Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
I don't understand what is supposed to come next. So its not Ruby on Rails anymore. What is it? Are agents going to magically convert all the RoR ecosystem to Rust or Whatever?
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
I was hoping there will be news on Rails 9.0. Feels like this is the end of Ruby Rails.
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
Unfortunately yes because Rails has always been a framework of extraction. Now they are not even coding anymore there is nothing to extract. No one is a programmer but everyone is a maker.
I hadn't connected the dots until you mentioned it, but yeah this keynote indirectly says it's the end of Ruby and Rails. Ruby was designed to be coded by humans, and DHH says it's the end of coding by hand.
This keynote is from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37Signals and the Rails core team, but it's actually more about AI coding than Rails and how 37Signals is adapting to this new technology. DHH and 37Signals are pretty famously anti-Venture Capitalist and Silicon Valley hype so they give an interesting unique perspective on tech trends. In the keynote, DHH believes the age of "hand coding" is over and what that means for our industry.
This link says ‘This video is private’ to me, here’s a working one https://youtu.be/vDjW_dRyKXY
Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
I don't understand what is supposed to come next. So its not Ruby on Rails anymore. What is it? Are agents going to magically convert all the RoR ecosystem to Rust or Whatever?
Translation does play to their strengths.
But yes, I think RoR's selling feature was developer ergonomics, which suddenly seems less of a benefit if developers aren't the ones writing the code. Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.
Have a look at fly.io facing similar issues, another platform whose value prop was dev ergonomics: https://fly.io/blog/kurt-scott-money-sprites/
I was hoping there will be news on Rails 9.0. Feels like this is the end of Ruby Rails.
Hey is not even a Ruby Rails App anymore. And indirectly admitting Ruby is slow considering they manage to cut 99.9% of CPU with their rewrite in Rust.
it is sorta sad that framework development will dry up with fewer incentives.
Unfortunately yes because Rails has always been a framework of extraction. Now they are not even coding anymore there is nothing to extract. No one is a programmer but everyone is a maker.
Agents might pick up Topcoat (inspired by Rails) as the framework for those Rust apps.
I hadn't connected the dots until you mentioned it, but yeah this keynote indirectly says it's the end of Ruby and Rails. Ruby was designed to be coded by humans, and DHH says it's the end of coding by hand.
DHH is "off the Rails" is not false now?
This keynote is from David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of 37Signals and the Rails core team, but it's actually more about AI coding than Rails and how 37Signals is adapting to this new technology. DHH and 37Signals are pretty famously anti-Venture Capitalist and Silicon Valley hype so they give an interesting unique perspective on tech trends. In the keynote, DHH believes the age of "hand coding" is over and what that means for our industry.