Agents might pick up Topcoat (inspired by Rails) as the framework for those Rust apps.

Even the concept of "framework" as we knew it becomes different in this age. If you only want reusability, why not use plain good old libraries and let the AI assemble them as needed for your project?

Unfortunately yes because Rails has always been a framework of extraction. Now they are not even coding anymore there is nothing to extract. No one is a programmer but everyone is a maker.

This is my first attempt at a AI framework and I'm pretty happy with it

https://pricklypear.rocks/

We're going to have a bunch of hardly used libraries/frameworks that might converge on a single one. Similar to the surge in JS frameworks/libraries from a few years back and where we are now.

Is squeezing a lot more performance beneficial to a business? or is it a small amount of VPS cost per month difference?

It helps to be clear, at least with yourself, about if you're doing something because you can/want to or if there are actual business reasons.

This is a question I have been circling around. The agents are good at Ruby/Rails. It’s probably a confluence of things, but whether the L in LLM benefits from Ruby’s emphasis on human readability is something I’d love to see a study on. Or more generally, how key is (human) language itself in the performance ceiling of LLMs. A machine specific coding language/framework/process could obviously be more efficient, but if language itself is the hard limit, those would be dead in the water with LLMs. Or put another way: if language wasn’t the ceiling, why didn’t we see machine first coding implementations before LLMs?

Those performance numbers mean nothing considering they went from rendering every single view of a highly interactive app solely on their servers to moving all rendering to the clients. It’s possible the backend logic of the app could have run on 10 hosts running Ruby as well.

I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.

Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.

Let's see how that goes.

Personally, I wouldn't want all my emails stored on a service where the dude doesn't even look at the code anymore.

DHH is on the board of Shopify

And Shopify has been sponsoring Ruby JIT developments, exactly for the same reasons Facebook created their own PHP fork with a JIT, and how Twitter moved into the JVM after so many fail whales.

Thanks, fixed.

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.

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.

We've had transpiled languages for decades, we really dont need a glorified dice to create rule based translation.

Everything is a nail at the moment.

Like people using LLMs to refactor. Refactoring is a solved problem, we've had decades to get nice tooling for this.

Write a solid piece of software by hand. Spend 20 plus years working all the bugs out and perfecting it. Build a giant community around it. Then use llms to rewrite it in another language, as the last step. Once that becomes unmaintainable, and there really is no community you can start over again by writing another working piece of software in a new language, perfecting it, building out a large community and then at the final step translate again with an llm, repeat.

I think what's next is the harness. Ruby on Rails brought conventions to web development. It could morph into brining conventions to building any kind of software using AI. AI on Rails. Many such efforts already exist and perhaps in short order such a project would be obsolete, but it's one potential path forward.

I dont think you watched the talk.

How certain are you about that? https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v2.3/plugins.html

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

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.

Sounds like OCaml has the answer then. It has the equivalent of all the great things you described in Rust, plus compile speeds similar to or better than Go. Agents should be able to blaze through changes with it.

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.

What model though?

There are two problems that arise from cheap code:

1. You get complexity back at the speed that you add code. Also the complexity compounds.

2. As a human you are still responsible for your code, and you need to understand how the important parts of the code base work.

When you combine these problems, you get a complicated code base where you don't understand the important parts.

That is why software design is getting a comeback. It actually helps with both problems. Less complexity and more understanding.

Why do you think an AI audit (say from Fable/Astra at xhigh) wouldn't have caught this?

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)

By "concerns" did you mean to say "I don't agree with some of his political opinions".

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?

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.

I strongly prefer Rails with agentic development. Rails comes with nearly everything you need to make a full-featured application, and that makes it easier and faster to use with agents.

No other framework comes close, and telling me that I can have my agents cobble together this same baseline, badly, from a hodgepodge of new code and random libraries is not compelling.

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.

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.

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.

I've been using Rust more and more for specific tasks in my Elixir saas app, the two play really well together.

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.

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.

OCaml.

If it doesn't matter I will just pick the cheapest to run (the static ones).

Yes, I'm still supporting two large-ish rails applications and a larger Rust application.

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

I don’t think this is agent specific. Rails is full of footguns that are virtually impossible to avoid even for a human developer.

I hate native apps. There are use cases better suited to native apps but often it's just not what I want.

You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.

You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.

There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.

Users absolutely care, people hate downloading random shit on their phone they don't want but are forced to.

What has always been true is that users often have no choice or voice to express their actual desires. It's not like there is a public alternative here (when there should be).

Here, I will give you my upvote! That's how Issuetrak is. The founder (me), still owns a majority of the stock, there's no outside investment, and we have customers who've been with us more than 20 years. Multiple employees as well!

His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps

I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.

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

Adding on to your point about attrition: if internal promotions in engineering are decided by your ability to be a force multiplier, to facilitate cross team collaboration, mentor and help others to skill up, how do any currently employed engineers demonstrate that with no one new to mentor or train? How do you collaborate when teammates work with AI tools more and coworkers less? Would they just have an easier time getting into a higher responsibility role looking elsewhere?

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.

with more productive teams you can have smaller teams and better communication

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.

It’s layoffs if the demand doesn’t grow to meet the output

If every engineer is 10-100x more productive with AI, and one company slashes its workforce to maintain the same level of productivity at reduced cost, it will lose out to its competitor who retains the same workforce and does far more with it.

Right now, the vibe at my company is not “we can save so much money with AI” it’s “here’s an infinite budget, use all the tokens you can to expand our moat because we’ve never been more sensitive to competitive disruption than we are now”

TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding.

That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:

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.

This matches my experience. My solo projects are now bigger than I ever would have accepted alone. The one I’m going to finish soon is one I actually refused a year ago because it was too big.

It’s the top of the chain that I wonder about. Agentic development is so fast (and in the process I’ve developed so good) that I’m thinking there is actually a maximum size a company doing this work could get. Beyond that top end size the management overhead is what’s limiting or the market size total. Maybe not, maybe mega dev houses will find other problems to solve, but I have a hard time imagining it.

He's not anti-rails. He just won't be using it.

It's almost as if, for him, it was more about him than Rails...

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".

i have nothing else to say to you other than good luck

People who are expert at assembly are still extremely valuable.

It’s not the same, though. I just addressed this in a reply to a sibling comment.

Aha, the common HN tactic of expanding someone’s argument until it appears ridiculous and then attacking that. But I will bite.

It tends to only be when someone is egregiously wrong or (as in the case IMO) acting in deliberate bad faith on a topic of massive public concern, like this. Because these people are a waste of psychological resources.

I totally write off proselytising antivaxxers who I think should have reason to know better, I tend to write off climate change deniers who should know better, and yes, I tend to write off educated people who mislead with statistics to create intellectual cover for xenophobic, bigoted thugs and their antisocial campaigns.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good one. Other people who get written off tend to have a nasty streak on a topic of some divisiveness. For example I am not religious but not anti-religious; I am anti being deliberately or loudly cruel, posturing or nasty about it either way. People who are like that can be like that, but they will not get to tell me about their professional interests as if their awful behaviour is just a quirk.

YMMV, but I am now middle aged and I don’t have the time for this anymore. Freedom of speech isn’t without consequences for loss of respect. If you think my position awful or lily-livered you are fully within your rights to let it colour your judgement of my opinions on technology.

Touché. I mean it has almost the same meter. I get that you're disagreeing with me, but have my compensatory upvote.

That evokes the lesser known corollary:

Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.

People say "background" here, because the default assumption is HN readers have software expertise, but it's frequently unclear what else, if anything, they have here.

I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.

---

That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?

His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.

Examples of these claims?

I am slightly abusing/overstretching the concept, to be fair; other commenters are not wrong to remark as such. But still.

The first link in his article cites his source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London

A proper British nativist would go full Tolkien and start resenting French influence on the language.

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.

London was 97.7% white in 1960.

I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.

It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).

But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.

In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.

This happens a lot in London’s history: https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...

So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.

People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.

A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:

https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/

Super-cool museum space dedicated to London as a port city.

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.

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.

Concerns with the dogshit I stepped in aside, I had a wonderful time going barefoot through the tulips.

DHH is "off the Rails" is not false now?

Thanks! We've changed the url to that from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9SxpJpHuus.

Adieu, Ruby on Rails.

It’s now Rust on Rails.

it became culturally irrelevant around rails 5

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.

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.

When I started in computing there was no Web, there was enough space to install the applications that actually mattered, and even better, developers actually had to take hardware constraints into account.

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.

Uhh, sounds like you haven't been writing modern React lately, which is server side lol

and something about omarchy

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

That is actually a smart move. You only have to learn SQL once to use it for 50 years.

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)

Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.

Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work

It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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.

You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.

SE is not like farming.

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.

https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195

And I think the online reality is much closer to the truth than AFK reality. I can't think of a single founder I've talked to in the past two years that's building with rails. That doesn't mean rails dies overnight, but it does mean it's simply all downhill from here.

I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.

Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.

Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.

The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.

Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.

Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.

And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.

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.

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.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.

The whole AI issue is and always has been a social question. It's hardly a ridiculous concept to have a skilled worker control a $10k budget to buy tools. In many fields that is normal.

Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.

I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.

I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.

You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.

Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.

Let’s see the moved mountains I’m sitting here waiting to see any improvement in software

Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.

sure but if that's the case society and i will have much bigger problems anyways

20 a month and using sonnet mostly for random fun stuff.

At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.

Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm very glad I am not dealing with anything even remotely corporate during this time, because I'd absolutely hate it

Meta just gave DHH $1m in credits fwiw

The list of people who have made millions and would be indifferent when the source of those millions is being challenged can not be very long.

It’s easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh).

It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.

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.

I mean, that’s like half an hour of tokens, right? (Half joking laugh/cry etc)

I think more often the comparison is web techs (like React native) VS native apps.

It is that bad.

You forgot the 30% revenue share the App Stores take.

shopify agrees https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native

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.

I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?

Robby is well known in the Ruby community.

Probably not a lumberjack.

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.

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.

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.

In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.

Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.

p(bloom)

These aphorisms try to put a more positive spin on the keynote, but they miss the point that made it so disappointing for a lot of people.

They travelled to a Ruby on Rails conference because they wanted to hear RoR talks. The keynote was all about AI and Rust and ended with “don’t be losers” about the AI debate.

Ruby on Rails content not found.

I suppose the die hard fans who have been around this long and who continue to travel to see DHH speak have aligned themselves with him as a personality figure, maybe more so than with Rails itself. Outside of that bubble, it just feels sad that one person used the conference to do yet another controversial move in an inflammatory way while ignoring the topic everyone travelled for. I say this as someone who uses a lot of AI and also agrees that programming work has changed. It’s just so insulting to be surprise-lectured about it with condescending “don’t be losers” comments when the topic was supposed to be Rails.

There was an opportunity to talk about what AI meant for the future of Rails, but instead he went off bragging about rewriting Hey in Rust. Rust has been my primary language for years, but I don’t want to be lectured about it in a Rails keynote while Rails discussion is nowhere to be found.

I that case so is Clojure.

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.

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.

why is that?

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.

Whatever answer you get, it's nothing more than an opinion. For now, anyway.

https://danluu.com/pl-tokens/

I'm not worried, feel free to use punch cards if you want sir..

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.

For varying definitions of results.

I stopped writing code manually more than a year ago. I've experienced the 100x, even perhaps the 1000x he mentions, and I still think he's fucking psychotic.

Not reading generated webapp code is one thing. Blindly commiting OS code is a whole different dimension, as is writing production code in a language you don't even know how to read.

So far a Rust rewrite's success rate directly, probably super linearly, correlates with the presence of a good, well designed test suite. This is why Bun's rewrite and others are successful. I anticipate that this will be true for the 37Signals rewrites.

I want to learn a couple of things once they are done:

1. Once the test suite assistance is over, how do features get built in their backends and continue to maintain the same quality. LLM test writing is a bit trickier as it often favors what Randy Coulman called tautological tests back in the day. It takes a lot of work to get them not to do this, so I am guessing folks at 37Signals will read at least this part. I can't imagine zero Rust read at all.

2. Over the years they had a few innovations in their domain design, ones that Rails made easier to do, for instance their delegated type pattern. Will Rust replicate this, and how would one know without reading it, or perhaps it does not matter? Furthermore, how do newer patterns emerge? and how does our arsenal of better abstractions keep growing?

I don't have the answers but I am glad there is a chance we can learn said answers.

That's cool, but like with most things, I think the manager types will misunderstand:

- A lot of this is looking at an existing app and/or code for reference.

- The people doing/guiding this are skilled.

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

and also said that a 10x dev in now 1000x with a tool like this

Yeah, I'm sure you are doing ~4 years worth of work per day. Get real Jesus Christ.

At least at the current level of AI, it still takes days/weeks/months to make a good app if you have standards. That's not effort everyone will want to do.

I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately. I am in the process of building my own music software applications. This is actually allowing me to leave MacOS since Ableton was previously the anchor for me. I can now build tools that are more geared towards what I always wanted in Rust much like DHH was talking about in that talk.

I could sell some of my tools I built but I am on the fence about it. As a few others have said, there is still work and taste that goes into those tools that some might not want to put the effort into. However, there will be an increasing number of people who just build bespoke tools for themselves. That's probably ok. There's a market for both.

The most important thing now (and maybe always) is distribution. If anyone can build something then it ultimately comes down to your ability to market, build trust and provide support at 2:30 AM. That's hard to do when you're a one person shop. Software is an ongoing operational commitment if you make it your business.

Which means that the number of people who can do a version of the thing i’ve been doing most of my life got way way way bigger in the last couple years.

Which invariably means that businesses who incorrectly believe that their vibe coded solution will withstand the trials and tribulations of production will be needing even more professional help when it all goes wrong.

Everything old is new again.

Yes people shouldn't discuss until they have tried vibe coding as SaaS. I do this now and it is 10x faster at coding and 1x on any other tasks. So overall maybe 3 months work is done in a month. This means the typical SaaS may be cheaper now but it is not like anyone can vibe code it cheaper than the subscription fee.

Geocities made everyone a webmaster, too. Remember those badass websites?

If/when agents become reliable enough, there will be no need for web apps, nor phone apps, etc. In fact, DHH got that part right: "your app should have a CLI if you want me to use it." If "English is the best programming language", then English is the best UX. I'm not navigating a silly page and filling out forms and dismissing popups if my agent can book a flight for me with a sentence and a bit of textual back and forth.

I wonder if the web will go away and the Internet will be just bot to bot traffic.

Navigating the web seems archaic in that context. Not only is that the end of Rails, but of frontend, JavaScript, etc. in the long term.

With RAM prices where they are, I'm expecting to see a lot more of this in the next year.

We've been transitioning in-memory caching for web apps to tiered or on-nvme caching. It's an order of magnitude slower, but no one really noticed.

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.

I guess it's the only con that will take money to have DHH give a keynote about some sycophantic BS

yes

No, not at all. Anyone who gives a damn at all about producing quality software is reading the code, and frankly most people who care about producing quality software aren't using LLMs to do it.

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.

If you allow me to quote Gemini 3.1 pro:

___

If we are talking about the standard 3.5-inch High Density (HD) floppy disk, which is the universal cultural icon for "floppy disk" (and the save icon in your software), the capacity is exactly:

    1,474,560 bytes
    This is equal to 1,440 KB (using 1024-byte kilobytes).
    It is marketed and universally referred to as 1.44 MB.

Now, let's run the exact math on DHH's keynote claim:

    His binary size: 0.5 MB (approx. 512,000 bytes).
    Floppy size: 1.44 MB (1,474,560 bytes).

If you put his "impossibly fast" 0.5 MB binary onto a standard floppy disk, you would have nearly a full megabyte of free space left over. You could fit almost three of his binaries on a single disk. You do not need "a little compression." You need a basic understanding of less-than/greater-than operators.

The Preemptive "Reply-Guy" Shield

Now, just in case a Hacker News pedant is reading this and wants to argue that DHH was talking about a different format, here is the absolute certainty on the rest of the historical hardware:

    3.5-inch Double Density (DD) (1980s): 720 KB. (A 0.5 MB file still fits easily without compression).

    3.5-inch Extended Density (ED) (1987): 2.88 MB. (Fits five of his binaries).

    5.25-inch High Density (1984): 1.2 MB. (Fits two of his binaries).

    5.25-inch Double Density (1981): 360 KB.

    8-inch Original IBM (1971): 80 KB.

To make DHH's statement mathematically correct, we have to pretend he was standing on a stage in 2024, hyping up modern web framework binaries, while indexing his storage metaphors to a 5.25-inch Double Density disk from 1981.

__

Thank you, Gemini. Much appreciated. Also, I love the tone.

(You can tell that it is actually that LLM by it thinking that it is still 2024)

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".)

Next year they will rewrite rails in rust with AI

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.

It's his conference he made because he was banned from the big one, for good reasons.

Oh wow, I forgot about this. That context is important. He's talking to an audience of adherents. There's something mildly fascist about that.

They didn't say it pays the bills. My guess is playing music, its the only other thing for me.

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.

Grifter gonna grift.

"This is the most confusing funeral I’ve ever experienced" is the top comment there. Rather apt!

That's kind of the point of conference talks.

"Here's something that I did that turned out to be helpful to my situation. Maybe you can learn something useful from it for your situation"

I don't really mean “give a team of TypeScript devs an agent and suddenly they can ship and maintain a production iOS app.” Expertise and ownership still matter, especially for something you have to support for years.

I'm talking more about agents as a force multiplier for teams who do have engineering experience. They reduce the amount of specialized knowledge, time, and coordination required to get something built and maintained. The constraint gets meaningfully weaker.

An experienced engineer who understands software architecture, debugging, product constraints, etc. but isn't an expert in every native platform can increasingly use an agent to bridge some of those gaps. That's very different from vibecoding your way into production.

fwiw I think we're still very early in the process of re-thinking about how teams are organized and what skill sets they need.

*fascist. Don't sugarcoat it.

"Strong opinions, loosely held" is an ideal worth striving for. The alternative is to hold on to things you should know better are false, aka dogmatism.

He several negative traits. He's one of these opinionated controversial guys. Because he has money people feel the need to react to what he says, whether they think he's right or wrong. Annoyingly, people like that get more exposure than level headed people with measured takes.

Mixed with his terrible views on society (xenophobia, techno-fascism), it makes a rather sour cocktail.

Totally disagree on the reevaluation of architecture best practices.

Agents are as prone as forgetting to update duplicated code as we are ( or almost ), because they work at the same level : text files spread everywhere that you have to open and read to know what's inside.

The fundamental reasons for those architecture best practices are still there, and it's actually quite convenient and also a good reason to remain optimistic in our ability to find a job as a professional software developer.

A lot can (and should) be said about this keynote, but I have a hangup on portraiture as an example of "creative destruction" (how I loathe that expression!). Classical portraiture is still alive and well and artists are still able to make a living from it - possibly even more of them now than during the 1800s.

The advent of the camera did push visual art in new directions, but not quite as presented here. Oil painting and portraiture wasn't as static as it's made out to be, and there's a difference between a commissioned portrait and artists painting people because they enjoy painting people. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, El Greco and Hieronymus Bosch are some of the most well-known experimenters in western art and they were active in the 1500s. Some of the most famous art movements (impressionism, expressionism, arts & crafts) appeared well before photography was democratized.

The biggest difference, though - as much as I love art - is that portraits are a distraction. Then as now, it's mostly a vanity project for the affluent and of little consequence to the lives of the vast majority. Software, on the other hand, is not only a multi-billion dollar industry employing millions of people, it's also a direct matter of life and death, since it's an essential component in things like nuclear power plants, airplanes and medical equipment.

Nah I'm good thanks. Call me old school, but I'd rather understand how things work, and try and keep a maintainable codebase. Rather than just get some random rust I've no idea what it is, or why it does it, pushed into prod.

I think this is going to be todays 'cheap outsource' culture. Good enough to keep shareholders happy, an apparent boost in productivity, before tanking the reliability of the company.

Remember when we used to scorn stackoverflow developers, or PRs that were more than a few lines long. An every morning git pull is now bigger than my terminal buffer, its complete chaos. Numbers game to keep the new metrics world gamification going. Its dire.

A few things are true:

- He is not wrong and all programmers need to hear this

- He loves to hear himself talk

- A year or two from now he will run this video to admit he was wrong about something