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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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 ↗
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗