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Comment by robbyrussell

10 hours ago

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)

37 comments

robbyrussell

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lbrito  3 hours ago

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.

  • nickjj  2 hours ago

    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.

    • geraldwhen  1 hour ago

      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.

      3 replies →

secstate  5 hours ago

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?

azuanrb  3 hours ago

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.

  • Aqua_Geek  17 minutes ago

    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.

  • ozim  2 hours ago

    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.

  • rramon  2 hours ago

    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.

embedding-shape  5 hours ago

> 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.

  • Lio  4 hours ago

    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.

  • 4ndrewl  5 hours ago

    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)