Great post, this has also been my experience in the past 2 years. Rails is just a lot of fun, and that’s especially important for side projects.

I’m usually a Go person and love it, but building simple crud routes is not the fun part of it.

Going off topic, but the article made me look into "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey" and as usual there is the big difference between what the "Professional Developers" with and without AI claim to be using, and the usual HN discussions "X is taking over the world, no one uses Y anymore".

As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive.

Due to my experience with Tcl, and continuous rewriting into C modules, if a JTI isn't in the box, I kind of don't bother unless it is due to external factors.

it is also very token efficient in nowadays modern AI driven development[^1]. I wish more people would renown ruby/rails

[^1]: https://github.com/mame/ai-coding-lang-bench?tab=readme-ov-f...

I love rails and the recent improvements are great.

I have the impression, though, that these days it only appeals to those who picked it up before version 3 or 4, when it was smaller, maybe more understandable, and incredibly better than all the competing frameworks (except Django maybe).

If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

Ruby and RoR is cool and all, but as these web apps got more and more complex, the need for static types became too important. What gave PHP it's edge was types and is the reason I'm still using it after nearly 20 years. PHP seems to implement those important things just in time. OOP, better OOP, types, speed boost, and next probably concurrency.

we run next.js on the frontend and the page router to app router migration was really painful. rails having stable conventions sounds very good when you go through something like that. I keep thinking about this trade off - move fast with the latest thing or just pick boring tech that works for 5 years.

I always enjoyed Rails, it isn't perfect but is way better then others. I have node and nextjs projects :) when they blow it, it is a major mystery what is blowing up.

Have so many good memories working with Ruby.

If anyone has old codebase need to be updated and upgraded, refreshed. I am happy to do that.

and security.

ideally a JS frontend app won't show logic not intended for the user type in question.

in practice, really often I see a huge app covering all roles and cases, a trove of info for the red team. and even worse, the reality of software development with LLMs in 2026 is plenty of code is being shipped without security audit.

I know it's not an inherent fault of the JS frameworks. bit I share what I see on the streets, most of custom JS apps I see are way more vulnerable to hacking than a old-style MVC app.

yes it is possible to make mistakes in both styles, but in JS apps I probably see 400% more easily discovered vulnerabilities than in a common MVC (even with stimulus) app

try ActiveAdmin, it reduces work a lot. also, ruby is so succinct and rails is so opinionated, Opus is super effective building code and keeping the codebase well structured by default

i returned to rails in 2025 after 12 years pause and my experience has been frustration and annoyance

rails lost it's convention over configuration ways, the generated app is dozens of files, lack of explanations and guidance on how to setup various things like environments, kamal being the worst offender and the changes between recent major releases aren't making it any easier to read the (often ai slop) articles and docs