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 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.
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.
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 ↗
[deleted]
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 ↗
[dead]
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 ↗
[dead]
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 ↗