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!<p>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.<p>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.
The dhh hn smear campaign continues<p>The 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
> 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 craft<p>If 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.<p>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.
> Sure, if you need help from the AI for something too difficult, time consuming or tedious, that makes sense<p>First, I offloaded the tedious. There was no real joy there. Then I offloaded the merely time consuming - after all I could have more fun on interesting problems.<p>But suddenly everything is too difficult, and I am not going to get any better at those pieces by glancing over ai prs. Still, this is what I do
> But the idea that everyone needs give up hand coding is absurd.<p>Unfortunately (?) this seems to be the ground truth for the majority of people I speak to. What's not clear to me yet, is whether we'll stop reading code. I suspect that reading is going away as well. There's a push at $WORK to expedite 50-files/20,000 line PRs via agentic reviews..<p>If this continues, then language readability and "pleasure" of hand coding will likely diminish. I'm still not clear where we're going to land with libraries and re-use. Non-technical pressures are forcing functionality to be re-vibe coded instead.<p>I've always loved Rails for its pragmatic approach; I've delivered many projects with it. I'll be sad when it disappears but it seems inevitable.
> If you're not under pressure to vibe code for work, and you still like writing the code, I don't understand this sentiment.<p>We don't necessarily like writing the code by hand, but those of us in this situation don't really have a choice and it pays the bills (handsomely, I might add; not complaining at all).<p>Every line of code has the entire organization behind it due to requirements that cannot budge an inch. There's also lots of rigorous manual testing beyond what is already automated. The automation efforts for this kind of software, sometimes going on decades, has left no stone unturned yet lots of human work (and payroll cost) remains.<p>This is what a real business looks like once it's settled into its competitive niche, and I'm routinely surprised how many devs on HN <i>are not</i> in this kind of role. Those people who are forced to lean hard on AI are at the highest risk of unemployment, and I have to assume they're either junior or made a lot of questionable career choices.
I wish I understood what goes on in the mind of people which today insist it's absurd to believe that LLMs can code, and that it's all marketing hype.<p>The strength of the Reality Distorsion Field would make the one of Steve Jobs pale in comparison.
Given DHH's political opinions, this is an interesting comparison to make, even with<p>> I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after.<p>to the extent where I'd almost say it's curious to draw upon this and not acknowledge the elephant in the room.
I mean, considering what came after the Weimar era, I'm not sure if this is meant to make me feel reassured...
considering DHH's reputation related to that time i kind of expected that to be the point of the article. surprised to find that it isn't.
Techno-fascism is the modern reincarnation. One of the goals being sufficient disruption to the labor market so workers lose their bargaining power.
I agree with this but I think because while basically truish fascism is so overused as a word I think many stop listening when they see it (one aspect that is not being reproduced these days is fascism was developed as a right wing populist response to socialism, but the right is not quite mobilizing a large working class base).<p>One description I think that aligns somewhat with our current era is “technoplatonism”, which is my own coinage but I think is not wholly original after googling. They want to create an artifical philosopher king that is commanded by a small elite of capitalists. So it has elements of fascism but it’s also a bit different, more classical in some ways. Just straight repression of the working class without inspiring or mobilizing the petite bourgeoisie in great numbers (though the artificial prominence of AI boosters on X and other digital platforms owned by the rich is one attempt at this).
Dangerous comparisons. Finance and AI ruin the economy and a strongman will create jobs in 2033?<p>That is the part DHH does not get. Nobody will protect him from the gypsies (his words) if all are unemployed.
What the article characterizes DHH as saying:<p><i>Look how I don’t care anymore, and you should not care either</i><p>What DHH actually said:<p><i>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.</i><p>and<p><i>There's only one play here, and it's total Fucking optimism. Lean in to the max possible. Because the utopia is almost here.</i>