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)
Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.
Right, or paying for AI models in general.
There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.
For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.
You think 2-8% is a problem? There's a large world outside the US. "Hundreds of dollars" per month is most of my salary, I can afford that only by going hungry half the time.
Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.
I make 55k working at a dental office and a restaurant and I'm paying 200$ a month on open source models because I'm having an absolute blast with them.
Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.
Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical
It's easier to enjoy it if you don't see how the sausage is made.
I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.
Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm very glad I am not dealing with anything even remotely corporate during this time, because I'd absolutely hate it
I'm paying $20 a month using opus 5.5 and having a blast.
20 a month and using sonnet mostly for random fun stuff.
At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.
Meta just gave DHH $1m in credits fwiw
You can pay $5 for deepseek 4.1 flash and be on the pareto frontier. And you can pay between $20-200/month for a huge amount of usage of the absolute frontier models. I was concerned about costs a year ago but with the proliferation of great cheap models, I think it's no longer a concern at all. I'd be fine if I could only use 4.1 flash.
I think the fear, threat, and valuation, of the frontier labs is that they will cross some line and have models that are infinitely smarter and more capable than everyone else. If that should happen, your deepseek account would be meaningless.
But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.
sure but if that's the case society and i will have much bigger problems anyways
The premium models are worth 10% of your income at least.
There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
10% of a software engineer salary is a lot of money. That's just ridiculous.
Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.
Have you tried to negotiate a 10% pay raise because “you can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5”? I’d wager you’re more likely to get a “the fuck do we need you for then” than that pay raise.
The whole AI issue is and always has been a social question. It's hardly a ridiculous concept to have a skilled worker control a $10k budget to buy tools. In many fields that is normal.
Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.
I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.
Let’s see the moved mountains I’m sitting here waiting to see any improvement in software
On the contrary, I say software got even worse
Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.
I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.
I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.
People generally don't have 10% of their income to just give away on a whim.
Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.
> You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.
Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.
The list of people who have made millions and would be indifferent when the source of those millions is being challenged can not be very long.
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> It’s easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh).
It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.
Nobody believes that
How can Rails live long if no one creates new things with it? Our web applications aren't like the Pyramids at Giza. DHH literally said that even without a blank canvas (Hey's backend) they were still able to re-write the backend in Rust and are not looking back.
That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.
The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.
Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.
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.
Oh well that's... um.
Source?
According to the schedule, today had a keynote on "AI and the future of Ruby & Rails — a chat with Matz & DHH". I suspect that might have clarified, but sadly they don't seem to have released a video (yet?)
This might just be damage control or politeness more than the truth.
I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.
Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.
You can accuse DHH of many things, but not of grifting, insincerity, political politeness/correctness just not to offend people. The guy speaks his mind and is unapologetic about it.
It would have been the case if he said all the things in keynote unprepared like in a podcast. i.e Speaking his mind.
But it wasn't.
I often need to prepare to speak my mind
> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?
I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.
And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.
Maybe not the most popular answer, but... because JIT?
I actually have no problem with him even if he directly say it out loud announcing the death of Ruby and Rails. And I am not even against agents taking over some jobs meaning less jobs for current developers. That is part of how new technology has always been, replacing some and we move on.
It is just that it shouldn't be done in the opening keynote of a conference. I thought it was very irresponsible to the other smaller sponsors and those who paid to join. I know Shopify fund most of it and is likely on the same stand.
> In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.
> Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.
> p(bloom)
These aphorisms try to put a more positive spin on the keynote, but they miss the point that made it so disappointing for a lot of people.
They travelled to a Ruby on Rails conference because they wanted to hear RoR talks. The keynote was all about AI and Rust and ended with “don’t be losers” about the AI debate.
Ruby on Rails content not found.
I suppose the die hard fans who have been around this long and who continue to travel to see DHH speak have aligned themselves with him as a personality figure, maybe more so than with Rails itself. Outside of that bubble, it just feels sad that one person used the conference to do yet another controversial move in an inflammatory way while ignoring the topic everyone travelled for. I say this as someone who uses a lot of AI and also agrees that programming work has changed. It’s just so insulting to be surprise-lectured about it with condescending “don’t be losers” comments when the topic was supposed to be Rails.
There was an opportunity to talk about what AI meant for the future of Rails, but instead he went off bragging about rewriting Hey in Rust. Rust has been my primary language for years, but I don’t want to be lectured about it in a Rails keynote while Rails discussion is nowhere to be found.
I’ve made a similar point to my colleagues recently about cross-platform vs native apps. If we’re using AI anyway, do the arguments we made years ago still hold today?
I know some people might disagree, mainly because AI isn’t a new architecture or a new programming language in the traditional sense. But I still think it’s worth revisiting the assumptions and having the discussion.
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.
I think more often the comparison is web techs (like React native) VS native apps.
It’s not really as bad as you make it sound.
You forgot the 30% revenue share the App Stores take.
It is that bad.
I mean, that’s like half an hour of tokens, right? (Half joking laugh/cry etc)
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.
With cross-platform frameworks, you’re only paying once for tokens. As businesses’ AI costs continue to rise, that can be a huge decision factor.
shopify agrees https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native
DHH is right (pun intended), p(bloom) is the ONLY WAY to LIVE.
Living in the fear of p(doom) is miserable. We're all gonna die one day anyway.
How long will that last? It's evident that they are trying to squeeze the engineers to the max.
Ask the COBOL guys
The market being what it is, I took a job in ColdFusion last year.
There are people here who have worked in the same CF codebase for over twenty years. They might start and finish their careers in a language everyone else forgot about decades ago.
I think Ruby has enough momentum that career Rubyists will have a home for as long as they want one.
How'd you find the job? And was it remote?
I spent 2 years coding in ColdFusion maybe 25 years ago. I've got experience!
Smart. Bravo.
Buddy of mine pivoted to doing just SQL and road into retirement as a DBA.
With hindsight, we both wished we had gone all-in on SQL way back when.
That is actually a smart move. You only have to learn SQL once to use it for 50 years.
The foundations yes, the rest only if you never change between RDMS products.
On my 50s, learnt SQL around 1996, have used SQL across Access, Informix, DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, PrestoDB, Neo4j.
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They’ll be getting nervous too at some point the agentic port will come for cobol. The past hesitation and risk aversion will subside once the less risky stuff is addressed. Once someone big enough sets a precedent, it will gain momentum
> the vibe here is far from doom and gloom.
To be fair, this is true of most of AFK world. Things start seeing a lot less doomy and gloomy when you're actually outside talking with other humans. Seems to mostly be online and various darker corners where they're dooming and glooming.
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.
Why are you saying he got rid of engineers? Did you watch the talk?
Yes, I watched it. I'm not saying he got rid of engineers so much as just not hiring new ones.
If he's hiring new people they won't be engineers or the people that used to do engineering.
They'll be people that are better suited to writing English than code.
I don't think that hiring the engineers was ever an option. He said that he couldnt maintain six native apps before agentic coding. The business never even considered expanding headcount by 6X to do it, it was a complete nonstarter.
There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).
It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.
It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.
I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.
People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.
Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.
Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work
Jevon's paradox has to do with consuming resources, not employment. There are plenty of examples of fields getting more efficient and employment falling. Farming and manufacturing being 2 examples.
You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.
SE is not like farming.
It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"
But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.
So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.
37signals typically doesn't do hire a lot of software engineers but just last week they hired Rob Zolkos who is very clearly a software engineer.
https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195
And I think the online reality is much closer to the truth than AFK reality. I can't think of a single founder I've talked to in the past two years that's building with rails. That doesn't mean rails dies overnight, but it does mean it's simply all downhill from here.
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)
From your profile: CEO/Founder of Planet Argon...
Looking it up: Planet Argon is a Ruby on Rails development agency.
> a Ruby on Rails development agency.
He's sitting in the front row at a Ruby on Rails conference - what did you think his job was?
Probably not a lumberjack.
Promoting his rails services where the creator and biggest defender of rails replaced rails with an AI generated rust version without writing a single line of code.
His comment is just damage control and biased, it did not state he's heavily invested financially in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.
I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?
Robby is well known in the Ruby community.