Right, or paying for AI models in general.

There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.

For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.

Good point. Most of us at the conference are still trying to make a living with Rails. That's not a concern for him. Can he remember what it was like to have to do that? Probably, but he feels very differently waking up each day than the rest of us.

Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:

"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."

DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!

The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.

The list of people who have made millions and would be indifferent when the source of those millions is being challenged can not be very long.

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> It’s easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh).

It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.

Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.

The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.

Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.

He clarified today, saying he would build any new app today in Rails. Should that app become so popular that it would benefit from Rust, he would rewrite it in Rust.

> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.

And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.

I think his talk is all about what AI means to rails. It's dead.

Those who travelled to a soon to be dead web frameworks conference might appreciate the heads up.

Those who refuse to accept or believe it might be salty.

I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers.

Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.

To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.

If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.

the algorithm is programmed to deliver it. Better engagement metrics with misery and anger than joy and hopefulness. (yes I know that you will reply 'but I prefer the joy and hope', but that's not the case across the wider population)

And I think the online reality is much closer to the truth than AFK reality. I can't think of a single founder I've talked to in the past two years that's building with rails. That doesn't mean rails dies overnight, but it does mean it's simply all downhill from here.

Publishing mobile apps in Apple store or Google Play is a shit show.

You have to adhere to bizarre requirements, you can be taken down on a whim without possibility to appeal.

You have to pay for a developer account at least to Apple each year $100, Google one time fee $25.

Nothing like that for a web app.

Depends a lot on the token budget I think, different situations for established businesses or strapped founders vs side hustles or hobbyists. So in a way you outgrow Rails or frameworks like it once you can afford a software factory on autopilot 24/7.

shopify agrees https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native

With cross-platform frameworks, you’re only paying once for tokens. As businesses’ AI costs continue to rise, that can be a huge decision factor.

That worldview assumes that technology is like rain or an asteroid shower, and we just have to accept it. Its not. Humans make technology and decide what is going to be used.

No technology is inevitable. Technology isn't nature.

Ask the COBOL guys

Lurkers abound.

> a Ruby on Rails development agency.

He's sitting in the front row at a Ruby on Rails conference - what did you think his job was?

I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?

Robby is well known in the Ruby community.

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

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.

> 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.

If he thought rails was better... He would have used it. Actions > words.

It’s not his message, it’s the forum. Why host a rails conference, that he explicitly created because he was silenced from the main one…to them not talk about rails?

Why not adapt rails for this next generation?

Why do it this way? It’s like walking into a temple to yell about Jesus. It was absurdly obnoxious.

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/

> 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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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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?

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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

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

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> Virtually every line of these projects has been AI authored

There's a difference between everything being vibe-coded where you don't look at the code and don't understand anything and using your agent like a very fast pair programmer.

It looks like Antirez did the latter. From https://antirez.com/news/164:

> In the first month I just wrote the specification document...Thanks to AI, the specification evolved a lot, via back and forth of feedback, intellectual challenges about what was the best design, what was the right compromise, what was too engineered and what not.

> You know what was the biggest realization of all that? For high quality system programming tasks you have to still be fully involved

Judgement will be required even moreso now. There will be critical parts of the system where it's important that engineers know them well. But there's a lot of work around the core that isn't that critical to know in detail. For these types of things, I've found it's just important to understand the gist to make sure things aren't going off the rails. But for the core pieces, it's important to understand the details of what's happening.

I think you are both correct.

I agree that we have to keep understanding our code and we have to understand the systems we build.

I think the deeper issue is that AI can generate so much code that reading it simply doesn't scale.

Even if AI were to produce perfectly written code that didn't have any bugs that human review needed to catch, it would still be too much code to read in order to understand everything. The machine can write much faster than I can read.

Extending this argument further, it also becomes impossible to onboard young people to codebases if we maintain an expectation that reading all the lower level source code is how they come up to speed. I don't think this was ever an actual expectation in the industry, although we may have short-handed it that way in conversation.

So IMHO we need to come up with higher level visualizations and other ways to compress the knowledge that we used to get out of reading source code. We basically need to create new higher level projections off of our semantic understanding of the project.

Sure, but changing the oil means buying a bunch of stuff and getting dirty. Replacing your vibe coded garbage app with my vibe coded garbage app is much much easier than changing my oil.

That said, I think this only applies to apps that can be replaced by vibe coded garbage. Anything with a network effect, or anything that requires deep domain knowledge is much safer

> Buying the oil, filters and all the tools you need to do it forever would cost less than one oil change at the dealership.

Are you changing your own oil? The cost of oil alone usually ends up being around 3 DIY changes vs one at the dealer ship. The mobile 1 synthetic I like is currently $92 for a 3-pack of 5qt containers. Which is enough for 3 oil changes with some left over to almost do a 4th. Dealership currently wants $84+tax for change w/free tire rotation. It's cheaper but certainly not "do it forever", and living in an apartment often means risking getting a warning from the landlord for doing auto maintenance in the parking lot since its against the stated rules in the lease.

> Why not?

Drain plug is in a stupid location that I don't often feel like dealing with. I do change the oil myself in all my other machines with much more pleasant for oil change designs, though. So I guess what you are saying is that AI isn't ergonomic enough yet, but will that hold true much longer?

> it does take some skills, judgement, taste, knowledge, time and effort to build things

As of now, but we are talking in a perspective.

>and also said that a 10x dev in now 1000x with a tool like this

Yeah, I'm sure you are doing ~4 years worth of work per day. Get real Jesus Christ.

Mediocre talks maybe

Even the concept of "framework" as we knew it becomes different in this age. If you only want reusability, why not use plain good old libraries and let the AI assemble them as needed for your project?

Personally I wouldn't want all my emails stored on a provider that doesn't speak IMAP.

And Shopify has been sponsoring Ruby JIT developments, exactly for the same reasons Facebook created their own PHP fork with a JIT, and how Twitter moved into the JVM after so many fail whales.

DHH is on the board of Shopify

I actually believe new frameworks and languages will pop up that are explicitly made to supercharge agentic engineering workflows. We're still super duper extra early! November last year was the START of all this. We're still in September! Not even one year has passed!

Where will we be in 5 years?

Examples:

https://dioxuslabs.com/

https://lean-lang.org/

It doesn't make much sense to use a human language like Ruby and leave so much on the table when you can use a language like Rust or C to squeeze a LOT more out of correctness/types/performance.

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.

Ruby?

HTMX is still alive and well; version 4.0 was just released.

(disclaimer: I'm a CEO of HTMX)

Where did he say that? I listened to it yesterday and AFAIK he only said "I don't know where the line between native vs web will end up in the future" (now that we can generate native apps easier)

Keep in mind DHH is working on an email app, it makes sense he sees native as the default option for that over pushing everything through the web when the barrier to entry lowered dramatically.

Hotwire is not explicitly a cross-platform concept. It's primarily a way to build web apps in the browser which is not going away any time soon. The only difference is in 2026 you're just more likely to vibecode a native mobile app than build a web/React Native version. Likewise you may build a native Desktop version instead of an Electron wrapper.

Rendering HTML on the server was kind of how IBM mainframes talked to their 3270 terminals, only that HTML is a lot nicer than 3270 streams and HTTP is human readable.

Server side rendering makes sense for mostly static content, but for web applications, a front end framework and a back-end API are a much better match.

Uhh, sounds like you haven't been writing modern React lately, which is server side lol

Oh wow, I forgot about this. That context is important. He's talking to an audience of adherents. There's something mildly fascist about that.

Actually it also is a good enough reason from him to move away from both working on Ruby on Rails and using it.

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Apparently not exactly banned. Seems they asked someone else to do the keynote and he said he'd go do his own thing https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsconf-faa7935e

(I don't know much - I was just googling what he was banned for)

Studying and writing about my conclusions, or just writing in general, is one way that I am still able to enter flow state outside of programming.

Sketching and drawing are also great for flow.

If you think you are a terrible drawer, check out “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”.

They didn't say it pays the bills. My guess is playing music, its the only other thing for me.

To name a few I have experienced: playing an instrument, sparring, meditation.

Paying the bills? I could have mentioned proving a theorem related to an algorithm at work ... but LLMs are also helping there now. The best I can come up with is: reading a book related to my current projects.

Good luck with your search.

> Readability and conciseness still has benefit, but the trade-off of worse performance (and less static checking) is suddenly more questionable.

There is an issue with this idea - we write software, we read it, we make sure it does what it should do, that it’s implement in a sensible and efficient way, and, most importantly, we make sure the tests do what they should do.

If you no longer write the code, it’s harder to understand it. If you don’t write the tests, you need to trust the LLM did both jobs correctly (multiple adversarial LLMs can help), but, ultimately, it’s code you can no longer claim you understand. And you can’t really be sure it does what you want until you understand it.

We've had transpiled languages for decades, we really dont need a glorified dice to create rule based translation.

Everything is a nail at the moment.

Like people using LLMs to refactor. Refactoring is a solved problem, we've had decades to get nice tooling for this.

Shit, I'm also hosting with them. Somehow I missed that post. I've been watching Kurt's AI-pillness advancing over time, but I didn't expect it to metastasize so quickly.

What a strange time. Kurt himself writes that they've had the best quarter ever, and yet he feels confident enough to steer the ship in a completely new direction.

With RAM prices where they are, I'm expecting to see a lot more of this in the next year.

We've been transitioning in-memory caching for web apps to tiered or on-nvme caching. It's an order of magnitude slower, but no one really noticed.

I stopped writing code manually more than a year ago. I've experienced the 100x, even perhaps the 1000x he mentions, and I still think he's fucking psychotic.

Not reading generated webapp code is one thing. Blindly commiting OS code is a whole different dimension, as is writing production code in a language you don't even know how to read.

Worry not, for I am using Claude right now. I would never question the doctrine of AI usefulness and productivity. Please scrap that J'accuse draft, sir, for I would never commit blasphemy against AI, I promise.

For varying definitions of results.

It's still early days, I'm hesitant to claim the death of software engineering. It's good now because LLMs were all trained on actual human output. One possible future is a slop death spiral.

Yep I find Elixir very enjoyable with agents at the moment, I've been developing a lot in it. It helps that I already liked the language and the platform, and now I just have the ability to build out my ideas faster.

I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.

Why is Elixir better suited for agents?

why is that?

That's not a licence to routinely adopt extreme opinions.

I don't really mean “give a team of TypeScript devs an agent and suddenly they can ship and maintain a production iOS app.” Expertise and ownership still matter, especially for something you have to support for years.

I'm talking more about agents as a force multiplier for teams who do have engineering experience. They reduce the amount of specialized knowledge, time, and coordination required to get something built and maintained. The constraint gets meaningfully weaker.

An experienced engineer who understands software architecture, debugging, product constraints, etc. but isn't an expert in every native platform can increasingly use an agent to bridge some of those gaps. That's very different from vibecoding your way into production.

fwiw I think we're still very early in the process of re-thinking about how teams are organized and what skill sets they need.

I agree with you, but DHH is proud of having a vibecoded backend in production written in a language he can't read.

If you allow me to quote Gemini 3.1 pro:

___

If we are talking about the standard 3.5-inch High Density (HD) floppy disk, which is the universal cultural icon for "floppy disk" (and the save icon in your software), the capacity is exactly:

    1,474,560 bytes
    This is equal to 1,440 KB (using 1024-byte kilobytes).
    It is marketed and universally referred to as 1.44 MB.

    His binary size: 0.5 MB (approx. 512,000 bytes).
    Floppy size: 1.44 MB (1,474,560 bytes).

The Preemptive "Reply-Guy" Shield

Now, just in case a Hacker News pedant is reading this and wants to argue that DHH was talking about a different format, here is the absolute certainty on the rest of the historical hardware:

    3.5-inch Double Density (DD) (1980s): 720 KB. (A 0.5 MB file still fits easily without compression).

    3.5-inch Extended Density (ED) (1987): 2.88 MB. (Fits five of his binaries).

    5.25-inch High Density (1984): 1.2 MB. (Fits two of his binaries).

    5.25-inch Double Density (1981): 360 KB.

    8-inch Original IBM (1971): 80 KB.

__

Thank you, Gemini. Much appreciated. Also, I love the tone.

(You can tell that it is actually that LLM by it thinking that it is still 2024)

no it was the part (not in this talk) where he said immigrants are invaders coming to steal everything and do crime and need to be culled like a wolf population

“Europe was better when it was more white”, more or less

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64

Google the man.

[dead]

This happens in every DHH thread and it always gives me a chuckle.

Yeah. I found it basically useless until around mid 2024. Now, I use it every day, nearly all day.

Some thing with multiple "nines" in its uptime.

Oh c'mon, there were three million ways you could express this feeling with some class... And you went for "can't even get the company names straight" ?

Reddit would have about 15 comments alluding without never revealing, all of them smart, classy and funny. The rest would be complete trash probably.

Tobi?

In the past I've wanted to edit a couple of Ruby programs (Asciidoctor and Gitlab) and the fact that they were written in Ruby basically made it impossible.

I guess I could do it with AI now but still...

aha, that explains the podium. Thanks for enlightening me. Kudos to Railsconf.

He's on an image redemption tour and he's failing bad.

Read some of his latest blog posts. Like https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

I'd say he crossed the line when he openly supported ethnic cleansing via remigration. I.e. deporting legal citizens that aren't the right race. If you don't think that's racist I don't know what it would take...

Before that I'd have said he was on the edge, but now it's pretty clear cut.