I think a lot of people haven't actually watched his talk and don't understand what he is saying. If you watch the talk, he is not anti-rails. He is just very pro- agentic coding.

What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.

Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.

His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.

Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:

https://rubyonrails.org/ai

TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.

> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here

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.

His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?

> That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.

I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.

(They can, of course, still be wrong)

Nothing that he said is just him espousing the truth. It is the world as he and all the other AI-pilled people wish it to be. It is a world they want to convince everyone is inevitable. There are still a lot of people outside of tech bubbles that don't like the direction AI is going and don't want to embrace what these companies are doing or how the government is handling it.

And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?

By "concerns" did you mean to say "I don't agree with some of his political opinions".

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.

But he himself promotes such a future too. This is a conflict of interest.

You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.

> Agents do currently work well with Rails

According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.

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