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.

> 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/

Gell-Mann amnesia assumes a journalist is not an expert on _anything_. In this case, DHH is (according to some) an expert on software but it's much less clear he's an expert on politics. So I'm not sure Gell-Mann amnesia applies here, it's maybe more like Nobel disease, where you're an expert on one thing and assume it "transfers" to other fields.

> His politics [...] are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data;

Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.

Thank you for mentioning the effect by name. I read first about it 20 years ago, memorized it under a totally different name, and was never able to find it again.

One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.

The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.

> The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias where a person spots major errors in a media report on a topic they know well, yet completely forgets that unreliability and trusts the rest of the same publication on unfamiliar topics.

AI is not as big of a productivity boost as compilers were but it is not zero. Back then, SQL was created and marketed as something “managers could use”, another parallel to the current cycle. This whole hype cycle is something we’ve seen before and IMO, we should know better how to handle it this time around. It’s a bit disappointing to hear the same arguments every time.

i have nothing else to say to you other than good luck

[dead]

Yeah, because being a fascist and racist is not concerning at all.

One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.

I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.

Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.

Software engineering is so back.

When designing systems, you want the important details to be right. Especially with authentication and authorization.

From an architecture level, you can know which classes are important to review and which ones are not.

Why do you think an AI audit (say from Fable/Astra at xhigh) wouldn't have caught this?

What model though?

Or you know just use one of the many great open models. The LLM wave can be taken just fine without "corporate-agents suck them dry".

Imagine having to virtue signal your comment first like that