alt Hacker NewsI 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:
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.
Replies
> 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/
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.