I sat front row for David's talk yesterday morning. Having talked with him the day before, I’ll admit… I wasn’t particularly surprised (nor unprepared).
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
I make 55k working at a dental office and a restaurant and I'm paying 200$ a month on open source models because I'm having an absolute blast with them.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
Have you tried OpenRouter and the DeepSeek-like models? If you try to optimize a little you could probably slash those costs.
I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.
robbyrussell · · focus · HN ↗
A bit of a field report from #RailsWorld: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.
Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.
I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.
That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.
There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.
Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.
In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
p(bloom)
lbrito · · focus · HN ↗
nickjj · · focus · HN ↗
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
sroerick · · focus · HN ↗
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
julianeon · · focus · HN ↗
I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.
sroerick · · focus · HN ↗