The main line on the Rails website now reads:

> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review

And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.

I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.

If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

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mark_round 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Author of the article here (hi! Anxiously watching my Grafana stack right now...)

I've only just noticed that on the Rails homepage, and while I acknowledge everyone's chasing that sweet sweet AI hype, I gotta say that's... disappointing[1]. The reason I fell in love with Ruby (and by extension, Rails) is because it enabled me as a human to express myself through code. Not to become a glorified janitor for a LLM.

[1]=Well, I had a stronger response initially but I toned it down a bit for here...

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Zanfa 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review

This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.

Rails is amazing, but "token-efficiency" is not on the list of reasons why.

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wiseowise 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.

Typical DHH insanity.

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stephenr 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.

The people who think that spicy autocomplete actually has an understanding of the slop it's churning out for them.

	▲	Zanfa 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Those people don't choose frameworks. It'll be chosen for them by some LLM and given the prevalence of JS, it'll likely be some flavor of React.

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hamandcheese 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

The claim seems quite clear to me: "convention over configuration allows coding agents to be more effective".

But yes, I do agree that the main line should say what Ruby on Rails actually is, not why it's good for your agent.

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fy20 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There was a post last week about the best programming language for LLMs, and in the comments people loved Go, with the claim being it's very opinionated and there's really only one way of doing things. I'd say the same is mostly true for Rails apps as well.

However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?

	▲	apsurd 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		TS is very AI native to the point i'd agree it's near magical in terms of contract. However, the fact its still the js ecosystem with react, thing is even though it's super productive in churning out the code, there's too many possible ways to do something. it's unwieldy. For example Claude is obsessed with making react context providers. it'll make tons of them to power every feature. and your app will happily hold 20 layers of russian doll'd state in memory with no way to link to anything. you have to tell it, no don't do that. i need you to power this thing through the router, through the url. and that has to be designed cohesively. and that's very different from the context free-for-all.
	▲	Kerrick 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Ruby has types with RBS and Steep now. It's a lot like using .d.ts sidecar files alongside JavaScript, via jsconfig.json configuring tsc. I like it a lot!
	▲	gommm 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Personally I love rust for agents because of types. In the ruby world there's sorbet and rbs so would be interesting to try that.

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operatingthetan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The claim seems quite clear to me: "convention over configuration allows coding agents to be more effective".

The agents pick up conventions from the extensive code in their corpus and aggressively follow them. I don't think Rails being explicit about it adds a lot unless someone is prone to prompting towards absurdity.

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gfody 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

doesn’t forcing your agent to think in ruby put it at huge disadvantage though? since the language isn’t that popular it can’t have learned it as well as say python or Java?

	▲	hrmtst93837 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Python does have a bigger pool of examples, but agents usually get tripped up by missing context about specific frameworks more than by language syntax. The real obstacle for LLMs is understanding Rails' implicit conventions and magic, not the Ruby language itself.
	▲	barrkel 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Claude munches through Ruby just fine, all day long.
	▲	vidarh 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The frontier models all handle Ruby just fine. So does th cheap Chinese models like Mini, Qwen, Deepseek.

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quinnjh 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference[...]?

it's a little cringe, but arguably the benefit of having agents use rails would be tht when you review and audit the agent produced code, you review something that is, as you put it: "beautiful and simple code" and "making it easy to reason about..."

I loved rails back in 2017. I may be an outlier but the line tempts me to try it again despite having adopted the who cares attitude to langs. Would be nice to hear from someone first hand if they felt it helped.

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kubafu 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I thought you were joking so I went to check it myself and... unfortunately you were not. That is insane.

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raincole 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't worry, it's just the hype phase and it will pass. (By 'pass' I mean agent-coding will be so ubiquitous that it's a given and not worth mentioning.)

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slopinthebag 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Oh boy. I can't even imagine what sort of hell an AI could unleash on a language as dynamic and magical as Ruby...

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apsurd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

both statements are true though. rails excels in the AI world because it's extremely cared for and intentional with language. and there's a ton of built up knowledge.

fwiw that headline is cringey for sure. but DHH has proven himself a great marketer. it very likely is riding the wave.

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imafish 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is just DHH (/37signals) being expert(s) at positioning.

Trying to answer the question of, why is language and framework still relevant in a world where almost everyone uses an agent for coding?