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He clarified today, saying he would build any new app today in Rails. Should that app become so popular that it would benefit from Rust, he would rewrite it in Rust.

Publishing mobile apps in Apple store or Google Play is a shit show.

You have to adhere to bizarre requirements, you can be taken down on a whim without possibility to appeal.

You have to pay for a developer account at least to Apple each year $100, Google one time fee $25.

Nothing like that for a web app.

Depends a lot on the token budget I think, different situations for established businesses or strapped founders vs side hustles or hobbyists. So in a way you outgrow Rails or frameworks like it once you can afford a software factory on autopilot 24/7.

Ask the COBOL guys

I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?

Robby is well known in the Ruby community.

I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers.

Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.

To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.

If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.

the algorithm is programmed to deliver it. Better engagement metrics with misery and anger than joy and hopefulness. (yes I know that you will reply 'but I prefer the joy and hope', but that's not the case across the wider population)

It seems to me, so far, everyone moved one level up.

- A layperson can now build one a solo developer can do

- A solo dev can now build what an agency of web development can do

- An agency of web development can now build native apps similar to what large corporation can do

- Large corporation can now tackle even more ambitious projects

Which makes sense given what got automated. This is with the current tech, people still exploring the full potential, but if that turns out to be the case then I'd argue the software market will grow substantially and we are just having an adjustment period.

> If you watch the talk, he is not anti-rails.

He explicitly said he still loves ruby as a language and thinks Rails is well suited for a future with AI coding.

It's interesting how this stuff gets spun on social media by people who don't watch the content.

> AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.

That sounds like layoffs lol.

He's not anti-rails. He just won't be using it.

> His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps

It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.

> 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).

>His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps

I have a hard time believing that, considering his hobby of racing cars and commissioning one-off hypercars. Unless it's that his business could never afford that dev team after DHH takes his salary.

> TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding.

That's an opinion, not a summary though. The way how DHH behaved is really awkward in the last years. See the "let's shoot down wolves" blog entry here:

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

That DHH is into AI agents everywhere is easy to see, but if you go to rails-con, would you not expect this to be about rails as such, and people? Now it's about rust - and AI. Controlled by big corporations. Yikes - some people must be upset about having gone there to listen to DHH preaching about an agentic future.

Edit: I also watched parts of the recent youtube video about rails. I could not focus on the content because DHH's style was so strange. I've seen that style before - nothingburger talks. Look at phrases he used such as "I have retired from being a professional programmer/software engineer". This is all aimed to hype up "agentic coding is the future". Rails is dead - that video is all the proof one needs. DHH shifted gears to AI, and it is quite similar to when he first promoted rails. But now it is about AI, not rails.

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.

(1) https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/

Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.

> His politics [...] are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data;

Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.

Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.

One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.

The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.

> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.

AI is not as big of a productivity boost as compilers were but it is not zero. Back then, SQL was created and marketed as something “managers could use”, another parallel to the current cycle. This whole hype cycle is something we’ve seen before and IMO, we should know better how to handle it this time around. It’s a bit disappointing to hear the same arguments every time.

i have nothing else to say to you other than good luck

Yeah, because being a fascist and racist is not concerning at all.

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.

Software engineering is so back.

When designing systems, you want the important details to be right. Especially with authentication and authorization.

From an architecture level, you can know which classes are important to review and which ones are not.

Why do you think an AI audit (say from Fable/Astra at xhigh) wouldn't have caught this?

What model though?

Or you know just use one of the many great open models. The LLM wave can be taken just fine without "corporate-agents suck them dry".

aha, that explains the podium. Thanks for enlightening me. Kudos to Railsconf.

> it does take some skills, judgement, taste, knowledge, time and effort to build things

As of now, but we are talking in a perspective.

I actually believe new frameworks and languages will pop up that are explicitly made to supercharge agentic engineering workflows. We're still super duper extra early! November last year was the START of all this. We're still in September! Not even one year has passed!

Where will we be in 5 years?

Examples:

https://dioxuslabs.com/

https://lean-lang.org/

It doesn't make much sense to use a human language like Ruby and leave so much on the table when you can use a language like Rust or C to squeeze a LOT more out of correctness/types/performance.

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.

> Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.

There is an issue with this idea - we write software, we read it, we make sure it does what it should do, that it’s implement in a sensible and efficient way, and, most importantly, we make sure the tests do what they should do.

If you no longer write the code, it’s harder to understand it. If you don’t write the tests, you need to trust the LLM did both jobs correctly (multiple adversarial LLMs can help), but, ultimately, it’s code you can no longer claim you understand. And you can’t really be sure it does what you want until you understand it.

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.

Yep I find Elixir very enjoyable with agents at the moment, I've been developing a lot in it. It helps that I already liked the language and the platform, and now I just have the ability to build out my ideas faster.

I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.

Why is Elixir better suited for agents?

why is that?

Worry not, for I am using Claude right now. I would never question the doctrine of AI usefulness and productivity. Please scrap that J'accuse draft, sir, for I would never commit blasphemy against AI, I promise.

It's still early days, I'm hesitant to claim the death of software engineering. It's good now because LLMs were all trained on actual human output. One possible future is a slop death spiral.

Where did he say that? I listened to it yesterday and AFAIK he only said "I don't know where the line between native vs web will end up in the future" (now that we can generate native apps easier)

Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.

Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.

Rendering HTML on the server was kind of how IBM mainframes talked to their 3270 terminals, only that HTML is a lot nicer than 3270 streams and HTTP is human readable.

Server side rendering makes sense for mostly static content, but for web applications, a front end framework and a back-end API are a much better match.

Uhh, sounds like you haven't been writing modern React lately, which is server side lol