Posted by stanislavb 13 hours ago
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
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
No other programming language brings developer joy because……. errrr because ……. Well because we are just super certain and confident, that’s why! Oh and DHH said so.
> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review
And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.
I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.
If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?
I've only just noticed that on the Rails homepage, and while I acknowledge everyone's chasing that sweet sweet AI hype, I gotta say that's... disappointing[1]. The reason I fell in love with Ruby (and by extension, Rails) is because it enabled me as a human to express myself through code. Not to become a glorified janitor for a LLM.
[1]=Well, I had a stronger response initially but I toned it down a bit for here...
This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.
Rails is amazing, but "token-efficiency" is not on the list of reasons why.
Typical DHH insanity.
The people who think that spicy autocomplete actually has an understanding of the slop it's churning out for them.
The claim seems quite clear to me: "convention over configuration allows coding agents to be more effective".
But yes, I do agree that the main line should say what Ruby on Rails actually is, not why it's good for your agent.
However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?
Very true for me as well. I've never worked with Ruby but feel the same way about Django.
Btw, if you're looking for a "Rails but with TypeScript," my colleagues and I are working on almost just that: https://wasp.sh/.
The main difference, besides the ecosystem, is that we're more in the "configuration over convention" camp. Wasp has a simple DSL for specifying said configuration, but it's about to be replaced with a TypeScript file.
Wasp is still in beta and nowhere near Rails-level polish. But, depending on your early adopter tendencies, you might find it interesting regardless. If you do try it out, please reach out and share your thoughts.
However, the fact its still the js ecosystem with react, thing is even though it's super productive in churning out the code, there's too many possible ways to do something. it's unwieldy.
For example Claude is obsessed with making react context providers. it'll make tons of them to power every feature. and your app will happily hold 20 layers of russian doll'd state in memory with no way to link to anything.
you have to tell it, no don't do that. i need you to power this thing through the router, through the url. and that has to be designed cohesively. and that's very different from the context free-for-all.
I agree. Not only that, I feel like TypeScript is currently the only popular high-level language with a type system capable of communicating all meaningful information. It seems to have hit an LLM sweet spot.
Looking at other candidates:
- Rust is popular and has a powerful type system, but it forces you to program at a level that's lower than necessary for most projects, hindering usability.
- Go is much more usable and very popular, but its type system can't communicate much.
- Haskell has an excellent type system, but it's nowhere near popular enough, and its usability suffers due to esoteric constraints (laziness, purity).
- etc.
I don't know the recent developments in Python's and Ruby's type systems. They may be able to compete these days, but they were nowhere near TS's level in terms of contract a few years ago when I last tried them out.
And I admittedly have no idea what's going on with C# and Java, but I'd love to hear about it.
The agents pick up conventions from the extensive code in their corpus and aggressively follow them. I don't think Rails being explicit about it adds a lot unless someone is prone to prompting towards absurdity.
it's a little cringe, but arguably the benefit of having agents use rails would be tht when you review and audit the agent produced code, you review something that is, as you put it: "beautiful and simple code" and "making it easy to reason about..."
I loved rails back in 2017. I may be an outlier but the line tempts me to try it again despite having adopted the who cares attitude to langs. Would be nice to hear from someone first hand if they felt it helped.
fwiw that headline is cringey for sure. but DHH has proven himself a great marketer. it very likely is riding the wave.
Trying to answer the question of, why is language and framework still relevant in a world where almost everyone uses an agent for coding?
It's not just Rails. Ruby is dying. And has been for quite some years now.
The strangest things are people writing blog entries claiming the opposite. Like "ruby ages like fine wine". No, that is incorrect - it is dying. I have been using Ruby since about 2004 or 2005. I still use it just about daily. I started before Rails and couldn't care any less about Rails; sadly the ecosystem is infiltrated by corporations such as shopify and others. You can see how they took over RubyCentral effectively (and if they insinuate otherwise - nope, I am not an idiot. I see the pattern. I notice what is happening. You call a black cat a green frog and I call bullshit. It's a black cat. See RubyCentral running amok already before they mass-purged developers, but that's another story - let's go back to ruby, and rails.)
> And Ruby itself is nowhere near the top 10 languages, sitting just underneath Lua and freaking Assembly language in terms of popularity!
Yup. Ruby is dying. It is following perl.
Now, defining "dying" is hard because you still have an active community, even outside of the train wrek that is rails (anyone still caring what random crap DHH writes on his blog? I've noticed fewer people care about the garbage he publishes, other than making fun when shopify damages the ecosystem - oh wait, he sits on the board of shopify. Did I already point out how much damage shopify causes here?).
> But I’m a stubborn bastard, and if I find a technology I like, I’ll stick with it particularly for projects where I don’t have to care about what anyone else is using or what the latest trend is.
On this part I agree. Ruby as a language is very well designed. It is a great language. I don't think anyone really objects to this, so the criticism has to be split - some criticism is valid, some is not. As a language ruby is well designed.
Nonetheless it is dying too. That is also a factual statement. Anyone claiming the opposite is wrong. At the least this is the case right now, and has been in the last some years, to varying extent.
> realised Ruby was “a better Perl than Perl”.
Also true. Ruby is the better perl. But I actually call Ruby syntactic sugar over C, because this is actually what Ruby is, if you think it through. My use cases are mostly helper-scripts, tons of that, over whatever I do in general. Literally everything computer-related. That includes use cases for the world wide web. All my needs here are covered by Ruby - but not by rails. I don't need rails.
Sadly, ruby also has a second problem: documentation. The documentation is crap in general. Look at rack. Opal. WebAssembly for Ruby. That documentation is a joke. An insult. Even sinatra, though better documented than these, has a bad documentation for the most part. There are some exceptions; for instance, hexapdf is well documented, and Jeremy's projects are also well-documented. So I am not saying everything is poorly documented. But for a language that once claimed it wants to compete against python ... sorry, documentation-wise this is still an epic failure point. In some ways ruby actually deserves to follow the path to extinction like perl did, merely because it failed to adjust, adapt and really improve. Yes, there is some internal improvement, but in many ways ruby failed to solve the problems people critisized it for, for many years. And now catching up is SUPER hard. I don't think it can happen anymore. I thought it was possible 10 years ago, but the last 5 years made it clear that ruby is towards extinction. It still does not change me using it, since ruby covers my use cases, but anyone thinking there will be an influx of new young folk driving ruby forward, is just worshipping an illusion here.
> There’s just this minimal translation required between what I’m thinking and what I type.
That's true. Ruby is kind of transitioning your thoughts into code.
> Sure, I can knock things together in Python, Go, or whatever the flavour of the month is, but I always feel on some level like I’m fighting the language rather than working with it.
Kind of, though python works fairly well too.
> And of course there was the welcoming, quirky “outsider” community feel with characters like Why the Lucky Stiff and their legendary Poignant Guide To Ruby.
Well - _why ragequit when someone doxxed him. But even aside from this, I found the poignant guide super-confusing. It was art, but I prefer less confusion myself. Still, _why is gone from the ruby ecosystem. Supposedly he is still doing computer-related stuff in reallife but he is no longer really affiliated with ruby as such. Did I already point out that ruby is dying?
> it’s just so nice being able to write things like
unless date <= 3.days.from_now
if upload_size > 2.megabytes
And AI is doing the rest. The path to exctinction.
Does Claude make "scripting" languages obsolete? I mean that knowledge becomes less useful if AI autogenerates everything.
> This can be something simple like caching for a specific time period:
<% cache "time_based", expires_in: 5.minutes do %>
<!-- content goes here -->
<% end %>
I abandoned PHP for many reasons but one was the spaghetti problem. Rail has the same spaghetti problem, though ruby is prettier than PHP. Still, that spaghetti design is just awful.
> This is why services like Heroku and Pivotal Cloud Foundry thrived back then
Heroku is also in the process of dying. There were some recent discussions about it on reddit as to why.
> While the Stack Overflow survey isn’t necessarily an accurate barometer of developer opinion, the positions of Ruby and Rails do show it’s fallen from grace in recent times.
It's not just SO though. TIOBE, despite being crap, also shows a similar trend. And if you research things, you notice many people moved on from ruby, for many reasons - often work-related.
The numbers are all there though. Now people either believe the numbers - or they write fake analysis such as this here: https://medium.com/railsfactory/ruby-is-not-dying-its-aging-...
> Anecdotally, I find a lot of documentation or guides that haven’t been updated for several years and the same goes for a lot of gems, plugins and other projects.
Yup. A dying ecosystem. I stopped using rubygems.org myself after Marty pushed the ecosystem into shopify's corporate pet project. 100.000 downloads and then your project is hijacked? Or the new shiny corporate rules? Nah. Go to corporate land and leave us alone, Marty. RubyCentral most definitely does NOT represent "the community". The original guys who wrote rubygems - now these were community folks, not some corporate ponicorns. Sadly when money is tight, bad things happen, and the ruby ecosystem showed this beautifully. Kind of bad too because it means money wins over community; but this is a chicken-egg problem, because how to grow a community if the trend goes downwards, for whatever the reason(s)?
> And I find that most gems follow a similar downward trend of activity.
Yup - but this is also old, even before RubyCentral transitioned into CorporationCentral. Ruby folks left ruby, years ago already. The people I knew from, say, 2005 to 2012 or so, also from IRC - some still use ruby, but most moved on to other things (also for financial reasons usually).
> Rails on the other hand actually seems to be picking up steam and has been remarkably consistent since the big “boom” of Rails 3.0 in 2010
Nope. Rails is also dying. It does not have the same 1:1 problem as ruby has, but the decline is 100% there too.
> Rails is a rare example of an OSS project that’s grown into its release cadence rather than burning out.
Not really. Ignore the promo. Look at the facts. Rails has been hurting too (which makes DHH laughing about when RubyCentral mass-purges developers both evil and silly, because that hurts the whole ruby ecosystem too - what was shopify thinking here?).
> Whether it can still find an audience amongst new developers is an open question
Yeah that is the question. Unfortunately the answer is there: new developers won't use ruby for the most part. AI also competes here now.
2026 is not like 2006, sorry folks.
> I probably could eventually build things almost as fast in another language or framework, but I doubt I’d be smiling as much while I did so.
Well, I used perl, php, python (still use python too). Ruby is more efficient for my brain though. And I disagree that I could be as fast as in another language. I simply have fewer barriers when writing ruby for the most part. Less restrictions. I don't think anyone thinks ruby itself is a bad language at all. We need to keep the discussions separate.
Pretty good comment from Mark Dastmalchi-Round by the way. Well-written, tons of details, opinions - even if I may disagree with some points, the overall quality of his blog entry is very good. We should give him very good marks for the blog - even more so as it is not on medium.com. I hate medium.com (and the link above, is to medium.com ... why did I link it ...)