alt Hacker NewsThis is what people were saying about Rails 20 years ago: it wows the kids who use it to set up a CRUD website quickly but fails at anything larger-scale. They were kind of right in the sense that engineering a large complex system with Rails doesn't end up being particularly easier than with Plone or Mason or what have you. Maybe this will just be Yet Another Framework.
Ruby OnRails is an interesting hype counter point.
A substantial number of the breathless LLM hype results come, in my estimation, quicker and better as 15 min RoR tutorials. [Fire up a calculator (from a library), a pretty visualization (from a js library), add some persistence (baked in DB, webhost), customize navigation … presto! You actually built a personal application.]
Fundamental complexity, engineering, scaling gotchyas, accessibility needs, customer insanity aren’t addressed. RoR optimizes for some things, like any other optimization that’s not always a meaningful.
LLMs have undeniable utility, natural interaction is amazing, and hunting in Reddit, stackoverflow, and MSDN forums ‘manually’ isn’t a virtue… But when the VC subsidies stop and the psychoses get proper names and the right kind of egg hits the right kind of face over unreviewed code, who knows, maybe we can make a fun hype cycle called “Actual Engineering” (AE®).