Maybe they used AI to make this ? But really though I hope they didn't and did some of designing themselves... I'm worried we are approaching a world where we never get new human designs just regurgitated designs from pre 2025.

I came here to say: Is someone going to tell him? Glad I’m not the only one to be like “Wait.. I can do this with an agent in no time”.

In fact, armed with Context7, Claude could recreate this whole business model in a day.

You don’t even need to do that anymore. It’s capable of visiting those sites and just copying the components look and feel. Try it. Ask it to make a template based on a theme you found and show it the link to the demo and BaM! You got something similar.

I've fiddled with Open Props [0] a bit lately, seems like a nice middle ground! Colours/fonts/spacing/etc that look nice together are there, but it's still up to you to use them. (And you're still writing CSS, so might be a deal breaker if that's the part of tailwind you like... but CSS is rather nice nowadays.)

[0] https://open-props.style/

Hey, thanks for giving it a shot! Agree on the UI front. It seems to be the most "unconventional" thing about the framework. Always struck me as odd, but I suppose it makes sense given how an app needs to adapt to a brand, audience, and market.

Agreed - particularly because there is an example of a login box and the screenshot of that is far more prominent than the rest of the design.

I don't think the demo should overpower the landing page.

And then it goes straight into themes. If I'm a Rails developer I'm not looking at theming, I'm looking for a conventional UI system that fits into Rails - stimulus, Hotwire, all that.

As far as I know, this site so far is just a bunch of specialised scaffolds for certain use-cases, but Rails itself has been capable of that the entire time.

Thanks for chiming in!

The login box is maybe confusing or maybe I'm misunderstanding you, it's actually UI for a login box, not actually where you login. I agree this area could be tightened up.

Will get this fixed, thanks!

Yes, it's on my radar to add more unique designs to the mix. Less typical, if that makes sense. For now, it's mostly a huge head start if you're building quickly.

And yes, unused Tailwind CSS is automatically extracted when it's built. For Rails, we use the tailwindcss-rails gem as a dependency for Rails UI, which JustWorks™.

Gotta love Safari. Thanks for spotting.

Fair enough. Yes, AI can one-shot a lot now, but I sort of think human-coded stuff has its place. Having done both, I'm most often cleaning up the AI UI that did a piss poor job. I'm sure it can improve in time, though. I built this to scratch my own itch as I'm doing a lot of 0-1 development on ideas.

Hey! A lot of the UI on the theme preview site and on railsui.com isn’t fully functional. It’s mostly there to show the design and layout of the components, not the underlying logic. The railsui gem itself has more complete, working components and pages.

Felt more like a Tailwind UI (https://tailwindcss.com/plus) to me

Hey I’m a designer and I love UI frameworks. Why design and build something from scratch if someone’s already doing it for you?

Unless there’s a very specific business case that requires a custom UI it’s not worth the hassle. I want to be delivering value for the business and for users, not maintaining a UI library.

One place I worked at had built an entire responsive CSS framework, which was hard to use and took a lot of maintenance. I threw it all out for Bootstrap (as was the style at the time). Some of the senior devs were upset I’d killed their baby, but everyone else was able to move so much faster.

Been there! I see this as a solo dev or small startup tool, great for building 0-1 ideas faster (which is what I use it for). Unless they’re working on greenfield apps, established teams probably aren’t the ideal fit.

Oh damn, haha. Sorry if it cooks your machine.

Do you not use Tailwind? What is being wrapped? Designed and built this all as a Ruby gem, you can one-click install if you want to build prototypes with Rails even faster. I suppose you're not the target customer, but thanks for chiming in.

I think their comparison page does a good job of breaking down the differences (vs Tailwind UI that is) https://railsui.com/compare/tailwind-ui-vs-rails-ui

But this one costs $799 a year.

What does this even mean? Tailwind isn't like Bootstrap; it's a way of structuring styles, not a design language of its own.

There's an open source Ruby gem you can use at will. https://github.com/getrailsui/railsui

I might be missing something, but was this project started in 2016? I'm not sure what line in the sand you're drawing. That was some minima for developers "knowing UI actually matters" I presume?

This you? https://flow-control.dev/

You’re overlooking Hotwire, PWA as a first-class concept, and Hotwire Native — the easiest way to take a functioning web app and migrate it to native mobile apps on both iOS and Android. I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at the new Rails technologies introduced in Rails 7 and Rails 8. You may find that the current Rails stack is the best fit for most, though not all, cloud applications that need a web client along with iOS and Android clients.

Please check out my response to another comment on this thread as so much has changed especially recently. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46712477

In general, I like it for the speed. I can build an MVP in less than a weekend using Rails, Rails UI, and some AI for some one-shot copy and random repetitive stuff.

Under the hood, I like the Rails conventions and Ruby's beauty.