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robbyrussell 15 hours ago [-]
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.
In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
p(bloom)
lbrito 9 hours ago [-]
Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
nickjj 8 hours ago [-]
Right, or paying for AI models in general.
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 income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes 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.
sroerick 1 hours ago [-]
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
rglullis 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
sam345 1 hours ago [-]
I'm paying $20 a month using opus 5.5 and having a blast.
1 hours ago [-]
slopinthebag 5 hours ago [-]
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.
kennywinker 3 hours ago [-]
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.
slopinthebag 2 hours ago [-]
sure but if that's the case society and i will have much bigger problems anyways
geraldwhen 7 hours ago [-]
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.
oefrha 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jrumbut 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lbrito 6 hours ago [-]
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.
marcus_holmes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
scottyah 6 hours ago [-]
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.
micromacrofoot 7 hours ago [-]
People generally don't have 10% of their income to just give away on a whim.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
nozzlegear 2 hours ago [-]
> You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.
7 hours ago [-]
secstate 10 hours ago [-]
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?
spiralpolitik 5 hours ago [-]
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.
MattyMc 9 hours ago [-]
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.
sebiw 8 hours ago [-]
Source?
usef- 7 hours ago [-]
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?)
andrewchambers 6 hours ago [-]
This might just be damage control or politeness more than the truth.
db48x 51 seconds ago [-]
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.
machomaster 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ksec 1 hours ago [-]
It would have been the case if he said all the things in keynote unprepared like in a podcast. i.e Speaking his mind.
But it wasn't.
ch4s3 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ksec 2 hours ago [-]
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. I thought it was very irresponsible to the other smaller sponsors and those who paid to join. I know Shopify fund most of it and is likely on the same stand.
devy 5 hours ago [-]
DHH is right (pun intended), p(bloom) is the ONLY WAY to LIVE.
Living in the fear of p(doom) is miserable. We're all gonna die one day anyway.
azuanrb 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ozim 8 hours ago [-]
Publishing mobile apps in Apple store or Google Play is a shit show.
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.
tokioyoyo 7 hours ago [-]
It’s not really as bad as you make it sound.
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
It is that bad.
LollipopYakuza 8 hours ago [-]
I think more often the comparison is web techs (like React native) VS native apps.
zingar 8 hours ago [-]
I mean, that’s like half an hour of tokens, right? (Half joking laugh/cry etc)
rramon 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Aqua_Geek 6 hours ago [-]
With cross-platform frameworks, you’re only paying once for tokens. As businesses’ AI costs continue to rise, that can be a huge decision factor.
How long will that last? It's evident that they are trying to squeeze the engineers to the max.
IMTDb 10 hours ago [-]
Ask the COBOL guys
spiffytech 2 hours ago [-]
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.
specialist 1 hours ago [-]
Smart. Bravo.
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.
sick_of_slop 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
conductr 7 hours ago [-]
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
embedding-shape 11 hours ago [-]
> the vibe here is far from doom and gloom.
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.
Lio 9 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.
If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.
andrewmutz 8 hours ago [-]
Why are you saying he got rid of engineers? Did you watch the talk?
Lio 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, I watched it. I'm not saying he got rid of engineers so much as just not hiring new ones.
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.
andrewmutz 7 hours ago [-]
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.
conductr 7 hours ago [-]
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.
andrewmutz 7 hours ago [-]
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
confidantlake 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jan_m_savage 4 hours ago [-]
You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.
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.
kreskin 7 hours ago [-]
37signals typically doesn't do hire a lot of software engineers but just last week they hired Rob Zolkos who is very clearly a software engineer.
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)
Scarbutt 9 hours ago [-]
From your profile: CEO/Founder of Planet Argon...
Looking it up:
Planet Argon is a Ruby on Rails development agency.
bluerooibos 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
swader999 4 hours ago [-]
Probably not a lumberjack.
Scarbutt 2 hours ago [-]
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 financially in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.
andruby 8 hours ago [-]
I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?
aantix 8 hours ago [-]
Robby is well known in the Ruby community.
robgough 1 days ago [-]
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.
andrewmutz 10 hours ago [-]
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.
aogaili 8 hours ago [-]
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.
138add 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
usef- 7 hours ago [-]
The current Hey was designed before vibe coding. They started using AI very recently.
aogaili 8 hours ago [-]
What is wrong with the website?
Have you seen the older apps built by devs? or all the other bootstrap themes?
138add 8 hours ago [-]
There is nothing wrong with designing like in the year 1999. But claiming improvements when all great websites like Amazon in 2004, the original GitHub, Google etc. were before AI is a bit weak.
He is just promoting Shopify's vibe coding for merchants. I bet on Shopify pivoting to vibe coded Rust soon because of "security".
ilikehurdles 6 hours ago [-]
I’m still not sure what your point regarding hey.com is, and certainly no big website in 1999 resembled it.
But to your other comment, are you professionally employed as a developer and still writing code by hand?
dmix 10 hours ago [-]
> If you watch the talk, he is not anti-rails.
He explicitly said he still loves ruby as a language and thinks Rails is well suited for a future with AI coding.
It's interesting how this stuff gets spun on social media by people who don't watch the content.
Lio 8 hours ago [-]
It looks like he spent about 4 minutes out of the 1:03 making that point.
I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.
I don't think he believes in Rails any more.
It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.
To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?
treis 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think anyone should really believe in Rails at this point. It was a monumental leap forward at the time but other stacks have shown that there are better ways.
7 hours ago [-]
ksec 1 hours ago [-]
>It's interesting how this stuff gets spun on social media by people who don't watch the content.
I watched it live, and a few actually in the show have very different perspective to what you suggest, they were just keep it to themselves and not posting it on twitter. Some did, but then deleted it.
And no one is questioning he doesn't like ruby anymore. But it was obvious there was nothing much said about the future of Ruby and Rails.
Scarbutt 8 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter if Rails is well suited for AI or not. Now, there's less incentive and reasons to use it.
lackoftactics 8 hours ago [-]
When I started as rails dev in 2013, it was really the top solution for producing MVP fast. Now, I don’t think that’s the case and most of the incentives are gone if we are no longer writing code by hand
mattbrewsbytes 7 hours ago [-]
So what would you pick for producing an MVP web app fast that you also want to run in production, maintain, patch and scale that has a solid eco-system of pre-built libraries you can just plug in to solve problems?
james_marks 4 hours ago [-]
I prefer a Rails backend, especially in the agentic world.
With an agent on a greenfield is when I’m most reliant on a framework for good standards and a clear architecture.
This is one of the things Rails does really well.
didibus 9 hours ago [-]
> AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
That sounds like layoffs lol.
azuanrb 9 hours ago [-]
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.
didibus 1 hours ago [-]
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.
milkshakes 9 hours ago [-]
it sounds like leverage
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
andrewmutz 9 hours ago [-]
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?
didibus 1 hours ago [-]
If you can get more done with less, your choices are either do more by spending the same, or spend less and get the same output.
Why do you think 100% of all companies will choose the first? Obviously some will choose the latter, hence it sounds like layoffs.
petersumskas 7 hours ago [-]
Because the limiting factor for what you can deliver has never been, and still isn’t, developer productivity.
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
milkshakes 4 hours ago [-]
with more productive teams you can have smaller teams and better communication
dist-epoch 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Making the widget cheaper doesn't necessarily create demand either. I will not buy 10 times more toothbrushes or writing pens if their prices suddenly decreased to 1 cent.
The demand for software or features will not increase at the speed of our ability to produce them.
ilikehurdles 6 hours ago [-]
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”
newlisp 8 hours ago [-]
He's not anti-rails. He just won't be using it.
rapind 10 hours ago [-]
> 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).
status_quo69 5 hours ago [-]
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
Gigachad 49 minutes ago [-]
I don’t think this is agent specific. Rails is full of footguns that are virtually impossible to avoid even for a human developer.
azuanrb 9 hours ago [-]
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.
Simple as that.
rapind 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, I'm still supporting two large-ish rails applications and a larger Rust application.
pdhborges 8 hours ago [-]
If it doesn't matter I will just pick the cheapest to run (the static ones).
toomuchtodo 10 hours ago [-]
What languages are best suited for development with agentic coding?
pitched 10 hours ago [-]
Rust is used a lot. Elixir/Phoenix comes up often. You’re looking for something statically typed with string guarantees and as FP as possible to make unit testing easier.
rapind 10 hours ago [-]
Rust for sure. Builds become a problem eventually though. Elixir is much more interesting now that they added types (I think they're doing more with this still?). I quite like Gleam from a human (non-agent) perspective.
cpursley 9 hours ago [-]
I've been using Rust more and more for specific tasks in my Elixir saas app, the two play really well together.
ForHackernews 10 hours ago [-]
In my experience, Go. It was designed to be idiot-proof. It's very verbose, not very expressive, compiles fast for quick feedback loops, strict autoformatter, plenty of examples in models' training data.
tkz1312 8 hours ago [-]
the only substantive difference I've noticed is between languages with a proof system and those without, where with a proof system is orders of magnitude better for agentic work.
sroerick 8 hours ago [-]
OCaml.
quentindemetz 10 hours ago [-]
> His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps
It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.
mvdtnz 9 hours ago [-]
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.
petersumskas 7 hours ago [-]
Yes! I wish I had more than one upvote to give!
hank1931 5 hours ago [-]
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!
mosura 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Hamuko 9 hours ago [-]
>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.
toobulkeh 2 hours 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.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
sdellis 10 hours ago [-]
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? People lose connection to their work, 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.
Also, I hate native apps. FWIW most devs I know actively try to avoid them.
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.
Lio 8 hours ago [-]
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.
shimman 5 hours ago [-]
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).
dofm 10 hours ago [-]
> 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?
revetkn 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ryantgtg 9 hours ago [-]
> much less clear
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.
machomaster 5 hours ago [-]
> I have a background in sociology and urban planning
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?
throwawayfifo 5 hours ago [-]
>His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
Examples of these claims?
revetkn 8 hours ago [-]
Ha. I was trying to be charitable there :)
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
My Gell-Mann moment was watching other HN users rate Gell-Mann moments while not realizing they're demonstrating it directly.
specialist 59 minutes ago [-]
That evokes the lesser known corollary:
Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.
diego_sandoval 9 hours ago [-]
> His politics [...] are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data;
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.
rossriley 7 hours ago [-]
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.
The fact he used the term “native Britains” says everything about his politics.
throwawayfifo 5 hours ago [-]
>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.
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
rossriley 4 hours ago [-]
Native means that your place of birth is in a country and that definitely doesn't apply just to people who cite their ethnicity as white British.
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
Happy to hear I'm a Native American.
rossriley 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sejje 23 minutes ago [-]
Oh, well then I'm a native American, I reckon. The other kind.
shadowtree 3 hours ago [-]
No, this Americanism is factually wrong.
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
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
rossriley 1 hours ago [-]
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.
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
> White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London
Bullshit. They are Johann Come Later Germans who killed off the Celtic Brits.
senderista 55 minutes ago [-]
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.
suhlig 9 hours ago [-]
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.
dofm 9 hours ago [-]
I am slightly abusing/overstretching the concept, to be fair; other commenters are not wrong to remark as such. But still.
themgt 9 hours ago [-]
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.
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
dofm 9 hours ago [-]
Touché. I mean it has almost the same meter. I get that you're disagreeing with me, but have my compensatory upvote.
dorianmariecom 10 hours ago [-]
> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.
dofm 9 hours ago [-]
Yes. I am broadening the definition of "media" and "publication", maybe, though it is posts on his own publishing platform and performances at his own breakaway conference.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
goosejuice 9 hours ago [-]
Apparently somewhere between a third to a half of American scientists believe in some kind of god. Not to denegrate those who believe, but that's some kind of compartmentalization going on. Politics isn't any different. I dunno, I guess I don't have much issue listening to people with whom I disagree. Some people just get stuck on things. I do to, and maybe I'm the one that's wrong.
mattbrewsbytes 7 hours ago [-]
Do you automatically dismiss everything someone says based on their opinions on other topics not relevant to their main job? Is everything always absolutes?
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
jstummbillig 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
(They can, of course, still be wrong)
pipes 11 hours ago [-]
By "concerns" did you mean to say "I don't agree with some of his political opinions".
iancuandrei 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah, because being a fascist and racist is not concerning at all.
pipes 9 hours ago [-]
It seems the new definition of fascism is any political opinion that isn't hard left.
rossriley 7 hours ago [-]
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.
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
That's funny since Restore is pretty tight w/ Tommy Robinson, actually.
konmok 6 hours ago [-]
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.
shimman 5 hours ago [-]
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.
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
No, he's literally a fascist, it's pretty obvious from his political blog posts.
What's with people always trying to deny fascism when they see it?
beastoven 8 hours ago [-]
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.
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jjtheblunt 8 hours ago [-]
i'm missing out on backstory gossip evidently: what's this fascist and racist accusation ?
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.
robgough 14 hours ago [-]
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.
efields 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Is it types? Are types the answer? Is it rust?
jaggederest 11 hours ago [-]
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.
alehlopeh 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but what’s “install a plugin” in rails? That’s not a thing; not even a thing someone who’s ever worked on a rails app would say by mistake.
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. Now imagine you're using it for a web application with compiled maud templates... you're potentially waiting minutes to see your changes.
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.
efields 9 hours ago [-]
Sounds like I should check in on rust in a year or so.
rapind 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I'm going through an exercise right now with a large codebase where I'm split some of it up into crates so that iterating on specific parts incurs less build overhead. Literally changing my architecture... which annoyed me a bit, but it does make sense.
CodingJeebus 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
prescriptivist 9 hours ago [-]
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.
senderista 10 hours ago [-]
Why do you think an AI audit (say from Fable/Astra at xhigh) wouldn't have caught this?
whazor 10 hours ago [-]
Software engineering is so back.
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.
aogaili 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah that is how I see it.
In Software Engineering, we learned about requirements, testings, system design, UMLs, etc, and those seems to be more relevant than ever.
everfrustrated 8 hours ago [-]
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.
timhh 11 hours ago [-]
What model though?
shevy-java 10 hours ago [-]
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.
rowanG077 10 hours ago [-]
Or you know just use one of the many great open models. The LLM wave can be taken just fine without "corporate-agents suck them dry".
Rover222 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Rover222 10 hours ago [-]
Imagine having to virtue signal your comment first like that
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
Concerns with the dogshit I stepped in aside, I had a wonderful time going barefoot through the tulips.
mrdependable 10 hours ago [-]
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"?
pitched 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mrdependable 10 hours ago [-]
This has nothing to do with programming or productivity. I am addressing the fact that people like DHH and his fans are in the habit of framing the future as written and that you can either embrace it or get crushed. Embracing it is giving OpenAI, Anthropic, et. al your approval to keep on going. I'm not denying that AI can do the job a lot faster.
pitched 9 hours ago [-]
Keeping the comparison to compilers, people in the 60s refusing the transition weren’t crushed, their skills were devalued. The open models work well enough at coding to keep up without buying OpenAI or Anthropic products.
anthonypasq 10 hours ago [-]
i have nothing else to say to you other than good luck
claude_on_fails 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
sashank_1509 7 hours ago [-]
Regarding the native vs web app problem, this was a completely made up human-made problem. I think I would have preferred a deterministic solution like a game engine but having agents code up native apps based on your web spec is not a horrible idea.
The bigger question to me, is the original implementation, are agents going to do that, or will humans hand code it. My two cents, I’ve been using agents heavily now, I review thousands of lines of code a day, I don’t think this works unless I have a clear idea of the spec I want to build in my mind already.
I get a better understanding of what the architecture should be and how I should build it by actually doing the thing, which means typing code at human speeds. I don’t reason my way into a good architecture, I don’t think I ever did that much in the past and I definitely don’t get it by asking the agent to check its plan and explain it to me the hundredth time. And then once I know the architecture, I don’t think the agent even speeds me up that much. It changes 7 days of coding to 1, but those 7 days weren’t worth much and I generate even more ideas and mental models in those 7 days that pay dividends for years to come.
Would you have told a tailor that using the industrial sewing machine improves his skill at making delicate, beautiful clothes? Of course not, actually even in 2026, large swathes of high quality delicate clothes are hand sewn. There will be an equivalent for coding, even DHH admits it, when he hedges with “most”.
I think, for me I’ll navigate my career to focus more on extremely high quality, delicate custom code and leave this agentic coding to the sweatshop workers. I wanted to do this anyway before agents, now I need to accelerate it. yes FAANG is sweatshop work.
zerr 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fy20 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kennywinker 3 hours ago [-]
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
hashbig 1 hours ago [-]
> 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??
jjarvis 6 hours ago [-]
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.
aogaili 9 hours ago [-]
Because it does take some skills, judgement, taste, knowledge, time and effort to build things. He said it is not very different from directing a team of contractors, 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.
zerr 8 hours ago [-]
> it does take some skills, judgement, taste, knowledge, time and effort to build things
As of now, but we are talking in a perspective.
ozim 8 hours ago [-]
People are not well organised.
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.
usef- 6 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
Geocities made everyone a webmaster, too. Remember those badass websites?
tnolet 8 hours ago [-]
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.
monocasa 8 hours ago [-]
It's his conference he made because he was banned from railsconf.
tnolet 8 hours ago [-]
aha, that explains the podium. Thanks for enlightening me. Kudos to Railsconf.
pushcx 6 hours ago [-]
No kudos earned. They didn't ban him, they just didn't invite him to give a keynote. Then Ruby Central put him back on stage for a RailsConf keynote q&a. It was the snowball that started rolling an ongoing avalanche of secondary crises.
zrail 8 hours ago [-]
He owns RailsWorld.
sampli 5 hours ago [-]
Gives him more credibility
xdennis 7 hours ago [-]
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
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Think about why he compares gypsies to wolves, and talks about "self-preservation".
You might want to be pedantic and try to say he's not comparing them to wolves. He is the one who put those two sentences next to each other. You can choose to ignore the thing that feels obvious to others.
I know a lot of people are decently close to DHH in their feelings on this issue. I think that being publicly loud about these opinions that most people keep to themselves simply leads to wondering what his _actual_ deep opinions are. Think about what you say in private compared to what you say in public, and consider that he is writing in public.
A sentiment being common or not is a bit besides the point about whether it's authoritarian or fascistic or whatever.
If you remove the context and the implication from his post, you can make the argument that it's "just" a post saying "enforce immigration laws".
The problem is that the context and the implications are part of his post. He is communicating who he is and what he believes, and for you it's mostly a question of whether you're going to listen to it.
This whole line of discussion is had about DHH in particular decently often, and I find it kinda funny because even beyond all of this I've always heard that he's just kind of a disagreeable person anyways. But I suppose this industry pulls in a certain kind of annoying person.
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wrs 2 hours ago [-]
So in your mind there’s absolutely no subtextual message here in choosing wolves. It would have meant exactly the same thing if he’d chosen raccoons, or pigeons, or deer, or rabbits?
sejje 11 minutes ago [-]
Uh, no? I didn't even make a statement, I asked a couple questions.
But no, those words you made up don't speak to an idea I have.
enraged_camel 2 hours ago [-]
Because, in the context he is describing, humans hunt and kill the wolves:
>> There's a reason why the last known wolf in Denmark didn't just wander off, but was shot dead in 1813.
>> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them.
sejje 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but then in the very next sentence, he says what you do with humans. He's explicit about it, so we don't have to guess.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
So no, he's not talking about hunting and killing the humans.
culi 2 hours ago [-]
idk, maybe the "you shoot them" part?? FFS did no one learn anything about the crucial role of dehumanization in the rise of the Nazis?
sejje 24 minutes ago [-]
> When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
culi 2 hours ago [-]
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
This isn't even his personal blog. It's the company blog of Hey that he's using to push his views. Do you really wanna work with a company whose professional blog references "[insert ethnicity] rape gangs" and "the decline of Europe". He could go full Kanye at any point.
TheAlchemist 39 minutes ago [-]
I agree it's quite weird to put it on a company blog, but it used to be that companies and their owners do express their views. As opposed to for example Big Tech, who doesn't express their views, but work very closely with Trump...
Gypsies are a major problem in a lot of cities in Europe... What would be a politically correct way to say that today ?
microsoftedging 1 minutes ago [-]
This is not his company's blog, it's his own personal one. IIRC anyone with a HEY address can post blogs publicly with HEY World
heartbreak 3 hours ago [-]
At the risk of promoting his views by sharing them here, this is not something he is at all quiet about.
I'd say he crossed the line when he openly supported ethnic cleansing via remigration. I.e. deporting legal citizens that aren't the right race. If you don't think that's racist I don't know what it would take...
Before that I'd have said he was on the edge, but now it's pretty clear cut.
sejje 3 hours ago [-]
Is it legal citizens that aren't the right race, or is it legal citizens that were previously foreign nationals?
why-el 10 hours ago [-]
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.
jcmontx 5 hours ago [-]
Well, an email server is next to the best use case for a low-level language. I'm still choosing Rails (or Laravel or Django) for CRUD apps any day of the week. Rails in particular is great because it's very conventional and AI writes it in an standardised way.
melodyogonna 6 hours ago [-]
Comes to Rails conference. Gives a keynote with nothing about Rails. Leaves.
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
It's his conference he made because he was banned from the big one, for good reasons.
culi 2 hours ago [-]
It's not RailsConf. He's banned from that. It's his own Rails World he owns
devy 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ksec 2 days ago [-]
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.
an0malous 1 days ago [-]
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.
bluerooibos 5 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kavok 4 hours ago [-]
Isn’t a lot of Rails dev done by Shopify and Intercom these days instead of by DHH companies?
stefanlindbohm 21 hours ago [-]
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.
rramon 2 days ago [-]
Agents might pick up Topcoat (inspired by Rails) as the framework for those Rust apps.
fantasizr 1 days ago [-]
it is sorta sad that framework development will dry up with fewer incentives.
sergiotapia 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mattbrewsbytes 6 hours ago [-]
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.
sroerick 7 hours ago [-]
This is my first attempt at a AI framework and I'm pretty happy with it
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.
11 hours ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
FLeXMurphy 9 hours ago [-]
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.
metaltyphoon 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dzonga 18 hours ago [-]
tldr:
dhh says 37signal's apps for Hey (their email platform moving to native)
backend for their email platform is now Rust - written by agents
says Rust produces small binaries - cutting number of servers needed from 110 to 10. hell they could serve peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi
says now that agents write all the code - use faster / native languages.
rails or ruby hardly get a mention besides that they might be well placed to capture web apps written by agents.
lackoftactics 13 hours ago [-]
also worth noting that hotwire is dead according to DHH in this talk. The rendering html server side is old way now
dmix 10 hours ago [-]
Where did he say that? I listened to it yesterday and AFAIK he only said "I don't know where the line between native vs web will end up in the future" (now that we can generate native apps easier)
Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.
Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.
pmontra 9 hours ago [-]
The issue with native apps is that you have to convince people to install them. If I had one app for each tab I open in my browser my phone would be a mess and out of free space. Then you slow down the delivery of features and bug fixes because you have to go through the app stores. You can't deploy something every day or more often.
So even if we can generate an app easily now, is that a wise choice for every business?
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
If the apps were actually good, you'd install them. A lot of the apps on F-Droid are pretty lightweight, and a phone's security model makes it much safer than installing apps on Windows.
The web makes apps worse by forcing a fairly strict sandbox, even as Google keeps trying to loosen it. Think of a messaging app that hides in your notification tray, that's a trivial UX thing that's impossible on the web.
dmix 5 hours ago [-]
Like everything, depends on the usecase. An email desktop app seems to be a valid one. A standard earlystage B2B SaaS Rails web app? Not so much.
Same with server side rust. A high volume transactional backend email service makes sense there. The base layer of a CRM managing a lot of business logic?
Life will go on much the same. We just have more options to say yes to 'native' with LLMs, we can experiment more with ideal scenarios rather than a religious adherence to cross platform or single-framework merely for team DX simplicity.
rbanffy 9 hours ago [-]
Rendering HTML on the server was kind of how IBM mainframes talked to their 3270 terminals, only that HTML is a lot nicer than 3270 streams and HTTP is human readable.
Server side rendering makes sense for mostly static content, but for web applications, a front end framework and a back-end API are a much better match.
crossthestreams 9 hours ago [-]
Uhh, sounds like you haven't been writing modern React lately, which is server side lol
lbrito 1 days ago [-]
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?
usef- 1 days ago [-]
Translation does play to their strengths.
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.
> 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.
lbrito 14 hours ago [-]
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.
rbanffy 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seanabrahams 2 hours ago [-]
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.
plant-ian 9 hours ago [-]
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.
1219876 10 hours ago [-]
Talk is sponsored by Shopify, which also sponsored the Lex Fridman 5 hour promotion.
All DHH's AI opinions are sponcon.
But he has great flagging support and his perception management agency will suppress this one, too.
sick_of_slop 6 hours ago [-]
Shopify - where the CEO said just the other day that “slop grenades” are making way more work for everyone?
Same guys?
Just chugging the clown juice.
blueSky1989 5 hours ago [-]
Flow state.
I am glad that he mentioned that he'll miss the flow state that he would enjoy while deeply focused in computer programming. That was also one of my worries. Gladly, I still have other ways to get there, and I hope that you'll find yours too.
lbrito 10 hours ago [-]
AI-psychotic and proud!
aogaili 9 hours ago [-]
Results and output are undeniable, unless you are delusional or in denial.
lbrito 8 hours ago [-]
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.
aogaili 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not worried, feel free to use punch cards if you want sir..
endemic 8 hours ago [-]
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.
phoronixrly 8 hours ago [-]
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.
copperx 11 hours ago [-]
Serious question: Is there a framework that is better suited for agents? There must be something out there that makes agents fly through development with minimal token expense.
vmsp 5 hours ago [-]
Whatever answer you get, it's nothing more than an opinion. For now, anyway.
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.
pageandrew 10 hours ago [-]
Why is Elixir better suited for agents?
ricketycricket 9 hours ago [-]
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.
__MatrixMan__ 10 hours ago [-]
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 support 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, which gives each one isolation from misbehavior of the others.
And since these support hot code reloading, without restarting the BEAM's OS process, you can patch the code for your user's sliver of the server and do 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 steps for carrying 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 except that it's not as popular as Elixir, which is probably more important.
You can also do all of this in the language that started it all: Erlang (Java : JVM :: Erlang : BEAM) but it's not exactly fashionable at present (similar to java vs like... kotlin or clojure or something).
Disclaimer: I'm more of a fan than a seasoned pro. I'd love to actually be working with this stuff daily, but my team wouldn't have it because they prefer familiar things and pain.
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.
- Skilled people have thought out what to make.
Otherwise they hear "20 minutes" and think AI can spit out a logical or good product from no reference or planning.
mococa 7 hours ago [-]
Next year they will rewrite rails in rust with AI
19 hours ago [-]
vips7L 2 hours ago [-]
Grifter gonna grift.
sreekanth850 23 hours ago [-]
Adieu, Ruby on Rails.
inatreecrown2 1 days ago [-]
DHH is "off the Rails" is not false now?
unethical_ban 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sejje 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
10 hours ago [-]
_rwo 8 hours ago [-]
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
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
yes
LarsKrimi 7 hours ago [-]
I guess it's the only con that will take money to have DHH give a keynote about some sycophantic BS
I don't think it's fair to say that being anti large scale immigration is racist.
steve_adams_86 8 hours ago [-]
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.
micromacrofoot 8 hours ago [-]
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.
notourproblem 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cindyllm 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
stiltzkin 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
copperx 10 hours ago [-]
Was it the white/black pill bit?
mitxela 3 hours ago [-]
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
claude_on_fails 10 hours ago [-]
[dead]
an0malous 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
12adg15 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hencq 11 hours ago [-]
I think you're confusing Spotify and Shopify.
prescriptivist 10 hours ago [-]
This happens in every DHH thread and it always gives me a chuckle.
wkirby 11 hours ago [-]
I'm not here to defend DHH --- but I think "AI" has materially changed since 2024. I think that it's entirely reasonable to have shifted perspective on the technology and its applications since 2024.
christophilus 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah. I found it basically useless until around mid 2024. Now, I use it every day, nearly all day.
stackghost 10 hours ago [-]
>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?
fragmede 6 hours ago [-]
Some thing with multiple "nines" in its uptime.
stackghost 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Is that "Serious Software"?
Rover222 11 hours ago [-]
Congrats on the dumbest rant I've read all week. Can't even get the company names straight.
atmosx 10 hours ago [-]
Oh c'mon, there were three million ways you could express this feeling with some class... And you went for "can't even get the company names straight" ?
Reddit would have about 15 comments alluding without never revealing, all of them smart, classy and funny. The rest would be complete trash probably.
Rover222 10 hours ago [-]
Sir I despise your ill informed debacle of a speech
133ah175 10 hours ago [-]
Tobi?
lackoftactics 19 hours ago [-]
it's funeral of Ruby on Rails
rbanffy 9 hours ago [-]
It’s now Rust on Rails.
whalesalad 8 hours ago [-]
it became culturally irrelevant around rails 5
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ferfumarma 7 hours ago [-]
Why such hate?
There are lots of languages I don't use, but I can't imagine saying that about any of them.
hypfer 8 hours ago [-]
A lot has been said about DHH, but, I think the moment where you can see that the guy has _clearly_ lost it is this quote:
> It is impossibly fast. And you know what? The binary? Half a megabyte. Half a fucking megabyte. I— you could fit that on a floppy disk almost. With a little compression. This is the other payoff.
The guy now(?) thinks like a lossy abstraction that speaks in tropes.
He has become the LLM - I would say, if I didn't know that even a 9B one can tell me with absolutely certainty how much space there is on a fucking floppy.
There is no reason to get into all the politics stuff when this is where the guy is at. Basic fact retrieval.
(Pedantically, one could now argue that it was not clear which floppy format the guy was referring to. And yes, that would be true, but by thinking that thought, you have thought about the sentence more than its author has.)
GMoromisato 8 hours ago [-]
I don't get it. Are you saying floppy disks were usually bigger than half a fucking megabyte or smaller?
I'm missing something (as usual) because I don't see what's wrong with his statement.
hypfer 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
philipallstar 8 hours ago [-]
> but by thinking that thought, you have thought about the sentence more than its author has
Overanalysing someone's spoken sentences isn't the badge of honour it might appear to be.
IshKebab 7 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what you think is so objectionable about that quote. It's one of the least mental things he's said.
You've never made a minor mistake during a presentation? (I await your confident "no".)
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(bloom)
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 income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes 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.
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
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.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.
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?
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.
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 it wasn't.
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.
It is just that it shouldn't be done in the opening keynote of a conference. I thought it was very irresponsible to the other smaller sponsors and those who paid to join. I know Shopify fund most of it and is likely on the same stand.
Living in the fear of p(doom) is miserable. We're all gonna die one day anyway.
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.
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.
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.
To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.
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.
SE is not like farming.
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.
https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195
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 financially in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.
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.
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.
- 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.
Have you seen the older apps built by devs? or all the other bootstrap themes?
He is just promoting Shopify's vibe coding for merchants. I bet on Shopify pivoting to vibe coded Rust soon because of "security".
But to your other comment, are you professionally employed as a developer and still writing code by hand?
He explicitly said he still loves ruby as a language and thinks Rails is well suited for a future with AI coding.
It's interesting how this stuff gets spun on social media by people who don't watch the content.
I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.
I don't think he believes in Rails any more.
It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.
To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?
I watched it live, and a few actually in the show have very different perspective to what you suggest, they were just keep it to themselves and not posting it on twitter. Some did, but then deleted it.
And no one is questioning he doesn't like ruby anymore. But it was obvious there was nothing much said about the future of Ruby and Rails.
With an agent on a greenfield is when I’m most reliant on a framework for good standards and a clear architecture.
This is one of the things Rails does really well.
That sounds like layoffs lol.
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.
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
Why do you think 100% of all companies will choose the first? Obviously some will choose the latter, hence it sounds like layoffs.
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
Making the widget cheaper doesn't necessarily create demand either. I will not buy 10 times more toothbrushes or writing pens if their prices suddenly decreased to 1 cent.
The demand for software or features will not increase at the speed of our ability to produce them.
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”
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, I hate native apps. FWIW most devs I know actively try to avoid them.
(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).
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?
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.
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?
Examples of these claims?
Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.
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
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
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.
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.
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
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)
What's with people always trying to deny fascism when they see it?
.·°՞( ̑ ᗜ ̑ )՞°·.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
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. Now imagine you're using it for a web application with compiled maud templates... you're potentially waiting minutes to see your changes.
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.
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"?
The bigger question to me, is the original implementation, are agents going to do that, or will humans hand code it. My two cents, I’ve been using agents heavily now, I review thousands of lines of code a day, I don’t think this works unless I have a clear idea of the spec I want to build in my mind already.
I get a better understanding of what the architecture should be and how I should build it by actually doing the thing, which means typing code at human speeds. I don’t reason my way into a good architecture, I don’t think I ever did that much in the past and I definitely don’t get it by asking the agent to check its plan and explain it to me the hundredth time. And then once I know the architecture, I don’t think the agent even speeds me up that much. It changes 7 days of coding to 1, but those 7 days weren’t worth much and I generate even more ideas and mental models in those 7 days that pay dividends for years to come.
Would you have told a tailor that using the industrial sewing machine improves his skill at making delicate, beautiful clothes? Of course not, actually even in 2026, large swathes of high quality delicate clothes are hand sewn. There will be an equivalent for coding, even DHH admits it, when he hedges with “most”.
I think, for me I’ll navigate my career to focus more on extremely high quality, delicate custom code and leave this agentic coding to the sweatshop workers. I wanted to do this anyway before agents, now I need to accelerate it. yes FAANG is sweatshop work.
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??
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.
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.
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
Think about why he compares gypsies to wolves, and talks about "self-preservation".
You might want to be pedantic and try to say he's not comparing them to wolves. He is the one who put those two sentences next to each other. You can choose to ignore the thing that feels obvious to others.
I know a lot of people are decently close to DHH in their feelings on this issue. I think that being publicly loud about these opinions that most people keep to themselves simply leads to wondering what his _actual_ deep opinions are. Think about what you say in private compared to what you say in public, and consider that he is writing in public.
A sentiment being common or not is a bit besides the point about whether it's authoritarian or fascistic or whatever.
If you remove the context and the implication from his post, you can make the argument that it's "just" a post saying "enforce immigration laws".
The problem is that the context and the implications are part of his post. He is communicating who he is and what he believes, and for you it's mostly a question of whether you're going to listen to it.
This whole line of discussion is had about DHH in particular decently often, and I find it kinda funny because even beyond all of this I've always heard that he's just kind of a disagreeable person anyways. But I suppose this industry pulls in a certain kind of annoying person.
But no, those words you made up don't speak to an idea I have.
>> There's a reason why the last known wolf in Denmark didn't just wander off, but was shot dead in 1813.
>> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them.
So no, he's not talking about hunting and killing the humans.
This isn't even his personal blog. It's the company blog of Hey that he's using to push his views. Do you really wanna work with a company whose professional blog references "[insert ethnicity] rape gangs" and "the decline of Europe". He could go full Kanye at any point.
Gypsies are a major problem in a lot of cities in Europe... What would be a politically correct way to say that today ?
https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
Before that I'd have said he was on the edge, but now it's pretty clear cut.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://pricklypear.rocks/
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.
dhh says 37signal's apps for Hey (their email platform moving to native)
backend for their email platform is now Rust - written by agents
says Rust produces small binaries - cutting number of servers needed from 110 to 10. hell they could serve peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi
says now that agents write all the code - use faster / native languages.
rails or ruby hardly get a mention besides that they might be well placed to capture web apps written by agents.
Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.
Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.
So even if we can generate an app easily now, is that a wise choice for every business?
The web makes apps worse by forcing a fairly strict sandbox, even as Google keeps trying to loosen it. Think of a messaging app that hides in your notification tray, that's a trivial UX thing that's impossible on the web.
Same with server side rust. A high volume transactional backend email service makes sense there. The base layer of a CRM managing a lot of business logic?
Life will go on much the same. We just have more options to say yes to 'native' with LLMs, we can experiment more with ideal scenarios rather than a religious adherence to cross platform or single-framework merely for team DX simplicity.
Server side rendering makes sense for mostly static content, but for web applications, a front end framework and a back-end API are a much better match.
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/
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.
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.
All DHH's AI opinions are sponcon.
But he has great flagging support and his perception management agency will suppress this one, too.
Same guys?
Just chugging the clown juice.
I am glad that he mentioned that he'll miss the flow state that he would enjoy while deeply focused in computer programming. That was also one of my worries. Gladly, I still have other ways to get there, and I hope that you'll find yours too.
https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/
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.
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.
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 support 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, which gives each one isolation from misbehavior of the others.
And since these support hot code reloading, without restarting the BEAM's OS process, you can patch the code for your user's sliver of the server and do 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 steps for carrying 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 except that it's not as popular as Elixir, which is probably more important.
You can also do all of this in the language that started it all: Erlang (Java : JVM :: Erlang : BEAM) but it's not exactly fashionable at present (similar to java vs like... kotlin or clojure or something).
Disclaimer: I'm more of a fan than a seasoned pro. I'd love to actually be working with this stuff daily, but my team wouldn't have it because they prefer familiar things and pain.
- A lot of this is looking at an existing app and/or code for reference.
- The people doing/guiding this are skilled.
- Skilled people have thought out what to make.
Otherwise they hear "20 minutes" and think AI can spit out a logical or good product from no reference or planning.
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.
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.
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"?
Reddit would have about 15 comments alluding without never revealing, all of them smart, classy and funny. The rest would be complete trash probably.
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.
> It is impossibly fast. And you know what? The binary? Half a megabyte. Half a fucking megabyte. I— you could fit that on a floppy disk almost. With a little compression. This is the other payoff.
The guy now(?) thinks like a lossy abstraction that speaks in tropes.
He has become the LLM - I would say, if I didn't know that even a 9B one can tell me with absolutely certainty how much space there is on a fucking floppy.
There is no reason to get into all the politics stuff when this is where the guy is at. Basic fact retrieval.
(Pedantically, one could now argue that it was not clear which floppy format the guy was referring to. And yes, that would be true, but by thinking that thought, you have thought about the sentence more than its author has.)
I'm missing something (as usual) because I don't see what's wrong with his statement.
Overanalysing someone's spoken sentences isn't the badge of honour it might appear to be.
You've never made a minor mistake during a presentation? (I await your confident "no".)