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.
CodingJeebus 5 hours ago [-]
I literally just patched an AI-generated API endpoint on a new service at work that shipped without any auth whatsoever, because AI was re-implementing the auth token check method individually in each child controller instead of implementing once in a before_action hook. That's Rails 101 stuff and the app is small. It was so obvious that I saw it right away just reading the code, I didn't even set an agent loose to do an initial inspection. It was a real "yeah I still got it" moment for me.
I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
robgough 3 hours ago [-]
One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
robbyrussell 5 hours ago [-]
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.
In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
p(bloom)
theappsecguy 2 hours ago [-]
How long will that last? It's evident that they are trying to squeeze the engineers to the max.
ksec 1 days ago [-]
I was hoping there will be news on Rails 9.0. Feels like this is the end of Ruby Rails.
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
stefanlindbohm 10 hours ago [-]
Those performance numbers mean nothing considering they went from rendering every single view of a highly interactive app solely on their servers to moving all rendering to the clients. It’s possible the backend logic of the app could have run on 10 hosts running Ruby as well.
I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.
fantasizr 19 hours ago [-]
it is sorta sad that framework development will dry up with fewer incentives.
ksec 15 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately yes because Rails has always been a framework of extraction. Now they are not even coding anymore there is nothing to extract. No one is a programmer but everyone is a maker.
rramon 1 days ago [-]
Agents might pick up Topcoat (inspired by Rails) as the framework for those Rust apps.
an0malous 1 days ago [-]
I hadn't connected the dots until you mentioned it, but yeah this keynote indirectly says it's the end of Ruby and Rails. Ruby was designed to be coded by humans, and DHH says it's the end of coding by hand.
9 hours ago [-]
lbrito 21 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what is supposed to come next. So its not Ruby on Rails anymore. What is it? Are agents going to magically convert all the RoR ecosystem to Rust or Whatever?
usef- 19 hours ago [-]
Translation does play to their strengths.
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Shit, I'm also hosting with them. Somehow I missed that post. I've been watching Kurt's AI-pillness advancing over time, but I didn't expect it to metastasize so quickly.
What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.
dzonga 7 hours ago [-]
tldr:
dhh says 37signal's apps for Hey (their email platform moving to native)
backend for their email platform is now Rust - written by agents
says Rust produces small binaries - cutting number of servers needed from 110 to 10. hell they could serve peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi
says now that agents write all the code - use faster / native languages.
rails or ruby hardly get a mention besides that they might be well placed to capture web apps written by agents.
lackoftactics 3 hours ago [-]
also worth noting that hotwire is dead according to DHH in this talk. The rendering html server side is old way now
sreekanth850 12 hours ago [-]
Adieu, Ruby on Rails.
lackoftactics 9 hours ago [-]
it's funeral of Ruby on Rails
inatreecrown2 17 hours ago [-]
DHH is "off the Rails" is not false now?
an0malous 1 days ago [-]
This keynote is from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37Signals and the Rails core team, but it's actually more about AI coding than Rails and how 37Signals is adapting to this new technology. DHH and 37Signals are pretty famously anti-Venture Capitalist and Silicon Valley hype so they give an interesting unique perspective on tech trends. In the keynote, DHH believes the age of "hand coding" is over and what that means for our industry.
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'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.
Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.
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)
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
I agree it seems like the end of Ruby on Rails. I personally hope a fork will come along as a spiritual successor, because I still love building web apps this way.
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Have a look at fly.io facing similar issues, another platform whose value prop was dev ergonomics: https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites/
What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.
dhh says 37signal's apps for Hey (their email platform moving to native)
backend for their email platform is now Rust - written by agents
says Rust produces small binaries - cutting number of servers needed from 110 to 10. hell they could serve peak traffic on a Raspberry Pi
says now that agents write all the code - use faster / native languages.
rails or ruby hardly get a mention besides that they might be well placed to capture web apps written by agents.