AnalysisDHH contradicts Rails philosophy, narrows its purpose
1 Sep 24 10:50 PM · 1d ago · 1 article · 4 posts · 16 comments · 4 sources · development 1 of 1
The jardo.dev analysis published on Hacker News highlights the contradiction: DHH used the world's premier Rails conference to announce Rails' flagship app is leaving Rails. The analysis notes his vision has narrowed Rails from a platform for "small teams, ambitious products" to a choice of last resort—"web apps of necessity"—while he himself moves to AI-generated Rust.
“DHH used the opening keynote of the world's premier Rails conference to announce that a flagship Rails app was leaving Rails.”
jardo.dev articleDavid Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) Creator and leader of Ruby on Rails37signals Software company owned/led by DHH
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2 outlets What About Rails?
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What people said 24 voices · best of 58 · verbatim
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about 11 months ago [i wrote](https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html#two-key-points): > Bro, it’s cringe af to go to Rails World. I won’t judge you if you went in 2025. But for 2026… just don’t! Why pay money to go hang out with rancid, creepy guys? I’m not one to kink shame but going to Rails World 2026 is a sign that you’re willing to…
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I moved from Ruby+Rails, though some other frameworks that I had no choice in (inherited the projects), to my new place of refuge: Kotlin+http4k.Kotlin is a very acceptable Ruby-with-types. Even better than the new Ruby with optional types. It reads the same, it writes very similar, and it produces very similar "style" of code. I like the be on…
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@ jardo Latest blog post was fire 🔥 Nice work on that. Found it on the front page of lobste.rs, if you weren’t already aware. https:// lobste.rs/s/rvvqos/what_about_ rails
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I feel bad feelings about what happened to Rails. It’s hard to overstate how important rails was to my career. Like this was the first framework that let a group of amateurs really launch ideas with a super supportive community and the things you launched were (relatively) battle tested. You could scale it in a way that was sort of amazing at the…
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> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to…
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What About Rails? L: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails C: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664 posted on 2026.09.24 at 22:50:16 (c=0, p=5)
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Rails is in a weird place right now. My favorite line from the Rails “Doctrine” is: > We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor. I believe that, as do a lot of people in the Rails…
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Most managers don't read the code of their direct reports. They just trust that the code is "good enough" and that there are enough other processes in place to catch bugs before they cause too much damage. I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious…
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What About Rails? Link: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664
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Ahh good catch; they did do a release yesterday. So for just shy of two months a new Rails app did not work out of the box with the latest release. That is really something else to me.
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A chatbot is worse than a CLI app: a CLI app does exactly what you ask for, and has a manual documenting exactly what command do what, and the output is consistent, the same command does the same thing period.A chatbot using an LLM of course not, it suffers from hallucinations, it may do what you want but there is a change it won't and you have to…
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What About Rails?: https:// jardo.dev/what-about-rails Discussion: http:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9839664
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Meanwhile the current Rails release is broken (and has been for weeks) and users can't even get through the first steps in the official getting starting guide without errors that have no actionable stacktrace and points the user to a csrf tag in a template file.
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As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of…
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I was never part of the Rails community (never did web dev professionally, used Rails once for a pro bono project), but I still resent what it did to the Ruby community I knew before Rails.
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but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written software is very reliable and easy to extend and develop. Extremely refreshing to read. The whole thing, not just this statement.Too much discourse creates a false dichotomy of "awesome, wonderful, hand-crafted code" vs "shitty AI slop."A lot of hand-crafted code is pretty bad. This is true even with…
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With all that's known about DHH, and the Ruby community in general being pro-human (or at least historically this was the case), it's a bit worrying there's still a large group of people that are seemingly OK with that and will just go to "David Con". My arm-chair theory here is that this is largely due to the US influence on the tech industry…
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"If every product is used by an agent driving a CLI, what’s going to differentiate Basecamp or Fizzy from the cheapest alternative?"At that point, why even bother with "driving a CLI"? I have a hard time seeing how this all doesn't go away soon. At the current trajectory, I am not seeing a future where software like Basecamp or Fizzy or the…
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That’s actually been one of the funniest things about all of the LLM tooling… I’ve been pushed for a long time to move away from my very CLI-based workflows and now, amazingly, they’re cool again for people who thought I was a grumpy old man last year.
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DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech."Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We…
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> I’m left wondering what the vision for Rails really is now, and who’s going to drive it. It could very well be that projects like Rails do not have much of a future, at least not in the current form. Rails, Django, Flask and other things were there to solve a problem that in this form no longer exists. At least not for people who use coding…
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I code and maintain a Rails stack. About 20% of the time an endpoint takes to respond is spent in Ruby. New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99, and it’s very rare for an endpoint to take more than 100ms. Most respond in under 80ms. I could LLM-port it (and probably will one day), but end-user response performance wouldn’t be the motivation.What does…
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If the horse was dead, then there would be no debate. But people spend a lot of time debating their opinions and preferences and with agents we're mostly past that point. We're just looking at how effective and expensive they are, and those things are measurable. I have no doubts that LLMs are very effective Rails programmers, why wouldn't they…
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> I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me.there's an important caveat here - LLMs absolutely can write better code than me, but they can also…
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