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.
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.
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.
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.