrect/stupid regarding the urban design.
I don't think so. But urban planning covers a lot more than design and development and transportation. There's lots of history that inevitably includes exclusionary housing and redlining (e.g., historical systemic racism) and crime, as well as immigration, policing, job accessibility, and more. He's had a few posts that touch upon some of these. In sum, I think he's intellectually lazy.
> Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_.
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.
With his infamous "As I remember London" article [1] he directly correlated skin colour to nationality leading to the claim that native Brits had dropped from 60% to a third.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
That's disingenuous because it's a neologism based on the population that were in America at the time of its colonisation. Native literally has the etymology of place of birth in the word.
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
The literal definition and etymology of 'native' relates to birth, check a dictionary and the definition will read the same. The truth is that 60% of London's population is made up of native Brits and that hasn't changed at all over the last 25 years.
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a 1900 year old working international port city, it has had a large population of European Jews for centuries, various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees made up perhaps ten per cent (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15%) of the population of London. But they didn’t leave; they simply assimilated.
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
>I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
"I don't believe this hatefact because it goes against the narrative!"
It's a fact that England has been over 95% ethnically homogeneous for hundreds of years. The only native Brits to England are the English (White Brits).
That is also bullshit (although a popular myth, deliberately cultivated by 19th-century English supremacists to justify subjugating their Celtic neighbors). Every region in Britain has a majority of Insular Celtic DNA on average (though the fraction varies). Even in the most heavily Anglo-Saxon regions like East Anglia, Germanic DNA is in the minority.
And of course the Celtic Britons replaced the Neolithic farmers, who replaced the Mesolithic foragers, and so on. "Indigenous" becomes meaningless with so many population replacements.
You think Celtic Brits don't count as white? Have you seen us? We're some of the pastiest looking people you will ever meet. I could get sunburnt opening the fridge.
Oh hon, I am your Irish people transported across a sea. In this part of my family, “happily” by personal decision, as opposed to the other half that wound up in Australia. The sun and I have made our peace.
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.
Same. I find that the combination of the BEAM runtime and the guardrails that you get with an Elixir project, functional style and particularly the consistent structure of using Ash with it for data, API and CLI lead to a very maintainable codebase even with a lot of AI.
Phoenix with LiveView bypassing the need for a separate frontend framework is also a huge win there.
I sat front row for David's talk yesterday morning. Having talked with him the day before, I’ll admit… I wasn’t particularly surprised (nor unprepared).
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
They’ll be getting nervous too at some point the agentic port will come for cobol. The past hesitation and risk aversion will subside once the less risky stuff is addressed. Once someone big enough sets a precedent, it will gain momentum
The market being what it is, I took a job in ColdFusion last year.
There are people here who have worked in the same CF codebase for over twenty years. They might start and finish their careers in a language everyone else forgot about decades ago.
I think Ruby has enough momentum that career Rubyists will have a home for as long as they want one.
The foundations yes, the rest only if you never change between RDMS products.
On my 50s, learnt SQL around 1996, have used SQL across Access, Informix, DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, PrestoDB, Neo4j.
To be fair, this is true of most of AFK world. Things start seeing a lot less doomy and gloomy when you're actually outside talking with other humans. Seems to mostly be online and various darker corners where they're dooming and glooming.
the algorithm is programmed to deliver it. Better engagement metrics with misery and anger than joy and hopefulness. (yes I know that you will reply 'but I prefer the joy and hope', but that's not the case across the wider population)
I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers though.
Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.
If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.
I don't think that hiring the engineers was ever an option. He said that he couldnt maintain six native apps before agentic coding. The business never even considered expanding headcount by 6X to do it, it was a complete nonstarter.
There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).
To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.
It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.
I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.
People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.
Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.
Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work
It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"
But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.
So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.
Jevon's paradox has to do with consuming resources, not employment. There are plenty of examples of fields getting more efficient and employment falling. Farming and manufacturing being 2 examples.
You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.
And I think the online reality is much closer to the truth than AFK reality. I can't think of a single founder I've talked to in the past two years that's building with rails. That doesn't mean rails dies overnight, but it does mean it's simply all downhill from here.
How can Rails live long if no one creates new things with it? Our web applications aren't like the Pyramids at Giza. DHH literally said that even without a blank canvas (Hey's backend) they were still able to re-write the backend in Rust and are not looking back.
That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
He clarified today, saying he would build any new app today in Rails. Should that app become so popular that it would benefit from Rust, he would rewrite it in Rust.
According to the schedule, today had a keynote on "AI and the future of Ruby & Rails — a chat with Matz & DHH". I suspect that might have clarified, but sadly they don't seem to have released a video (yet?)
You can accuse DHH of many things, but not of grifting, insincerity, political politeness/correctness just not to offend people. The guy speaks his mind and is unapologetic about it.
The drastic change in the ethnic/cultural makeup of people leaving in many Western countries is a fact. In Finland it is +70% foregners only in the past 10 years. Do you want to dispute stats? Write to the Finnish department of statistics.
Or are you arguing that this is a natural process and politicians can't influence it? Wrong. Pre-post Brexit stats show the opposite. As do the stats from Denmark, after politicians started working on the issue.
You are fine with stats, but don't like DHH's opinions about those facts? Well, those are opinions and everyone has a right to them. Opinions and feelings based on morals can't really be proved incorrect.
Or are you tone policing?
So what exactly is the actual problem? "Someone on the internet has wrong opinions and is not a carbon copy of me, politically"? What a silly and totalitarian behavior to call other people dirty names!
Stop calling anyone with differing opinions a racist or xenophobe. It really feels like these activists are deliberately misusing powerful words in order to weaken them (if everyone is called a racist, no matter how undeservedly, then no one is). Or they are simply stupid and do not understand the reaction they are causing with their totalitarian tactics.
He was't talking about the color of the skin or a passport. He was talking about the culture, does it integrate well, is it compatible, is it "enriching" or actually enriching. Is the person and the group this person belongs to, a negative or a positive for the country, the society, the original/native people.
This has nothing to do with the race or a color of one's skin. Like Idris Elba is British as is Rishi Sunak.
Are you really so ignorant or just pretending to be? White replacement is a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. You are not under attack. You are not being suppressed or silenced. DHH just doesn’t like people with skin tones darker than his own and who don’t live their lives as presented on nazi party’s propaganda posters. Statistics ain’t on his side. I’m just relaying what he said, if you don’t like that, take that to DHH. I do not endorse nazism.
And I’m not saying anyone’s opinions are wrong, I’m just saying calls to violence, such as DHH’s suggested deportations of people based solely on their skin color, are not opinions. Violence mustn’t be re-labeled as an opinion. Advocating for harming people or violating their agency cannot pass as political position, not even fringe one. You are free to have opinions, values and beliefs, but don’t think other people will be fine with that when your opinion starts affecting their lives. No matter what someone’s external appearance makes you think about a person, they also have opinions, values and beliefs.
(This just a short summary of what basic human decency is.)
I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.
Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.
Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.
The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.
Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.
> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.
And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your yearly income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it.
I use air quote on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
The premium models are worth 10% of your income at least.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
10% of a software engineer salary is a lot of money. That's just ridiculous.
Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.
Have you tried to negotiate a 10% pay raise because “you can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5”? I’d wager you’re more likely to get a “the fuck do we need you for then” than that pay raise.
The whole AI issue is and always has been a social question. It's hardly a ridiculous concept to have a skilled worker control a $10k budget to buy tools. In many fields that is normal.
Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.
I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.
I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.
You can pay $5 for deepseek 4.1 flash and be on the pareto frontier. And you can pay between $20-200/month for a huge amount of usage of the absolute frontier models. I was concerned about costs a year ago but with the proliferation of great cheap models, I think it's no longer a concern at all. I'd be fine if I could only use 4.1 flash.
I think the fear, threat, and valuation, of the frontier labs is that they will cross some line and have models that are infinitely smarter and more capable than everyone else. If that should happen, your deepseek account would be meaningless.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
I make 55k working at a dental office and a restaurant and I'm paying 200$ a month on open source models because I'm having an absolute blast with them.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
20 a month and using sonnet mostly for random fun stuff.
At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.
It's easier to enjoy it if you don't see how the sausage is made.
I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.
Everyone in the team has become simple
rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out.
Whoever figures out better ways to:
1. Present a big AI PR to a fellow human for review
2. Understand a big AI PR, as a human reviewer
...is going to be a hero. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems of this new era.
I've been experimenting with this, but it's early days. My efforts are mostly along the lines of having AI generate artifacts that guide the reviewer through the PR in execution flow order, explaining the reason for changes along the way.
I don't think that's the way forward. We don't accept mega-PRs from people, why accept them from machines? The best practice of small, focused commits - whether it be from a person or a LLM - will win out in time once we're past this manic phase.
Have you tried OpenRouter and the DeepSeek-like models? If you try to optimize a little you could probably slash those costs.
I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.
You think 2-8% is a problem? There's a large world outside the US. "Hundreds of dollars" per month is most of my salary, I can afford that only by going hungry half the time.
Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.
Good point. Most of us at the conference are still trying to make a living with Rails. That's not a concern for him. Can he remember what it was like to have to do that? Probably, but he feels very differently waking up each day than the rest of us.
Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:
"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."
DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!
The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.
I’ve made a similar point to my colleagues recently about cross-platform vs native apps. If we’re using AI anyway, do the arguments we made years ago still hold today?
I know some people might disagree, mainly because AI isn’t a new architecture or a new programming language in the traditional sense. But I still think it’s worth revisiting the assumptions and having the discussion.
Depends a lot on the token budget I think, different situations for established businesses or strapped founders vs side hustles or hobbyists. So in a way you outgrow Rails or frameworks like it once you can afford a software factory on autopilot 24/7.
For a lot of companies it is not a factor because they have free app complementary to their services.
Main point is that even if you could slop out some code to have a mobile app there is enough of additional burden that makes it not really worth it when you can get away with web version that is good enough and you don’t have to care about all that bs coming with publishing and maintaining a mobile app or to be specific you need to maintain exactly 2 apps.
Put aside the usual web-dev perspective for a moment. As developers, we build for our users.
The web and native apps serve different purposes. Users do not use a website the same way they use a mobile app, and the trade-offs are different.
I’m getting tired of web developers failing to acknowledge that and treating web technology like a hammer that needs to be applied to every nail they come across.
And especially when people say “the web”, what they often really mean is Chrome and the Chromium ecosystem. A lot of web apps barely get tested properly on Firefox or Safari, which only reinforces Google’s monopoly over the web platform.
Yes, app stores have their problems. That does not make the web the right answer for every product.
I can’t imagine how agile apps and difficult environment you have to develop for to really feel tokens cost at implementation level. Meetings, research, PoCes and everything else eats thousands times more.
Promoting his rails services where the creator and biggest defender of rails replaced rails with an AI generated rust version without writing a single line of code.
His comment is just damage control and biased, it did not state he's heavily invested in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.
That worldview assumes that technology is like rain or an asteroid shower, and we just have to accept it. Its not. Humans make technology and decide what is going to be used.
No technology is inevitable. Technology isn't nature.
I actually have no problem with him even if he directly say it out loud announcing the death of Ruby and Rails. And I am not even against agents taking over some jobs meaning less jobs for current developers. That is part of how new technology has always been, replacing some and we move on.
It is just that it shouldn't be done in the opening keynote of a conference. Had this been at the closing keynote it would have been much better.
> In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
> Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
> p(bloom)
These aphorisms try to put a more positive spin on the keynote, but they miss the point that made it so disappointing for a lot of people.
They travelled to a Ruby on Rails conference because they wanted to hear RoR talks. The keynote was all about AI and Rust and ended with “don’t be losers” about the AI debate.
Ruby on Rails content not found.
I suppose the die hard fans who have been around this long and who continue to travel to see DHH speak have aligned themselves with him as a personality figure, maybe more so than with Rails itself. Outside of that bubble, it just feels sad that one person used the conference to do yet another controversial move in an inflammatory way while ignoring the topic everyone travelled for. I say this as someone who uses a lot of AI and also agrees that programming work has changed. It’s just so insulting to be surprise-lectured about it with condescending “don’t be losers” comments when the topic was supposed to be Rails.
There was an opportunity to talk about what AI meant for the future of Rails, but instead he went off bragging about rewriting Hey in Rust. Rust has been my primary language for years, but I don’t want to be lectured about it in a Rails keynote while Rails discussion is nowhere to be found.
The constant has always been tools that maximize developer productivity. What's changed is that LLMs are now the best way for developers to tell machines what to do. We've all been given a much bigger lever we can use to spend our waking hours (and even sleeping hours if you run agents overnight) to move even bigger mountains.
DHH is a Spotify board member. Spotify is run by a snowboarder and sells the illusion that shops can be vibe coded by merchants.
DHH was against AI before 2024/2025 and is a gigantic sellout, just like the Ruby core people employed by Spotify.
DHH has only written web software and knows nothing about serious software development. He is a blowhard who even sells out his own framework for monetary gains.
>DHH has only written web software and knows nothing about serious software development.
I don't particularly like DHH either but web software is definitely serious. Shopify (which you seem to have confused with Spotify) runs on Rails. So does GitHub.
Those are both huge platforms handling a ton of traffic. If GitHub isn't "serious software" then what is?
Years and years ago I wrote a PWA for my wife and I to sync lists (packing lists, groceries, TODOs etc) cross-device. It's been running in a docker container and only goes down when the server reboots for kernel upgrades. That's at least five 9s of reliability. It has 2 users.
It's the framing. Wolves, sheep, and gypsies. "Standing idly by while your livestock is devoured by predators or your neighborhood is taken over by migrants"; migrants are not inherently predators at all. North America is built by them. DHH implies anyone from outside is only arriving to violate and destroy what existed before them. This is not at all how it works.
Alongside this framing is seemingly no admission or acknowledgement that crimes have been and still are perpetrated by "normal Brits" as well; the focus is entirely on the barbarians coming from outside to maraud. It's as though he attaches criminality to foreignness.
He also steps all over the line of what a "native" Brit is. Seemingly not someone born there, but, according to statistics he is certainly referring to white Brits.
The list goes on. The man is racist. I don't think being anti-large scale immigration is inherently racist at all. As a Canadian I have substantial concerns about how immigration is conducted, and I don't consider that racist. But very, very little of what DHH thinks, or how he frames his ideas, ever crosses my mind. I don't think about preserving 'real' or 'normal' Canadians. I think a lot about how immigrants have made my country better. I don't internally or explicitly associate crime with immigration. It's much different.
Right he juxtaposes wolves:shoot::gypsies:deport — using a literal extermination campaign as a metaphor has been incredibly problematic throughout history.
Also generally in Denmark gypsy is a pejorative (sigøjner). One could go on and on, there's no overreach to the racist claim by any means.
He's not bumbling into these situations, he knows very well what he's doing.
You can always go live in Africa/the Middle East if you want to live there. We don't so will not be permitting people from those areas to take over our countries, thanks.
no it was the part (not in this talk) where he said immigrants are invaders coming to steal everything and do crime and need to be culled like a wolf population
An agent that was looking at the log output from a program in a typical language, and also looking at the code for that program, would have a lot of unanswered questions related to "how do I iterate on this?" Maybe there's a kubernetes cluster involved somewhere. Maybe it there's a cloud storage bucket. Maybe there's dashboards and metrics and telemetry hosted by servers that the agent doesn't know the name of.
Elixir runs on the BEAM which lets you do hot code reloading process at a time. And these are much more lightweight than your typical OS process. So you can do things on the BEAM which would be just crazy to do on other achitectures. Like if you have a server which needs to do something for a million users, it would be insanity to run a million separate OS processes for the job. But BEAM processes are so lightweight that you can do that.
And since they support hot code reloading, you can patch the code for just your user's process in a sort of "what-if" experiment. Other architectures would require you to implement separate test environments or complicated feature flag systems, but the beam lets you just reach out and change it for just the process you care about--you're not baking the experiment into an OSI image or anything so dangerous as that... blast radius is kept small.
And the process by which you would carry out this experiment, it's all doable at the elixir shell. You connect to the BEAM and make changes. That's a tremendous reduction in context that an agent needs to load--context which would otherwise instruct the agent about how to reason about the deploy process and how to wall off your experiment from others so as to not cause problems with it is just answered implicitly by how the BEAM works.
Elixir compiles to BEAM bytecode, so you get all of this because the BEAM is cool. As for Elixir as a language... I don't think there's anything agent-specific about it. Gleam might be a better choice since it's statically typed and also compiles to BEAM bytecode, but it's not as popular as Elixir.
I maintain Elixir and Rails applications. In my opinion, almost all LLMs handle Elixir better. I suspect, though do not know, being an immutable functional language and composing applications in a functional style makes it easier for the models to "reason" about the code and state. I learned very quickly that this is my preferred language for that very reason.
Additionally, the features available in the BEAM and OTP mean the agents have built-in tools for many things that would require reaching for 3rd-party libraries or even additional services. This means less variability in design as the models will happily use all the language features human developers would have to learn about and understand over time to use effectively. Not that this isn't important, but I believe models do a better job steering you to obvious and optimal solutions with Elixir.
The new type system is only going to make it better.
Yep I find Elixir very enjoyable with agents at the moment, I've been developing a lot in it. It helps that I already liked the language and the platform, and now I just have the ability to build out my ideas faster.
I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.
Worry not, for I am using Claude right now. I would never question the doctrine of AI usefulness and productivity. Please scrap that J'accuse draft, sir, for I would never commit blasphemy against AI, I promise.
It's still early days, I'm hesitant to claim the death of software engineering. It's good now because LLMs were all trained on actual human output. One possible future is a slop death spiral.
I sure as hell am never again releasing human-authored open-source in a way that can be scraped. My Github is now relegated to the lowest quality slop from the cheapest models.
I stopped writing code manually more than a year ago. I've experienced the 100x, even perhaps the 1000x he mentions, and I still think he's fucking psychotic.
Not reading generated webapp code is one thing. Blindly commiting OS code is a whole different dimension.
So far a Rust rewrite's success rate directly, probably super linearly, correlates with the presence of a good, well designed test suite. This is why Bun's rewrite and others are successful. I anticipate that this will be true for the 37Signals rewrites.
I want to learn a couple of things once they are done:
1. Once the test suite assistance is over, how do features get built in their backends and continue to maintain the same quality. LLM test writing is a bit trickier as it often favors what Randy Coulman called tautological tests back in the day. It takes a lot of work to get them not to do this, so I am guessing folks at 37Signals will read at least this part. I can't imagine zero Rust read at all.
2. Over the years they had a few innovations in their domain design, ones that Rails made easier to do, for instance their delegated type pattern. Will Rust replicate this, and how would one know without reading it, or perhaps it does not matter? Furthermore, how do newer patterns emerge? and how does our arsenal of better abstractions keep growing?
I don't have the answers but I am glad there is a chance we can learn said answers.
That's cool, but like with most things, I think the manager types will misunderstand:
- A lot of this is looking at an existing app and/or code for reference.
- The people doing/guiding this are skilled.
- People have thought about what to make.
Otherwise they hear "20 minutes" and think AI can spit out a logical or good product from no reference or planning.
I really enjoyed DHH's keynote speech using his own family lineage story via the art history intertwined with technology evolution portrait paintings -> photography pictures as analogy of what's happening right now in the technology landscapes.
He may be racist but what a great orator! (Who else does that apply to?) Can't really disagree with him about the AI stuff either. I mean maybe it's a bit premature but if it isn't true now it will be in 5-10 years.
I guess the death of Ruby is a silver lining to AI at least.
In the past I've wanted to edit a couple of Ruby programs (Asciidoctor and Gitlab) and the fact that they were written in Ruby basically made it impossible.
So the keynote mentions that in a perspective you are going to be a "maker of things" rather than a coder. But, nobody is asking, in a perspective, why would anybody use the stuff you "make" rather than using AI directly? All of the notion of apps disappears, in a perspective.
Because it does take some skills, judgement, taste, knowledge, time and effort to build things. He said the notion is not very different from directing contractors team, and also said that a 10x dev in now 1000x with a tool like this. He also gave the parallel of photography to address this point, that people were forced to be more creative and adapt.
But I assume you didn't use to build anything substantial.
Business people I work with tend to have all kind of ideas in different places, I cannot count all the Trello boards they have abandoned. Users are usually lazy and don't want to fill in data properly, well yeah chatbox with llm is cool interface, but you still have to enforce structure for data so it is useful.
With AI problem is still there "garbage in, garbage out", models are not going to imagine correct data to fill in blanks, in the end if you need someones birthday, someone has to type it in.
Web app I am working on is organised only because we get engineers and quality assurance and we get paid for maintaining application. Data is structured and we can deliver insights because the application enforces structure.
There are far more requirements than AI can deliver on its own.
I have a "cooking notebook" of recipes, cooking techniques and notes, that over the past ~15 years or so I've migrated from Evernote to Notion and most recently to Bear. I've built this all up over time, and don't really want to just ask ChatGPT instead.
I have a pretty solid idea what the 'perfect' custom app for this would look like for me at this point. I've toyed with the idea of vibe coding it, but I simply don't have the time to get it built, test it out, and refine it to the point where it'd meet the vision of what I want.
Bear isn't exactly what I want but it's close enough right now to warrant using it and paying for it. And it seems to have a decent team behind that's going to spend time continuing to build and improve it so I don't have to.
At least at the current level of AI, it still takes days/weeks/months to make a good app if you have standards. That's not effort everyone will want to do.
I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately. I am in the process of building my own music software applications. This is actually allowing me to leave MacOS since Ableton was previously the anchor for me. I can now build tools that are more geared towards what I always wanted in Rust much like DHH was talking about in that talk.
I could sell some of my tools I built but I am on the fence about it. As a few others have said, there is still work and taste that goes into those tools that some might not want to put the effort into. However, there will be an increasing number of people who just build bespoke tools for themselves. That's probably ok. There's a market for both.
The most important thing now (and maybe always) is distribution. If anyone can build something then it ultimately comes down to your ability to market, build trust and provide support at 2:30 AM. That's hard to do when you're a one person shop. Software is an ongoing operational commitment if you make it your business.
Do you change the oil on your car yourself? No? Why not? Buying the oil, filters and all the tools you need to do it forever would cost less than one oil change at the dealership. Plenty of videos on YouTube you can learn from.
Sure, but changing the oil means buying a bunch of stuff and getting dirty. Replacing your vibe coded garbage app with my vibe coded garbage app is much much easier than changing my oil.
That said, I think this only applies to apps that can be replaced by vibe coded garbage. Anything with a network effect, or anything that requires deep domain knowledge is much safer
> Replacing your vibe coded garbage app with my vibe coded garbage app is much much easier than changing my oil
I am not sure what is it about the HN crowd that makes them so out of touch with what the average Joe is capable of. It's like that Dropbox post top comment all over again.
Don't you think that the only reason you think it's simple is because you're... A professional Software Engineer??
I know for a fact that it has gotten simpler. Which means that the number of people who can do a version of the thing i’ve been doing most of my life got way way way bigger in the last couple years.
Sure, not everybody can do it - i take your point. But the dynamic between can and can’t has changed. Projects I wouldn’t take on because they were too much work for not enough reward have become something I can pop off in a couple hours. People who know nothing about coding but a lot about their specific need can build complex apps in days.
> Which means that the number of people who can do a version of the thing i’ve been doing most of my life got way way way bigger in the last couple years.
Which invariably means that businesses who incorrectly believe that their vibe coded solution will withstand the trials and tribulations of production will be needing even more professional help when it all goes wrong.
Yes people shouldn't discuss until they have tried vibe coding as SaaS. I do this now and it is 10x faster at coding and 1x on any other tasks. So overall maybe 3 months work is done in a month. This means the typical SaaS may be cheaper now but it is not like anyone can vibe code it cheaper than the subscription fee.
Drain plug is in a stupid location that I don't often feel like dealing with. I do change the oil myself in all my other machines with much more pleasant for oil change designs, though. So I guess what you are saying is that AI isn't ergonomic enough yet, but will that hold true much longer?
> Buying the oil, filters and all the tools you need to do it forever would cost less than one oil change at the dealership.
Are you changing your own oil? The cost of oil alone usually ends up being around 3 DIY changes vs one at the dealer ship. The mobile 1 synthetic I like is currently $92 for a 3-pack of 5qt containers. Which is enough for 3 oil changes with some left over to almost do a 4th. Dealership currently wants $84+tax for change w/free tire rotation. It's cheaper but certainly not "do it forever", and living in an apartment often means risking getting a warning from the landlord for doing auto maintenance in the parking lot since its against the stated rules in the lease.
I just like changing my own oil. Once I bought a house and finally had a garage again, I jacked up my car and truck and changed out all the oils: rear diff, front diff, transfer case, manual transmissions (the best transmissions) ... it may take longer than just putting into one of those places, but I'm doing it myself and I know I'm doing it right. I can inspect everything and I don't have some kid scanning my VIN number and putting my car into a big marketing and tracking database.
I think the perf jump from Ruby to Rust is much greater than .NET Core to Rust. Not much will change in .NET land for the foreseeable future. I see this migration happening from Ruby and others so it is not surprising from that aspect.
Also - what he is talking about was true for well over a year. It is just that a lot of day-to-day gaps between prompt and output were closed in the meantime. In a sense, Ruby on Rails/37 Signals is a late adopter.
> I think the perf jump from Ruby to Rust is much greater than .NET Core to Rust
This has not been true for me. If you are constrained by memory, you will still come out better using Rust, even if you use C# with AOT. We use .NET 10 at work and see 1/5th of the memory being used by a ported Rust service. Your mileage may vary.
Haven't watched the video, but I've been spending a few hours the past week re-acquainting myself with Ruby before diving back into rails introductions.
Ruby is an interesting language to work with. I don't know it like Python, but it's a language that finds problems developers would run into and built solutions in to make it easier.
As for Rails, as a total novice: It is a lot of Convention over Configuration, and it's almost a second language on top of Ruby. Everything works together implicitly so you have to recognize what's happening when you look at the code. I don't know if any Ruby/Rails oriented IDEs exist that guide the developer with hints and shortcuts to how the pieces of a Rails app fit together, but it sure would be handy.
I can see how typed, high-performance languages with explicit references to all the integrations would be easier for AI to handle. But as long as humans sometimes have to look at the code, I would think Rails still has a place.
> how the pieces of a Rails app fit together, but it sure would be handy
Best thing you can do is get a fuzzy file search, but you'll learn the structure soon enough. Once you know it, you'll be very fast. I loved it when I used it professionally.
weird talk; is not reading any code _at all_ is the new standard now? I do happily ai-slop side projects here and there but seems like just going full steam ahead _at work_ is ok? sorry, I meant - is the future now? xd
No, not at all. Anyone who gives a damn at all about producing quality software is reading the code, and frankly most people who care about producing quality software aren't using LLMs to do it.
How a developer oriented conference can give one minute of screen time to a by now fully open, mask off, racist / fascist is beyond me. Does the Rails world don't know, or don't care?
Edit: it's his conference because the actual Rails conf banned him. Sad victory I guess.
Okay, I'll bite. What did he do that's racist and fascist. And please provide receipts.
For reference, here are the definitions:
racist: a person who believes that a particular race is superior to others, or who discriminates against other races
fascism: any right-wing, authoritarian, nationalist ideology characterized by centralized, totalitarian governance, strong regimentation of the economy and society, and repression of criticism or opposition
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadHey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
Where will we be in 5 years?
Examples:
https://dioxuslabs.com/
https://lean-lang.org/
It doesn't make much sense to use a human language like Ruby and leave so much on the table when you can use a language like Rust or C to squeeze a LOT more out of correctness/types/performance.
https://pricklypear.rocks/
Is squeezing a lot more performance beneficial to a business? or is it a small amount of VPS cost per month difference?
It helps to be clear, at least with yourself, about if you're doing something because you can/want to or if there are actual business reasons.
I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.
Let's see how that goes.
Personally, I wouldn't want all my emails stored on a service where the dude doesn't even look at the code anymore.
https://www.hey.com/faqs/#can-i-use-hey-to-check-my-other-em...
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Have a look at fly.io facing similar issues, another platform whose value prop was dev ergonomics: https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites/
What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.
If you don’t build the product that’ll kill your cash cow, your competitors will.
There is an issue with this idea - we write software, we read it, we make sure it does what it should do, that it’s implement in a sensible and efficient way, and, most importantly, we make sure the tests do what they should do.
If you no longer write the code, it’s harder to understand it. If you don’t write the tests, you need to trust the LLM did both jobs correctly (multiple adversarial LLMs can help), but, ultimately, it’s code you can no longer claim you understand. And you can’t really be sure it does what you want until you understand it.
That said, why do we think compilers produce correct code?
Everything is a nail at the moment.
Like people using LLMs to refactor. Refactoring is a solved problem, we've had decades to get nice tooling for this.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Is it types? Are types the answer? Is it rust?
As time has gone on Rails has gotten better about this, but it still means that "your rails" and "my rails" are different enough that AI could easily get confused.
As you say, the other aspect is the intense dynamism which works against AI, which again prefers to have everything explicit and reasonable about from the text.
So I ended up going back to Javascript after a brief 12 year digression into Ruby. I still love Ruby but it's just not the right language for the current environment and team structures - typescript is "worse is better" in the right ways that it's a much better choice for both frontend/backend being the same and better type systems.
Back in the very early days you would have used script/plugin install (svn url)
Here's one of my mirror repositories migrated from SVN into git. https://github.com/jaggederest/acts_as_voteable
However Rust has one serious problem, BUILDS. It’s slow and it takes up a ton of space and memory. You will be working around this on any sizeable codebase. Using cargo check to ration your compiles, a dedicated build box, etc.
If we accept that over half of the people building with rust are using agents (I'm sure this is much higher in reality), then you should also accept that there is a ton of time and resources spent on building / compiling. Optimizing this should probably be a top priority. They need someone who will be fanatical about shaving time and memory use from the build process.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
When designing systems, you want the important details to be right. Especially with authentication and authorization.
From an architecture level, you can know which classes are important to review and which ones are not.
In Software Engineering, we learned about requirements, testings, system design, UMLs, etc, and those seems to be more relevant than ever.
1. You get complexity back at the speed that you add code. Also the complexity compounds.
2. As a human you are still responsible for your code, and you need to understand how the important parts of the code base work.
When you combine these problems, you get a complicated code base where you don't understand the important parts.
That is why software design is getting a comeback. It actually helps with both problems. Less complexity and more understanding.
The part I'm still not sure about is the 2nd point, I just don't know how good those LLMs will get at managing complexity and how important is for human to under details of the code. I'm not sure yet, I could imagine a future where we have have much more higher level tools to manage the comprehension and complexity challenges. Or it could be that LLMs will never fully comprehend the full architecture and humans will always be needed for that kind of big-picture analysis. I really don't know, and frankly I don't think anybody knows.
I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.
(They can, of course, still be wrong)
Lying about your opponents just make them look good. We should all have learnt this lesson from the Trump fiasco.
If you like his politics then good for you, no need to make things up about a country you don't understand.
Ok. And? This was not the statement I objected to. Just because there isn't a mainstream major party right of him, doesn't mean he's to the most right there is in the universe. Those are completely different things.
DHH repeatedly presents electoral democracy as the legitimate mechanism for resolving political disagreement. He has also repeatedly emphasized free speech, including criticizing European restrictions that he regards as excessive, and has argued for keeping political disagreements from destroying ordinary social relationships.
Historians generally use fascism for something considerably more specific than nationalism, anti-immigration politics, or right-wing populism: typically an authoritarian ultranationalist movement hostile to liberal democracy and political pluralism, historically associated with a powerful centralized state, suppression of opposition, and political violence.
DHH doesn’t fit the bill.
What's with people always trying to deny fascism when they see it?
.·°՞( ̑ ᗜ ̑ )՞°·.
The issue with the Romani is that they refuse to integrate. Or rather, the people we call the Romani are the people left after parts of their population DID integrate and now are just a part of society. It's selection really.
What do you do with a population like this that is actively belligerent? The Nazis solution was extermination, and I obviously think that's very immoral. Just letting them walk all over us is also immoral. Forced integration by breaking them up into individual families isolated from each other and performing cultural genocide? Also immoral.
This is a classic dilemma. There's no good option here. But pretending there isn't a dilemma is just fooling yourself.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
https://rubyonrails.org/ai
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
To each their own, but I think using Rails in the era of agents is probably a mistake. It has 2 big problems IMO.
(a) A ton of footguns that an agent can and will miss on occasion, and as we manually review less and less code, we will also miss it, and
(b) security on the web has become increasingly important due to hostile AI agents, and while rails has great secure conventions (see (a)), it's still easier to screw up something and not catch it until after it's deployed because there are simply less guardrails in place (dynamic types, no compile, slow tests, generally bad performance profile).
All this static vs dynamic stuff doesn’t really matter anymore. AI doesn’t care. You just need to close the feedback loop with tests, linting, a compiler, or whatever else gives it a clear signal.
Simple as that.
Rails comes with the console by default, so production inspection of a bug is something the ai can do without a ton of bs to be set up, and that console can be forced to be auditable (using standard gems) or read only (using flags).
I used to love rust, still do sorta, but yeah I think this is really not a good argument against a tool that operationally is better at most things at being observed or poked or prodded or tested in production
(1) https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/
Most users don’t care. What they do care about is performance, and native is usually the easiest way to get there.
For your AI workflow questions, it depends. With or without AI, those decisions depend on the organisation’s direction, the team’s capabilities, and their preferences. Did your org have a single answer for the best programming language, framework, or workflow even before AI? There was never a single right answer to any of that.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
What has always been true is that users often have no choice or voice to express their actual desires. It's not like there is a public alternative here (when there should be).
It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.
I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.
That sounds like layoffs lol.
as a solo: you can build and ship more in your own time
as a startup: you can iterate and scale more with more velocity and less growing pains
as an enterprise: people with ideas but not a technical background can put their tokens where their mouth is and build their own interfaces, personal apps, ask their own questions, ship their own features without having to navigate layer 8 and play games for resources
Instead you can do layoff by attrition, you stop hiring, and you don't backfill seats, as people naturally leave or get pip-ed, the team shrink, you don't rehire into the position, and in a year or two, you cut down by 10%.
Also, I wouldn't trivialize a freeze in hiring growth, it means to get a job you have to wait for someone to retire, and also wait for people looking for jobs with more experience as they're more likely to fill the roll to also retire. Basically there's now way more demand for jobs than hiring, so that will drive compensation down for those currently employed.
We can't hire or give anyone raises, but we will expect you to be more productive via throwing money into the slop void.
i see your point and i want to tell you it's pretty much the same with cloud computing, which is so much more expensive than running your own hardware... and yet nobody's really questioning cloud computing (except the oxide people, but they're still tiny)
the company i work for could probably spent half its yearly cloud bill in hardware and be fine for 3-5 years.
guess who discovered the same thing and booted google cloud off their books? dhh
that guy is simply enlightened.
The demand for software will not increase at the speed our ability to produce it does.
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
There is no MBA like magical growth, the amount of customers is a physical limitation of inhabitants on planet Earth that are willing to actually use a specific piece of software, regardless of how productive it was made in first place.
Why do you think 100% of all companies will choose the first? Obviously some will choose the latter, hence it sounds like layoffs.
Right now, the vibe at my company is not “we can save so much money with AI” it’s “here’s an infinite budget, use all the tokens you can to expand our moat because we’ve never been more sensitive to competitive disruption than we are now”
That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:
https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a
That DHH is into AI agents everywhere is easy to see, but if you go to rails-con, would you not expect this to be about rails as such, and people? Now it's about rust - and AI. Controlled by big corporations. Yikes - some people must be upset about having gone there to listen to DHH preaching about an agentic future.
Edit: I also watched parts of the recent youtube video about rails. I could not focus on the content because DHH's style was so strange. I've seen that style before - nothingburger talks. Look at phrases he used such as "I have retired from being a professional programmer/software engineer". This is all aimed to hype up "agentic coding is the future". Rails is dead - that video is all the proof one needs. DHH shifted gears to AI, and it is quite similar to when he first promoted rails. But now it is about AI, not rails.
- A layperson can now build one a solo developer can do
- A solo dev can now build what an agency of web development can do
- An agency of web development can now build native apps similar to what large corporation can do
- Large corporation can now tackle even more ambitious projects
Which makes sense given what got automated. This is with the current tech, people still exploring the full potential, but if that turns out to be the case then I'd argue the software market will grow substantially and we are just having an adjustment period.
It’s the top of the chain that I wonder about. Agentic development is so fast (and in the process I’ve developed so good) that I’m thinking there is actually a maximum size a company doing this work could get. Beyond that top end size the management overhead is what’s limiting or the market size total. Maybe not, maybe mega dev houses will find other problems to solve, but I have a hard time imagining it.
From what I have seen the pie will get way larger, but there is growth pain and adjustment period for sure.
Larger organizations might need more tooling/agents and better internal processes before they can see the full potential. I don't think ww, as an industry, are there yet, this tech started truly working less than a year ago.
Why not adapt rails for this next generation?
Why do it this way? It’s like walking into a temple to yell about Jesus. It was absurdly obnoxious.
You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.
> Agents do currently work well with Rails
According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.
What an interesting way to make it sound like that means anything. "Background" - how appropriately vague...
And how exactly does this make you an expert on European, and especially Danish, immigration, culture and vox populi?
I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.
---
That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
Examples of these claims?
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact.
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960. Now it is around 50%, and falling. Again, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
you obviously know this because you know what "native americans" means.
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a 1900 year old working international port city, it has had a large population of European Jews for centuries, various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees made up perhaps ten per cent (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15%) of the population of London. But they didn’t leave; they simply assimilated.
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
>I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
"I don't believe this hatefact because it goes against the narrative!"
It's a fact that England has been over 95% ethnically homogeneous for hundreds of years. The only native Brits to England are the English (White Brits).
Bullshit. They are Johann Come Later Germans who killed off the Celtic Brits.
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-re...
And of course the Celtic Britons replaced the Neolithic farmers, who replaced the Mesolithic foragers, and so on. "Indigenous" becomes meaningless with so many population replacements.
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.
Phoenix with LiveView bypassing the need for a separate frontend framework is also a huge win there.
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
p(gloom)
There are people here who have worked in the same CF codebase for over twenty years. They might start and finish their careers in a language everyone else forgot about decades ago.
I think Ruby has enough momentum that career Rubyists will have a home for as long as they want one.
Buddy of mine pivoted to doing just SQL and road into retirement as a DBA.
With hindsight, we both wished we had gone all-in on SQL way back when.
On my 50s, learnt SQL around 1996, have used SQL across Access, Informix, DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, PrestoDB, Neo4j.
I spent 2 years coding in ColdFusion maybe 25 years ago. I've got experience!
To be fair, this is true of most of AFK world. Things start seeing a lot less doomy and gloomy when you're actually outside talking with other humans. Seems to mostly be online and various darker corners where they're dooming and glooming.
Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.
If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.
If he's hiring new people they won't be engineers or the people that used to do engineering.
They'll be people that are better suited to writing English than code.
There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).
It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.
I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.
People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.
It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"
But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.
So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.
SE is not like farming.
https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195
That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
But it wasn't.
Or are you arguing that this is a natural process and politicians can't influence it? Wrong. Pre-post Brexit stats show the opposite. As do the stats from Denmark, after politicians started working on the issue.
You are fine with stats, but don't like DHH's opinions about those facts? Well, those are opinions and everyone has a right to them. Opinions and feelings based on morals can't really be proved incorrect.
Or are you tone policing?
So what exactly is the actual problem? "Someone on the internet has wrong opinions and is not a carbon copy of me, politically"? What a silly and totalitarian behavior to call other people dirty names!
This is not an opinion, and it is actually a lie because the actual law and constitution of said country disagree.
This has nothing to do with the race or a color of one's skin. Like Idris Elba is British as is Rishi Sunak.
And I’m not saying anyone’s opinions are wrong, I’m just saying calls to violence, such as DHH’s suggested deportations of people based solely on their skin color, are not opinions. Violence mustn’t be re-labeled as an opinion. Advocating for harming people or violating their agency cannot pass as political position, not even fringe one. You are free to have opinions, values and beliefs, but don’t think other people will be fine with that when your opinion starts affecting their lives. No matter what someone’s external appearance makes you think about a person, they also have opinions, values and beliefs.
(This just a short summary of what basic human decency is.)
Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.
But there is a "dead middle".
If you have a big cash flow to go with "...lots of users and [rising] hosting costs" then, yes, you're spot on
But if there is insufficient cash flow then costs are rising and you are a bit stuck.
The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.
Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.
I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.
And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your yearly income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it.
I use air quote on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.
Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.
I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.
I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.
1. Present a big AI PR to a fellow human for review 2. Understand a big AI PR, as a human reviewer
...is going to be a hero. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems of this new era.
I've been experimenting with this, but it's early days. My efforts are mostly along the lines of having AI generate artifacts that guide the reviewer through the PR in execution flow order, explaining the reason for changes along the way.
Full disclosure: I'm working on Xpoze.
I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.
Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.
It's essentially trying to turn programming into pay to play / pay to win, a concept that was gaming related for decades.
It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.
It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.
Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:
"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."
DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!
The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.
I know some people might disagree, mainly because AI isn’t a new architecture or a new programming language in the traditional sense. But I still think it’s worth revisiting the assumptions and having the discussion.
You have to adhere to bizarre requirements, you can be taken down on a whim without possibility to appeal.
You have to pay for a developer account at least to Apple each year $100, Google one time fee $25.
Nothing like that for a web app.
Main point is that even if you could slop out some code to have a mobile app there is enough of additional burden that makes it not really worth it when you can get away with web version that is good enough and you don’t have to care about all that bs coming with publishing and maintaining a mobile app or to be specific you need to maintain exactly 2 apps.
The web and native apps serve different purposes. Users do not use a website the same way they use a mobile app, and the trade-offs are different.
I’m getting tired of web developers failing to acknowledge that and treating web technology like a hammer that needs to be applied to every nail they come across.
And especially when people say “the web”, what they often really mean is Chrome and the Chromium ecosystem. A lot of web apps barely get tested properly on Firefox or Safari, which only reinforces Google’s monopoly over the web platform.
Yes, app stores have their problems. That does not make the web the right answer for every product.
If I name the price for actually developing apps no one will pay, there are only nerds nagging about how they are annoyed by web apps.
Looking it up: Planet Argon is a Ruby on Rails development agency.
He's sitting in the front row at a Ruby on Rails conference - what did you think his job was?
His comment is just damage control and biased, it did not state he's heavily invested in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.
Living in the fear of p(doom) is miserable. We're all gonna die one day anyway.
No technology is inevitable. Technology isn't nature.
It is just that it shouldn't be done in the opening keynote of a conference. Had this been at the closing keynote it would have been much better.
> Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
> p(bloom)
These aphorisms try to put a more positive spin on the keynote, but they miss the point that made it so disappointing for a lot of people.
They travelled to a Ruby on Rails conference because they wanted to hear RoR talks. The keynote was all about AI and Rust and ended with “don’t be losers” about the AI debate.
Ruby on Rails content not found.
I suppose the die hard fans who have been around this long and who continue to travel to see DHH speak have aligned themselves with him as a personality figure, maybe more so than with Rails itself. Outside of that bubble, it just feels sad that one person used the conference to do yet another controversial move in an inflammatory way while ignoring the topic everyone travelled for. I say this as someone who uses a lot of AI and also agrees that programming work has changed. It’s just so insulting to be surprise-lectured about it with condescending “don’t be losers” comments when the topic was supposed to be Rails.
There was an opportunity to talk about what AI meant for the future of Rails, but instead he went off bragging about rewriting Hey in Rust. Rust has been my primary language for years, but I don’t want to be lectured about it in a Rails keynote while Rails discussion is nowhere to be found.
Those who travelled to a soon to be dead web frameworks conference might appreciate the heads up.
Those who refuse to accept or believe it might be salty.
If it was me, I would have preferred to be informed it was dead before spending $699 on tickets and buying airfare and hotel reservations.
1. thank you for omz, it's great
2. how is it possible you've been on HN for over 15 years and have just 254 karma?
DHH was against AI before 2024/2025 and is a gigantic sellout, just like the Ruby core people employed by Spotify.
DHH has only written web software and knows nothing about serious software development. He is a blowhard who even sells out his own framework for monetary gains.
I don't particularly like DHH either but web software is definitely serious. Shopify (which you seem to have confused with Spotify) runs on Rails. So does GitHub.
Those are both huge platforms handling a ton of traffic. If GitHub isn't "serious software" then what is?
Is that "Serious Software"?
(I also smell the wild racism wafting off DHH. Really, don't give this man your attention. Don't break cordon.)
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Alongside this framing is seemingly no admission or acknowledgement that crimes have been and still are perpetrated by "normal Brits" as well; the focus is entirely on the barbarians coming from outside to maraud. It's as though he attaches criminality to foreignness.
He also steps all over the line of what a "native" Brit is. Seemingly not someone born there, but, according to statistics he is certainly referring to white Brits.
The list goes on. The man is racist. I don't think being anti-large scale immigration is inherently racist at all. As a Canadian I have substantial concerns about how immigration is conducted, and I don't consider that racist. But very, very little of what DHH thinks, or how he frames his ideas, ever crosses my mind. I don't think about preserving 'real' or 'normal' Canadians. I think a lot about how immigrants have made my country better. I don't internally or explicitly associate crime with immigration. It's much different.
Also generally in Denmark gypsy is a pejorative (sigøjner). One could go on and on, there's no overreach to the racist claim by any means.
He's not bumbling into these situations, he knows very well what he's doing.
Elixir runs on the BEAM which lets you do hot code reloading process at a time. And these are much more lightweight than your typical OS process. So you can do things on the BEAM which would be just crazy to do on other achitectures. Like if you have a server which needs to do something for a million users, it would be insanity to run a million separate OS processes for the job. But BEAM processes are so lightweight that you can do that.
And since they support hot code reloading, you can patch the code for just your user's process in a sort of "what-if" experiment. Other architectures would require you to implement separate test environments or complicated feature flag systems, but the beam lets you just reach out and change it for just the process you care about--you're not baking the experiment into an OSI image or anything so dangerous as that... blast radius is kept small.
And the process by which you would carry out this experiment, it's all doable at the elixir shell. You connect to the BEAM and make changes. That's a tremendous reduction in context that an agent needs to load--context which would otherwise instruct the agent about how to reason about the deploy process and how to wall off your experiment from others so as to not cause problems with it is just answered implicitly by how the BEAM works.
Elixir compiles to BEAM bytecode, so you get all of this because the BEAM is cool. As for Elixir as a language... I don't think there's anything agent-specific about it. Gleam might be a better choice since it's statically typed and also compiles to BEAM bytecode, but it's not as popular as Elixir.
Additionally, the features available in the BEAM and OTP mean the agents have built-in tools for many things that would require reaching for 3rd-party libraries or even additional services. This means less variability in design as the models will happily use all the language features human developers would have to learn about and understand over time to use effectively. Not that this isn't important, but I believe models do a better job steering you to obvious and optimal solutions with Elixir.
The new type system is only going to make it better.
I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.
https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/
Not reading generated webapp code is one thing. Blindly commiting OS code is a whole different dimension.
I already agreed with everything he said.
He said the same things I've already heard 10 times before, but meaner.
I guess some people need tough love, but that's not the kind of thing you should broadcast to everyone as tough love also puts many people off.
I want to learn a couple of things once they are done:
1. Once the test suite assistance is over, how do features get built in their backends and continue to maintain the same quality. LLM test writing is a bit trickier as it often favors what Randy Coulman called tautological tests back in the day. It takes a lot of work to get them not to do this, so I am guessing folks at 37Signals will read at least this part. I can't imagine zero Rust read at all.
2. Over the years they had a few innovations in their domain design, ones that Rails made easier to do, for instance their delegated type pattern. Will Rust replicate this, and how would one know without reading it, or perhaps it does not matter? Furthermore, how do newer patterns emerge? and how does our arsenal of better abstractions keep growing?
I don't have the answers but I am glad there is a chance we can learn said answers.
- A lot of this is looking at an existing app and/or code for reference. - The people doing/guiding this are skilled. - People have thought about what to make.
Otherwise they hear "20 minutes" and think AI can spit out a logical or good product from no reference or planning.
All DHH's AI opinions are sponcon.
But he has great flagging support and his perception management agency will suppress this one, too.
I guess the death of Ruby is a silver lining to AI at least.
There are lots of languages I don't use, but I can't imagine saying that about any of them.
I guess I could do it with AI now but still...
But I assume you didn't use to build anything substantial.
As of now, but we are talking in a perspective.
Business people I work with tend to have all kind of ideas in different places, I cannot count all the Trello boards they have abandoned. Users are usually lazy and don't want to fill in data properly, well yeah chatbox with llm is cool interface, but you still have to enforce structure for data so it is useful.
With AI problem is still there "garbage in, garbage out", models are not going to imagine correct data to fill in blanks, in the end if you need someones birthday, someone has to type it in.
Web app I am working on is organised only because we get engineers and quality assurance and we get paid for maintaining application. Data is structured and we can deliver insights because the application enforces structure.
There are far more requirements than AI can deliver on its own.
Yeah, I'm sure you are doing ~4 years worth of work per day. Get real Jesus Christ.
I have a pretty solid idea what the 'perfect' custom app for this would look like for me at this point. I've toyed with the idea of vibe coding it, but I simply don't have the time to get it built, test it out, and refine it to the point where it'd meet the vision of what I want.
Bear isn't exactly what I want but it's close enough right now to warrant using it and paying for it. And it seems to have a decent team behind that's going to spend time continuing to build and improve it so I don't have to.
I could sell some of my tools I built but I am on the fence about it. As a few others have said, there is still work and taste that goes into those tools that some might not want to put the effort into. However, there will be an increasing number of people who just build bespoke tools for themselves. That's probably ok. There's a market for both.
The most important thing now (and maybe always) is distribution. If anyone can build something then it ultimately comes down to your ability to market, build trust and provide support at 2:30 AM. That's hard to do when you're a one person shop. Software is an ongoing operational commitment if you make it your business.
That said, I think this only applies to apps that can be replaced by vibe coded garbage. Anything with a network effect, or anything that requires deep domain knowledge is much safer
I am not sure what is it about the HN crowd that makes them so out of touch with what the average Joe is capable of. It's like that Dropbox post top comment all over again.
Don't you think that the only reason you think it's simple is because you're... A professional Software Engineer??
Sure, not everybody can do it - i take your point. But the dynamic between can and can’t has changed. Projects I wouldn’t take on because they were too much work for not enough reward have become something I can pop off in a couple hours. People who know nothing about coding but a lot about their specific need can build complex apps in days.
Which invariably means that businesses who incorrectly believe that their vibe coded solution will withstand the trials and tribulations of production will be needing even more professional help when it all goes wrong.
Everything old is new again.
Drain plug is in a stupid location that I don't often feel like dealing with. I do change the oil myself in all my other machines with much more pleasant for oil change designs, though. So I guess what you are saying is that AI isn't ergonomic enough yet, but will that hold true much longer?
Are you changing your own oil? The cost of oil alone usually ends up being around 3 DIY changes vs one at the dealer ship. The mobile 1 synthetic I like is currently $92 for a 3-pack of 5qt containers. Which is enough for 3 oil changes with some left over to almost do a 4th. Dealership currently wants $84+tax for change w/free tire rotation. It's cheaper but certainly not "do it forever", and living in an apartment often means risking getting a warning from the landlord for doing auto maintenance in the parking lot since its against the stated rules in the lease.
Also - what he is talking about was true for well over a year. It is just that a lot of day-to-day gaps between prompt and output were closed in the meantime. In a sense, Ruby on Rails/37 Signals is a late adopter.
This has not been true for me. If you are constrained by memory, you will still come out better using Rust, even if you use C# with AOT. We use .NET 10 at work and see 1/5th of the memory being used by a ported Rust service. Your mileage may vary.
We've been transitioning in-memory caching for web apps to tiered or on-nvme caching. It's an order of magnitude slower, but no one really noticed.
Ruby is an interesting language to work with. I don't know it like Python, but it's a language that finds problems developers would run into and built solutions in to make it easier.
As for Rails, as a total novice: It is a lot of Convention over Configuration, and it's almost a second language on top of Ruby. Everything works together implicitly so you have to recognize what's happening when you look at the code. I don't know if any Ruby/Rails oriented IDEs exist that guide the developer with hints and shortcuts to how the pieces of a Rails app fit together, but it sure would be handy.
I can see how typed, high-performance languages with explicit references to all the integrations would be easier for AI to handle. But as long as humans sometimes have to look at the code, I would think Rails still has a place.
Best thing you can do is get a fuzzy file search, but you'll learn the structure soon enough. Once you know it, you'll be very fast. I loved it when I used it professionally.
Edit: it's his conference because the actual Rails conf banned him. Sad victory I guess.
For reference, here are the definitions:
racist: a person who believes that a particular race is superior to others, or who discriminates against other races
fascism: any right-wing, authoritarian, nationalist ideology characterized by centralized, totalitarian governance, strong regimentation of the economy and society, and repression of criticism or opposition