Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
I literally just patched an AI-generated API endpoint on a new service at work that shipped without any auth whatsoever, because AI was re-implementing the auth token check method individually in each child controller instead of implementing once in a before_action hook. That's Rails 101 stuff and the app is small. It was so obvious that I saw it right away just reading the code, I didn't even set an agent loose to do an initial inspection. It was a real "yeah I still got it" moment for me.
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Interesting that all the patterns Rails adopted for humans to write better code can't easily be funneled into the LLM doing the job now. Seems like it should be.
I think the issue with Rails, as a long time developer in that ecosystem, is that much of the default assumptions are a) not common (not so far off-piste that a human can't get used to them, but outside the center of the bell curve), and b) not explicit. So it's very common to do things like install a plugin that has across-the-repo effects but that is only documented in e.g. the config directory and the bundle. Unlike, say, NPM, when you install a new package where you explicitly have to e.g. import it everywhere you want to use it.
As time has gone on Rails has gotten better about this, but it still means that "your rails" and "my rails" are different enough that AI could easily get confused.
As you say, the other aspect is the intense dynamism which works against AI, which again prefers to have everything explicit and reasonable about from the text.
So I ended up going back to Javascript after a brief 12 year digression into Ruby. I still love Ruby but it's just not the right language for the current environment and team structures - typescript is "worse is better" in the right ways that it's a much better choice for both frontend/backend being the same and better type systems.
How certain are you about that? <a href="https://guides.rubyonrails.org/v2.3/plugins.html" rel="nofollow">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. <a href="https://github.com/jaggederest/acts_as_voteable" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jaggederest/acts_as_voteable
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.
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.
> Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
I still review PRs, but rarely suggest changes. The most meaningful reviews come from our review bots. I mostly review broad architectural decisions as a way to keep abreast of changes in the codebase. There's a cohort of engineers I work with who I would be perfectly okay with letting the clankers review, approve, and merge their PRs. But there's a larger cohort of engineers who need what I would call a directional code review.
Agile is dead. It presumed writing the code was the slowest part of the cycle. Now it makes more sense to only start writing code when the requirements are known as the code is quick and low cost to change if/when the requirements change later.
Agreed, this is very critical point, I always thought big part of software engineering is the art and science of managing ever-growing complexity.
The part I'm still not sure about is the 2nd point, I just don't know how good those LLMs will get at managing complexity and how important is for human to understand the details of the code. I'm personally not sure yet..I could imagine a future where we have have much more higher level tools to manage the comprehension and complexity challenges. Or it could be that LLMs will never fully comprehend the full architecture and humans will always be needed for that kind of big-picture analysis. I really don't know, and frankly I don't think anybody knows.
> That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.
His article was literally in support of Tommy Robinson's marches, there isn't really any further right on the political spectrum than you can go, these politics are so extreme that no political party no matter how far right would risk association with and they go out of their way to vet and exclude them.
This is just so silly. There's plenty of space left to go right of Robinson. He's not even advocating a christian theocracy, and there's plenty of people in the US that do.
Lying about your opponents just make them look good. We should all have learnt this lesson from the Trump fiasco.
There is no viable political party in the UK that is right-wing enough to be endorsed by Robinson. When the normie racist party (Reform) isn't racist enough so you have to go to the even more racist party (Restore) there might be an issue with your beliefs.
If you like his politics then good for you, no need to make things up about a country you don't understand.
> There is no viable political party in the UK that is right-wing enough to be endorsed by Robinson
Ok. And? This was not the statement I objected to. Just because there isn't a mainstream major party right of him, doesn't mean he's to the most right there is in the universe. Those are completely different things.
No, fascism has a pretty clear definition, just read Ur-Fascism. DHH fits that to a T. You just don't know what fascism is, or you're struggling with some cognitive dissonance.
I have never heard of this work, but thank you for sharing it. It's terrifying how nearly every single point is something that AI companies are embracing and marketing under.
> No, fascism has a pretty clear definition, just read Ur-Fascism. DHH fits that to a T. You just don't know what fascism is, or you're struggling with some cognitive dissonance.
DHH repeatedly presents electoral democracy as the legitimate mechanism for resolving political disagreement. He has also repeatedly emphasized free speech, including criticizing European restrictions that he regards as excessive, and has argued for keeping political disagreements from destroying ordinary social relationships.
Historians generally use fascism for something considerably more specific than nationalism, anti-immigration politics, or right-wing populism: typically an authoritarian ultranationalist movement hostile to liberal democracy and political pluralism, historically associated with a powerful centralized state, suppression of opposition, and political violence.
I find it interesting to see the different dimming levels of comments in this thread. This person calling DHH a fascist and racist is undimmed while the previous much more mild (but implied right leaning) comment is almost disappeared.
It's a bit more nuanced than that though. If someone breaks into your house and you ask the police to remove them you aren't a fascist. If Russia invades your country and you fight them for every inch, you aren't a fascist. If Romanis invade your city and threaten, assault, and rob your citizens and you remove them, you aren't a fascist.
The issue with the Romani is that they refuse to integrate. Or rather, the people we call the Romani are the people left after parts of their population DID integrate and now are just a part of society. It's selection really.
What do you do with a population like this that is actively belligerent? The Nazis solution was extermination, and I obviously think that's very immoral. Just letting them walk all over us is also immoral. Forced integration by breaking them up into individual families isolated from each other and performing cultural genocide? Also immoral.
This is a classic dilemma. There's no good option here. But pretending there isn't a dilemma is just fooling yourself.
I think a lot of people haven't actually watched his talk and don't understand what he is saying. If you watch the talk, he is not anti-rails. He is just very pro- agentic coding.
What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
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
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 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.
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?
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Not sure if you’re speaking from experience or just being theoretical here. We’re using Rails and it’s been great. Maintenance and upgrades have been a breeze.
All this static vs dynamic stuff doesn’t really matter anymore. AI doesn’t care. You just need to close the feedback loop with tests, linting, a compiler, or whatever else gives it a clear signal.
Rails dev here, still using it, still plan on using it, use agents, don't see them making food gun decisions with rails apis just code.
Rails comes with the console by default, so production inspection of a bug is something the ai can do without a ton of bs to be set up, and that console can be forced to be auditable (using standard gems) or read only (using flags).
I used to love rust, still do sorta, but yeah I think this is really not a good argument against a tool that operationally is better at most things at being observed or poked or prodded or tested in production
Do the teams fully understand the code that they are committing? Are the teams reviewing each others code or are agents? When agents do all the coding, and perhaps the reviewing, and the patching what is left of the team? 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.
I hate native apps. There are use cases better suited to native apps but often it's just not what I want.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
Users absolutely care, people hate downloading random shit on their phone they don't want but are forced to.
What has always been true is that users often have no choice or voice to express their actual desires. It's not like there is a public alternative here (when there should be).
One of the things I admire most about Basecamp is that they are a bootstrapped, profitable business. There's no shame in running a business this way. The world would be more resilient if more business owners grew sustainably instead of soaking up endless invester funding and losing money year after year before enshittifying in a desperate attempt to repay their overlords.
Here, I will give you my upvote! That's how Issuetrak is. The founder (me), still owns a majority of the stock, there's no outside investment, and we have customers who've been with us more than 20 years. Multiple employees as well!
>His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps
I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.
as a solo: you can build and ship more in your own time
as a startup: you can iterate and scale more with more velocity and less growing pains
as an enterprise: people with ideas but not a technical background can put their tokens where their mouth is and build their own interfaces, personal apps, ask their own questions, ship their own features without having to navigate layer 8 and play games for resources
At least within my circle, that’s not really the case. Instead, what I’m seeing is more of a hiring freeze, with the budget being used to empower existing employees through AI. Which I think is a more reasonable take.
That's often layoffs in disguise. If you want to cut 10%, but you don't want to do it as a single layoff, because that's expensive, can trigger certain laws depending where you are, and might disrupt teams, who do you cut?
Instead you can do layoff by attrition, you stop hiring, and you don't backfill seats, as people naturally leave or get pip-ed, the team shrink, you don't rehire into the position, and in a year or two, you cut down by 10%.
Also, I wouldn't trivialize a freeze in hiring growth, it means to get a job you have to wait for someone to retire, and also wait for people looking for jobs with more experience as they're more likely to fill the roll to also retire. Basically there's now way more demand for jobs than hiring, so that will drive compensation down for those currently employed.
Adding on to your point about attrition: if internal promotions in engineering are decided by your ability to be a force multiplier, to facilitate cross team collaboration, mentor and help others to skill up, how do any currently employed engineers demonstrate that with no one new to mentor or train? How do you collaborate when teammates work with AI tools more and coworkers less? Would they just have an easier time getting into a higher responsibility role looking elsewhere?
> We can't hire or give anyone raises, but we will expect you to be more productive via throwing money into the slop void.
i see your point and i want to tell you it's pretty much the same with cloud computing, which is so much more expensive than running your own hardware... and yet nobody's really questioning cloud computing (except the oxide people, but they're still tiny)
the company i work for could probably spent half its yearly cloud bill in hardware and be fine for 3-5 years.
guess who discovered the same thing and booted google cloud off their books? dhh
Why does it sound like layoffs? If you keep the team size the same and use the productivity increase to deliver more business value, how is that layoffs?
If I figure out a way to make my workers produce 10 times more widgets each, it doesn't automatically follow that there is a market for the extra 9 widgets. Otherwise I would have hired 9 extra workers before that invention to fulfill the market demand.
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.
That is the fallacy of all those MBA degrees with exponential growth expectations, they never take into account the physical limitations of goods, like your very good examples.
Thus layoffs, no need to keep as many employees around.
There is no MBA like magical growth, the amount of customers is a physical limitation of inhabitants on planet Earth that are willing to actually use a specific piece of software, regardless of how productive it was made in first place.
If every engineer is 10-100x more productive with AI, and one company slashes its workforce to maintain the same level of productivity at reduced cost, it will lose out to its competitor who retains the same workforce and does far more with it.
Right now, the vibe at my company is not “we can save so much money with AI” it’s “here’s an infinite budget, use all the tokens you can to expand our moat because we’ve never been more sensitive to competitive disruption than we are now”
> TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding.
That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:
That DHH is into AI agents everywhere is easy to see, but if you go to rails-con, would you not expect this to be about rails as such, and people? Now it's about rust - and AI. Controlled by big corporations. Yikes - some people must be upset about having gone there to listen to DHH preaching about an agentic future.
Edit: I also watched parts of the recent youtube video about rails. I could not focus on the content because DHH's style was so strange. I've seen that style before - nothingburger talks. Look at phrases he used such as "I have retired from being a professional programmer/software engineer". This is all aimed to hype up "agentic coding is the future". Rails is dead - that video is all the proof one needs. DHH shifted gears to AI, and it is quite similar to when he first promoted rails. But now it is about AI, not rails.
It seems to me, so far, everyone moved one level up.
- A layperson can now build one a solo developer can do
- A solo dev can now build what an agency of web development can do
- An agency of web development can now build native apps similar to what large corporation can do
- Large corporation can now tackle even more ambitious projects
Which makes sense given what got automated. This is with the current tech, people still exploring the full potential, but if that turns out to be the case then I'd argue the software market will grow substantially and we are just having an adjustment period.
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".
This matches my experience. My solo projects are now bigger than I ever would have accepted alone. The one I’m going to finish soon is one I actually refused a year ago because it was too big.
It’s the top of the chain that I wonder about. Agentic development is so fast (and in the process I’ve developed so good) that I’m thinking there is actually a maximum size a company doing this work could get. Beyond that top end size the management overhead is what’s limiting or the market size total. Maybe not, maybe mega dev houses will find other problems to solve, but I have a hard time imagining it.
I do suspect there will be many mega projects. Things like new operating systems, new apps ecosystem (not just apple/android), new virtual reality environments, massive interconnected web of agents, in-house models etc, also alot of re-writes and update of existing infrastructure.. competitors to existing social networks and many established players..I think the entire software ecosystem will grow larger, wider and deeper from all directions.
From what I have seen the pie will get way larger, but there is growth pain and adjustment period for sure.
But to your point, I also think solo devs/freelancer are now seeing the most gains, that's because they can adapt the fastest and they don't need to deal with existing overheads.
Larger organizations might need more tooling/agents and better internal processes before they can see the full potential. I don't think ww, as an industry, are there yet, this tech started truly working less than a year ago.
It’s not his message, it’s the forum. Why host a rails conference, that he explicitly created because he was silenced from the main one…to them not talk about rails?
Why not adapt rails for this next generation?
Why do it this way? It’s like walking into a temple to yell about Jesus. It was absurdly obnoxious.
But he himself promotes such a future too. This is a conflict of interest.
You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.
> Agents do currently work well with Rails
According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.
Nothing that he said is just him espousing the truth. It is the world as he and all the other AI-pilled people wish it to be. It is a world they want to convince everyone is inevitable. There are still a lot of people outside of tech bubbles that don't like the direction AI is going and don't want to embrace what these companies are doing or how the government is handling it.
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
AI is not as big of a productivity boost as compilers were but it is not zero. Back then, SQL was created and marketed as something “managers could use”, another parallel to the current cycle. This whole hype cycle is something we’ve seen before and IMO, we should know better how to handle it this time around. It’s a bit disappointing to hear the same arguments every time.
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.
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.
Given that we know he's literally a fascist (it's in all his political posts) that jives. "Embrace what we want or get mercilessly crushed" is a very fascist position.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Respectfully, your comment I replied to was very much this. Your dismissal is based on the person rather than the substance... on the basis of their political opinion in a completely unrelated field. Being wrong, and an asshole, about one thing doesn't make one wrong about everything else by association.
Ignoring dhh because he's offensive is totally reasonable and if that's what you meant well that's different.
> Your dismissal is based on the person rather than the substance…
It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.
From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.
Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?
For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.
These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.
(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)
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.
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.
Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
People say "background" here, because the default assumption is HN readers have software expertise, but it's frequently unclear what else, if anything, they have here.
I do agree "background" is vague, but I generally assume the minimal threshold to say that is something like a previous career, undergraduate degree, or graduate degree in the background. I personally wouldn't say I had a background in something I was only an amateur enthusiast of.
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That being said, what on earth gives you the idea a substantial background in sociology WOULDN'T be relevant here?
Because I understand what sociology is and isn't, since I too have "a background" in sociology and urban development. As well as statistics, history and even futurology.
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
I'm glad you found that interesting, whoever you are. KingMob is right, though: I have college degrees in those subjects, and I work in urban planning. However, that doesn't make my post an appeal to authority. He discusses topics that have been very thoroughly studied over the course of decades, and he seems unfamiliar with these studies. He seems to go for a "it's just basic logic, right?" approach in many of his posts. It's not very effective writing - but perhaps it is if you have no background in these subjects?
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
Haven't heard him talking about urban development, except for a general preference for European-style urban design (safety, efficiency, for people), and the overall terrible American car-centered design. Please correct me if he did say something incorrect about the urban design.
I don't think so. But urban planning covers a lot more than design and development and transportation. There's lots of history that inevitably includes exclusionary housing and redlining (e.g., historical systemic racism) and crime, as well as immigration, policing, job accessibility, and more. He's had a few posts that touch upon some of these. In sum, I think he's intellectually lazy.
> Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_.
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.
With his infamous "As I remember London" article [1] he directly correlated skin colour to nationality leading to the claim that native Brits had dropped from 60% to a third.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
>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.
That's disingenuous because it's a neologism based on the population that were in America at the time of its colonisation. Native literally has the etymology of place of birth in the word.
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960.
Now it is around 50%, and falling.
Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">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.
The literal definition and etymology of 'native' relates to birth, check a dictionary and the definition will read the same. The truth is that 60% of London's population is made up of native Brits and that hasn't changed at all over the last 25 years.
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not 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: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">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:
That is also bullshit (although a popular myth, deliberately cultivated by 19th-century English supremacists to justify subjugating their Celtic neighbors). Every region in Britain has a majority of Insular Celtic DNA on average (though the fraction varies). Even in the most heavily Anglo-Saxon regions like East Anglia, Germanic DNA is in the minority.
And of course the Celtic Britons replaced the Neolithic farmers, who replaced the Mesolithic foragers, and so on. "Indigenous" becomes meaningless with so many population replacements.
You think Celtic Brits don't count as white? Have you seen us? We're some of the pastiest looking people you will ever meet. I could get sunburnt opening the fridge.
Oh hon, I am your Irish people transported across a sea. In this part of my family, “happily” by personal decision, as opposed to the other half that wound up in Australia. The sun and I have made our peace.
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.
Same. I find that the combination of the BEAM runtime and the guardrails that you get with an Elixir project, functional style and particularly the consistent structure of using Ash with it for data, API and CLI lead to a very maintainable codebase even with a lot of AI.
Phoenix with LiveView bypassing the need for a separate frontend framework is also a huge win there.
robgough · · focus · HN ↗
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.
CodingJeebus · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
Is it types? Are types the answer? Is it rust?
jaggederest · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
jaggederest · · focus · HN ↗
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. <a href="https://github.com/jaggederest/acts_as_voteable" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jaggederest/acts_as_voteable
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
yawaramin · · focus · HN ↗
CodingJeebus · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
timhh · · focus · HN ↗
whazor · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
In Software Engineering, we learned about requirements, testings, system design, UMLs, etc, and those seems to be more relevant than ever.
everfrustrated · · focus · HN ↗
whazor · · focus · HN ↗
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.
aogaili · · focus · HN ↗
The part I'm still not sure about is the 2nd point, I just don't know how good those LLMs will get at managing complexity and how important is for human to understand the details of the code. I'm personally not sure yet..I could imagine a future where we have have much more higher level tools to manage the comprehension and complexity challenges. Or it could be that LLMs will never fully comprehend the full architecture and humans will always be needed for that kind of big-picture analysis. I really don't know, and frankly I don't think anybody knows.
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
rason-yang · · focus · HN ↗
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Rover222 · · focus · HN ↗
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Rover222 · · focus · HN ↗
jstummbillig · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
iancuandrei · · focus · HN ↗
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bvcp · · focus · HN ↗
pipes · · focus · HN ↗
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
boxed · · focus · HN ↗
Lying about your opponents just make them look good. We should all have learnt this lesson from the Trump fiasco.
Jtarii · · focus · HN ↗
If you like his politics then good for you, no need to make things up about a country you don't understand.
boxed · · focus · HN ↗
Ok. And? This was not the statement I objected to. Just because there isn't a mainstream major party right of him, doesn't mean he's to the most right there is in the universe. Those are completely different things.
konmok · · focus · HN ↗
shimman · · focus · HN ↗
andsoitis · · focus · HN ↗
DHH repeatedly presents electoral democracy as the legitimate mechanism for resolving political disagreement. He has also repeatedly emphasized free speech, including criticizing European restrictions that he regards as excessive, and has argued for keeping political disagreements from destroying ordinary social relationships.
Historians generally use fascism for something considerably more specific than nationalism, anti-immigration politics, or right-wing populism: typically an authoritarian ultranationalist movement hostile to liberal democracy and political pluralism, historically associated with a powerful centralized state, suppression of opposition, and political violence.
DHH doesn’t fit the bill.
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
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beastoven · · focus · HN ↗
.·°՞( ̑ ᗜ ̑ )՞°·.
KingMob · · focus · HN ↗
boxed · · focus · HN ↗
The issue with the Romani is that they refuse to integrate. Or rather, the people we call the Romani are the people left after parts of their population DID integrate and now are just a part of society. It's selection really.
What do you do with a population like this that is actively belligerent? The Nazis solution was extermination, and I obviously think that's very immoral. Just letting them walk all over us is also immoral. Forced integration by breaking them up into individual families isolated from each other and performing cultural genocide? Also immoral.
This is a classic dilemma. There's no good option here. But pretending there isn't a dilemma is just fooling yourself.
simianwords · · focus · HN ↗
KingMob · · focus · HN ↗
jjtheblunt · · focus · HN ↗
micromacrofoot · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64" rel="nofollow">https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
jjtheblunt · · focus · HN ↗
andrewmutz · · focus · HN ↗
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:
<a href="https://rubyonrails.org/ai" rel="nofollow">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.
dmix · · focus · HN ↗
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.
Scarbutt · · focus · HN ↗
lackoftactics · · focus · HN ↗
mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
za3faran · · focus · HN ↗
james_marks · · focus · HN ↗
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.
timr · · focus · HN ↗
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.
Lio · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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ksec · · focus · HN ↗
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.
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
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).
toomuchtodo · · focus · HN ↗
pitched · · focus · HN ↗
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
cpursley · · focus · HN ↗
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
tkz1312 · · focus · HN ↗
sroerick · · focus · HN ↗
azuanrb · · focus · HN ↗
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.
pdhborges · · focus · HN ↗
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
status_quo69 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
sdellis · · focus · HN ↗
Also, I hate native apps. FWIW most devs I know actively try to avoid them.
(1) <a href="https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/
azuanrb · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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).
quentindemetz · · focus · HN ↗
It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.
mvdtnz · · focus · HN ↗
petersumskas · · focus · HN ↗
hank1931 · · focus · HN ↗
mosura · · focus · HN ↗
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Hamuko · · focus · HN ↗
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.
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
That sounds like layoffs lol.
milkshakes · · focus · HN ↗
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
azuanrb · · focus · HN ↗
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
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.
eric-hu · · focus · HN ↗
officeplant · · focus · HN ↗
We can't hire or give anyone raises, but we will expect you to be more productive via throwing money into the slop void.
znpy · · focus · HN ↗
i see your point and i want to tell you it's pretty much the same with cloud computing, which is so much more expensive than running your own hardware... and yet nobody's really questioning cloud computing (except the oxide people, but they're still tiny)
the company i work for could probably spent half its yearly cloud bill in hardware and be fine for 3-5 years.
guess who discovered the same thing and booted google cloud off their books? dhh
that guy is simply enlightened.
officeplant · · focus · HN ↗
znpy · · focus · HN ↗
andrewmutz · · focus · HN ↗
dist-epoch · · focus · HN ↗
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.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
petersumskas · · focus · HN ↗
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
milkshakes · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
There is no MBA like magical growth, the amount of customers is a physical limitation of inhabitants on planet Earth that are willing to actually use a specific piece of software, regardless of how productive it was made in first place.
didibus · · focus · HN ↗
Why do you think 100% of all companies will choose the first? Obviously some will choose the latter, hence it sounds like layoffs.
zingar · · focus · HN ↗
ilikehurdles · · focus · HN ↗
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”
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
shevy-java · · focus · HN ↗
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:
<a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a" rel="nofollow">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.
aogaili · · focus · HN ↗
- 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 · · focus · HN ↗
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aogaili · · focus · HN ↗
Have you seen the older apps built by devs? or all the other bootstrap themes?
138add · · focus · HN ↗
He is just promoting Shopify's vibe coding for merchants. I bet on Shopify pivoting to vibe coded Rust soon because of "security".
ilikehurdles · · focus · HN ↗
But to your other comment, are you professionally employed as a developer and still writing code by hand?
usef- · · focus · HN ↗
springtimesun · · focus · HN ↗
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.
aogaili · · focus · HN ↗
From what I have seen the pie will get way larger, but there is growth pain and adjustment period for sure.
aogaili · · focus · HN ↗
Larger organizations might need more tooling/agents and better internal processes before they can see the full potential. I don't think ww, as an industry, are there yet, this tech started truly working less than a year ago.
newlisp · · focus · HN ↗
toobulkeh · · focus · HN ↗
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.
nathanappere · · focus · HN ↗
mb22 · · focus · HN ↗
shevy-java · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
mrdependable · · focus · HN ↗
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
anthonypasq · · focus · HN ↗
pitched · · focus · HN ↗
mrdependable · · focus · HN ↗
pitched · · focus · HN ↗
Jtarii · · focus · HN ↗
NetMageSCW · · focus · HN ↗
pitched · · focus · HN ↗
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
claude_on_fails · · focus · HN ↗
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dofm · · focus · HN ↗
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?
dorianmariecom · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
Ignoring dhh because he's offensive is totally reasonable and if that's what you meant well that's different.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
It's fully based on the substance of the point as well. DHH's view is not just wrong, it's wilfully misleading, on a topic of enormous significance, to further a bad faith point. He could have retracted or amended it when presented with the facts; he has not. So this is a problem of substance as well as person.
From there yes, I get to a point about the person. IMO it is a useful practical definition of madness to pretend that someone acting in bad faith can be trusted to do it only on a single divisive topic.
Given two people, one a manipulative antivaxxer and one not: are you saying you don't factor your view on their anti-vaxx thoughts into their recommendations on other fact-based topics?
For me, these people simply get deleted from my brain, as far as possible.
These are simple judgements about the likelihood someone's opinion on a topic I do not know about is going to be good. When I know that their other opinions are clearly wrong and held in bad faith, I am going to take that into account.
(Where religion comes into things is where it becomes mostly a question of personality.)
goosejuice · · focus · HN ↗
mattbrewsbytes · · focus · HN ↗
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.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
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.
themgt · · focus · HN ↗
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
revetkn · · focus · HN ↗
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
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.
revetkn · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
specialist · · focus · HN ↗
Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
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?
KingMob · · focus · HN ↗
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?
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
Appeal to authority is a bias for a reason. In this case it wasn't even that well executed.
A "background in software development" (an HR or a marketing girl in the website design sweatshop) does not give enough relevance and authority to speak about the technical details of Linux kernel. Vice versa.
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
Anyway, all I was saying is that reading his posts as a somewhat informed reader leaves me with the impression that he doesn't have a deep understanding of these topics. I studied (25 years ago) many topics that he likes to tell us his thoughts about, such as systemic racism, consumer behavior, nationalism, how to read bar charts, etc. It would be pretty easy for many people to tear open his posts, but he doesn't enable comments.
machomaster · · focus · HN ↗
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
Examples of these claims?
ryantgtg · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
tshaddox · · focus · HN ↗
Incidentally, this is also the fundamental flaw with Crichton's original description of the effect which questioned the accuracy of reporting about international affairs. When it comes to politics, simply having access to important leaders and meetings and reporting on them accurately and fairly is the only "journalistic expertise" you need.
Of course, the even broader problem with the concept is that, in reality, there are some articles written by journalists that contain a reasonable understanding of the subject matter, and some articles that do not. So seeing an article written about your field of expertise that contains misunderstandings doesn't by itself tell you anything about the distribution of good and bad articles covering any particular field.
suhlig · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
diego_sandoval · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
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] <a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64" rel="nofollow">https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
WillPostForFood · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
spiralpolitik · · focus · HN ↗
nixon_why69 · · focus · HN ↗
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
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 · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
sejje · · focus · HN ↗
shadowtree · · focus · HN ↗
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: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960. Now it is around 50%, and falling. Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">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.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
shadowtree · · focus · HN ↗
dwaltrip · · focus · HN ↗
simianwords · · focus · HN ↗
you obviously know this because you know what "native americans" means.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
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: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">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:
<a href="https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/" rel="nofollow">https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/
Super-cool museum space dedicated to London as a port city.
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
Bullshit. They are Johann Come Later Germans who killed off the Celtic Brits.
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2015-03-19-who-do-you-think-you-really-are-genetic-map-british-isles" rel="nofollow">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.
Lio · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
But I’ll happily burn my skin red to protest racist shits. And some of them open with this old trope. Apparently my response is almost as old a trope. But that’s not what Boudicca told us when we fought the Romans.
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
brightball · · focus · HN ↗
Phoenix with LiveView bypassing the need for a separate frontend framework is also a huge win there.