What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
- 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.
Have you seen the older apps built by devs? or all the other bootstrap themes?
He is just promoting Shopify's vibe coding for merchants. I bet on Shopify pivoting to vibe coded Rust soon because of "security".
But to your other comment, are you professionally employed as a developer and still writing code by hand?
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.
I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.
I don't think he believes in Rails any more.
It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.
To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?
I love Elixir/Erlang but we all know the "better stack" these new devs will choose instead for a web app is a maze of React, supabase, and Auth0.
That sounds like layoffs lol.
as a solo: you can build and ship more in your own time
as a startup: you can iterate and scale more with more velocity and less growing pains
as an enterprise: people with ideas but not a technical background can put their tokens where their mouth is and build their own interfaces, personal apps, ask their own questions, ship their own features without having to navigate layer 8 and play games for resources
Talking point: I think it is communication, and AI (notably information exchange in “Claudish”) is not as effective there.
Making the widget cheaper doesn't necessarily create demand either. I will not buy 10 times more toothbrushes or writing pens if their prices suddenly decreased to 1 cent.
The demand for software or features will not increase at the speed of our ability to produce them.
It’s his business decision to save on native app development costs to increase his (generous?) profit margins.
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).
All this static vs dynamic stuff doesn’t really matter anymore. AI doesn’t care. You just need to close the feedback loop with tests, linting, a compiler, or whatever else gives it a clear signal.
Simple as that.
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.
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.
Also, I hate native apps. FWIW most devs I know actively try to avoid them.
(1) https://www.uclawjournal.org/how-ai-destroys-institutions/
Most users don’t care. What they do care about is performance, and native is usually the easiest way to get there.
For your AI workflow questions, it depends. With or without AI, those decisions depend on the organisation’s direction, the team’s capabilities, and their preferences. Did your org have a single answer for the best programming language, framework, or workflow even before AI? There was never a single right answer to any of that.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
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.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
I have a background in sociology and urban planning. It's very clear that DHH is not an expert on politics. His blog posts demonstrate a very elementary understanding of the topics he covers. He doesn't even understand statistics.
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.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
The one for me is spotting the Baader-Meinhof effect, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
But if someone misrepresents deliberately on a topic of polarising importance, why would you spend any time listening to them on any other topic?
I would (still) listen to him if I did not know he wrote stupid wrong things on other topics in bad faith.
DHH or anyone else spouting opinions on social media is hardly qualified to be setting policies for countries. Social media is also hardly the place to have any sort of debate on those topics.
I had a fairly opposite reaction: Knowing what you can't be and how much less important your past work is going to be is good. If there are good reasons for more people doing less in Rails, then the creator is probably the person you want to be most level headed about that.
(They can, of course, still be wrong)
And honestly, do people really think everyone is just going to become an "energized creator"?
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I'm on board with the idea that agents are going to write most of the code, but not checking it is just insane to me, based on some of the things I've seen committed in commercial codebases recently.
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.
Is it types? Are types the answer? Is it rust?
As time has gone on Rails has gotten better about this, but it still means that "your rails" and "my rails" are different enough that AI could easily get confused.
As you say, the other aspect is the intense dynamism which works against AI, which again prefers to have everything explicit and reasonable about from the text.
So I ended up going back to Javascript after a brief 12 year digression into Ruby. I still love Ruby but it's just not the right language for the current environment and team structures - typescript is "worse is better" in the right ways that it's a much better choice for both frontend/backend being the same and better type systems.
However Rust has one serious problem, BUILDS. It’s slow and it takes up a ton of space and memory. You will be working around this on any sizeable codebase. Using cargo check to ration your compiles, a dedicated build box, etc. Now imagine you're using it for a web application with compiled maud templates... you're potentially waiting minutes to see your changes.
If we accept that over half of the people building with rust are using agents (I'm sure this is much higher in reality), then you should also accept that there is a ton of time and resources spent on building / compiling. Optimizing this should probably be a top priority. They need someone who will be fanatical about shaving time and memory use from the build process.
Maybe there will be one day, but what are the odds that it will meaningfully move the needle for existing platforms such that manual code review is unnecessary? "Blindly trust the output" is not a feasible security posture today.
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.
In Software Engineering, we learned about requirements, testings, system design, UMLs, etc, and those seems to be more relevant than ever.
You can say "ride the wave", but this is more - this is helping the wave become huge. And cashing in too. Sorry, but I no longer buy any of what these guys do. To me they seem like BigBro ad-clowns.
> Agents do currently work well with Rails
According to whom? And not everyone wants to become dependent on corporate-agents sucking them dry financially. We all know the increase-in-cost will come with regards to tokens, after the get-hook addiction phase is over.