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Comments (51)

  • chao-
    Mostly agree with José's tweet linked in the article: the effort required to make anything better is lowered substantially. For example, the primitives for Ruby concurrency to be good have been there for 3-4 years. Many long-established ecosystem libraries and conventions didn't adopt these newer tools, and I don't blame them for that. Many might have required breaking changes. Breaking changes are a tough sell for decade-old, stable libraries. Then for application teams, prior to agentic engineering, it would be a big lift to migrate large projects to a new set of libraries. But that's not the case anymore!Ruby is never going to be a BEAM language or Rust, but I'm pretty excited for the near-term performance improvements in Ruby; not only the base language (e.g. Spinel), but in the broader ecosystem. When you avoid a handful of footguns, you maintain some basic architectural consistency/organization (and get your agents to do the same), Ruby continues to have a good balance between expressiveness, and the ease of reasoning about the code, relative to the amount of annotations and boilerplate you need to throw in to get there.For someone who is persuaded they should never read the code anyway, then that's not a benefit that they desire, vaya con dios! There's not much conversation to have when working from such different premises.
  • woodruffw
    I used to write a lot of Ruby, so I appreciate the author's enthusiasm for the language and community's future. I think it's a great language in many ways, and deserves more attention. I was never a Rails person and have long felt that the community was overly shackled to Rails, and it could be a very good thing for that to be shaken apart.On the other hand, I find the comparison to Weimar Germany a little nuts. My association with the period is a little less Fritz Lang and a little more "paramilitaries terrorizing the Ostjuden." It feels strange to use this as the analogy for Ruby's revitalization, in no small part because of DHH's openly reactionary leanings.(I don't think this comparison is ill-intended, I just think it doesn't produce the author's intended reaction.)
  • goatlover
    > I must admit that for a few days I felt very depressed about it all. Not about “AIs writing all the code” - that much is clear to me, and I do not lament the changing landscape of the craftIf you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment. People coding on their own time won't be left behind. It's your own time to use as you like. And if you want to take a longer time to hand craft a library or your pet project, more power to you.Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense. But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd. This also isn't true for all paid programming work and will continue not to be, despite the marketing hype.
  • rdg1991
    one thing that's really stuck out to me from this presentation is the Hey on a Raspberry Pi comment - that really strikes me as more of an indictment on how many people are actually using Hey. I know a single person who does and work for a heavy Rails shop with folks that love DHH. Pretty important to keep in mind with any of his grand proclamations around work/business/etc that 37S has maxed out at 50 or so employees IIRC, and that was pre-mass exodus.I do hope he focuses less on Rails and lets others take it over more. It does do a lot of things really well, and it's incredibly easy to build stuff quickly on it.
  • asdffdasy
    people will say dhh is being cancelled etc. but he always had very bad political takes.now, he is fully in musk orbit, so i expect him to be even more polarizing when speaking publicly.and ultimately, musk gave him a couple millions to sell grok (starting with full integration into his arch install script he calls a distro).so, if you follow the money, it is pretty clear he is "just doing his (grok salesman) job"
  • neko_ranger
    The dhh hn smear campaign continuesThe nuance is of course that dhh is both correct and not exactly right at the same time, and doesn't really have any affect on you. Rails is still great for solo/small teams moving fast technically and product wise. He's also right that rust is good for established services (with possibly larger teams) that prioritize performance. Just as it always was, but now the transition from rails -> rust/others is much quicker with ai
  • Routine8502
    I mean, considering what came after the Weimar era, I'm not sure if this is meant to make me feel reassured...
  • 2akUh
    Dangerous comparisons. Finance and AI ruin the economy and a strongman will create jobs in 2033?That is the part DHH does not get. Nobody will protect him from the gypsies (his words) if all are unemployed.
  • shevy-java
    > Much has been said about the DHH keynote that he gave at RailsWorld.First, it has to be said that Ruby on Rails is not Ruby, in that the two communities at best are overlapping, but in reality, they are separate communities. I never managed to get into rails; I bought two books and did not complete either one. Despite all the promo, I always found rails horribly boring. I also did not see the need for it. At that point ruby itself already handled all my web needs (I wrote quite a lot of stuff in PHP; my latest project called "web", originally "cyberweb" when I was still using rubygems.org, came from the things I used and learned back then in PHP), so I never really fully understood the hype train. It took me a while to realise that this is how DHH operates - he is a business man first and foremost, not a programmer. He tries to build up hype. That's largely how rails got successful in the first place, in 2006 or so, give or take. So when he now promotes AI and Rust, I have a deja vu - he is on the promo tour again. (Note: I am not saying there is zero value in rails. Evidently there is, but I am focusing here on the promo, and DHH is a business man, not a programmer.)> To me, it was the voice of a person in an existential crisis, but also a very jaded one.DHH is annoying, but I don't think he is in any existential crisis. Now I think he lost the plot after his hate-entry against wolves, and casually linking shooting down animals to hunting down immigrants here:https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6aAnd no, I am not interested in any right-wing nuts trying to sugar-coat this. Before I used ruby I studied countless books about strategies (strategems, in particular chinese one, from Senger in particular), many psychology books too (various influence-centric books, both with a positive connotation and a negative one, e. g. "how to win friends and influence people", as well as the six core aspects of manipulation and so forth) - so I am not interested in white-washing campaigns about DHH anymore. His dislike of wolves showed it too clearly: he switched sides and is now on the Big Tech Bros side. This was already made clear when shopify rampaged through the ruby ecosystem - see how numerous devs were expelled by the ruby core team (Hiroshi Shibata, who acted under command by someone else, we all know that; and the reason for that move, was due to financial influx into the ruby ecosystem, which brings us back to shopify and its evil influence on the ruby ecosystem. byroot will soon say "no, we need more shopify companies!!!" - and while that has some logic in it, no, we really don't need MORE financial addictions and kick backs in the ruby ecosystem. Ruby needs more independent developers, and unfortunately it is now stuck in a death spiral. I don't see how it can escape it, even though ruby, as a language is really well designed - people need to separate the criticism, including criticism of DHH. DHH is a nut; ruby as a language is well-designed)> “Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either” is not a great message when you are the headline speaker at the conference - let’s call it CareConf - that you have, yourself, lobbied for.The thing is: DHH's promo tour is logical if you connect the fact that DHH is now an AI promo agent. That's why he has no problem promoting Rust. It just sustains the AI agenda now. DHH is like a tool for AI promo. I pity the man - he is just a shell of his former himself now. He talked about things other than rails. You know all know that rails is dead. DHH did a post-portem here on rails. It's one of the more surprising things to witness. AI is the new rage - rails is dead.> The message from the supreme leader was clear: we vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way, it worked great, we neither need nor care about Rails anymore.That was not the main message though. The main message was that DHH joined the AI hype train. Rails is not relevant anymore. Even Omarchy is just a promo tool for AI. And, interestingly, the promo by DHH actually works. I am fascinated by that. Some of the clowns promoting it are paid shills clearly, but many people genuinely like Omarchy, for whatever the reasons. I don't fully understand it, but again, it reminds me of the rails hype. People LOVE hype. I don't know why; for me it never worked since I could not care less about what others are interested in (for the most part; I do "follow" some clever people. Follow is also such a strange word coined by antisocial media).> he could have just left the toy he no longer loves - including its community - in peace.But he is now an AI agent. So he promotes AI. He no longer cares about rails, that is true, but to him rails is a platform to promote AI. Same with Omarchy.Big Tech Bros already pumped in millions here. It is a promo tool, similar to Anthropic claiming all problems in biology have been solved by claude (or will be, soon). They infect EVERYTHING now. It is the ultimate skynet slop. Just look at the ruby core team: claude is the main designer now. Does anyone feel like contributing to this AI slop? And, surprisingly: some people do. It's really interesting how AI changes people's mind. It's like in the old (two) movies Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But shit.> But here is the thing: the rich and famous losing interest in the good stuff does not oblige the rest of us to. If anything, it frees up the room.That is partially true, but ... can you generate as much hype and interest?Many projects by solo devs fail here. Not everyone has the patience to do what, e. g. DHH does. You can dislike his methods but at the end of the day you will rate success somehow. One is by money. The other (or an additional one) is by interest by people.I think DHH, as much as I think he is an AI tool, succeed in both. I am not interested in what this ultra-right nut has to say, but you have a bubble here of influencers and people listen to them a lot. Or, at the least, some do. Even matz said "I see no issue with blog entries of shooting down wolves and then randomly talking about migrants". Well, I have an issue with that, but it kind of means that politics and money infiltrated a lot of the discussion - on both sides, by the way. I am not so naive to assume that all criticism against DHH is genuine or honest either.
  • WillPostForFood
    What the article characterizes DHH as saying:Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care eitherWhat DHH actually said:I have AI delirium. AI euphoria. Because this is simply the most exciting thing we have made computers do in the time I have worked with them, played with them, interacted with them. But I think actually to wrestle with the fact that on the one hand, this is tremendously exciting, it is also a little unnerving.andThere's only one play here, and it's total Fucking optimism. Lean in to the max possible. Because the utopia is almost here.
  • Philpax
    Given DHH's political opinions, this is an interesting comparison to make, even with> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.to the extent where I'd almost say it's curious to draw upon this and not acknowledge the elephant in the room.