YHK - yet another hacker news clone

From the talk it’s clear, Rails needs to be forked.

While I mostly agree with DHH's take on this particular technological cycle, this is a very well thought out criticism.

Rails, or even more so php have VERY little to bring to the table in 2026 going forward. Rails (ruby) is still a saner language than PHP, but as slow as php is. (granted ruby is not idiotic like PHP and runs rather than start/die).

If you go the LLM route something like Go is probably the goto default for MOST networking/web-first apps. You get static types, and a fast compile cycle (rust is still very slow here), and IF you want more from the language you can use something like Lisette (https://lisette.run/).

Bottom line is dynamic languages are obsolete. There is really no benefits from using them outside very small throw away scripts.

The summary is exactly why a lot of people is upset.

>That’s what bothers me most. I’m skeptical of his AI claims, but that’s not the real issue here.

>The problem is that he stood up at Rails World and told everyone that he was moving his product off Rails and the best thing he could come up with to say to people still using Rails was that we’re “the best of the best.” Thanks, I guess.

>Maybe Rails is done, in the way the Mosscap project claims. Maybe it’s time to focus on stability and maintenance. If that’s the plan, someone needs to say it. If it isn’t, then let’s hear about where we’re headed. DHH did neither.

> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?

I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.

It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.

Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.

(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)

Rails is dead.

Its founder has converted to AI driven Rust.

He has a point. Anything you could build in Rails you can now build in fast reliable type safe memory safe multithreaded Rust in minutes.

DHH will bring his tribe of true believers to where he has gone, where he has set up a new sideshow tent.

Do you follow the leader.

Is it Rails that you follow or is it DHH?

It is pretty obvious rails is dead as it hangs massively on its founder for good and for bad.

And it is quite telling that he prefers to kill it off like this rather than handing the reigns over to someone else.

A technical note - the big difference is that a design with a number of fat clients don’t need server side rendered html - that lowers the load on the server regardless of the programming language.

You can probably write quite light json apis in Ruby and the performance of them will be dominated by network and db usage anyways compared to a similar implementation done in a compiled language.

DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech.

"Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"

You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We listened to him because of Rails not Hey or Basecamp. They were just application of Rails as a technology.

If he no longer has a vision for Rails' niche, what do we need him for? What's his pitch?

He might as well just be a Danish Barry Gibb impersonator that can't sing but instead drones on and on about politics. :P

The article forgets one thing, how DHH started his talk: he asked the audience how many people still codes by hand, and only 5 people raised their hands.

I was also waiting for some cool talk of some change, as I loved the simplificiation that Rails has done last year, but I also understand his point of view: he could either speed up the development of rails with AI (what Bun has done), or just say that it's mature and it doesn't matter anymore and it's better to not ruin a mature system.

Every piece of software has an expiration date. You can extend its lifespan, but technology keeps moving. What was considered standard on the backend five years ago may look completely different today. I think that's a good thing. Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured.

We should be celebrating the fact that we can now port almost anything with far less effort, or modernize an existing stack to meet today's performance expectations, requirements, and engineering standards.

Honestly Rails being finished it's that bad. If you aren't writing the code by hand what benefit is it really bringing to you now?

Rails niche was fast setup/low starting out costs and relatively constrained/medium maintenance costs. To get this you traded performance and type system. The latter usually resulted in increased maintenance costs as test suites ballooned to compensate.

These days fast setup is simply a product of AI, every ecosystem now offers fast setup. Maintenance costs are now about how token efficient it is to find and fix problems. Test suites are going to be huge everywhere now but there is some chance languages that require less to accomplish more will win on token efficiency and be favored.

Humans aren't the dominant factor in programming language design or selection anymore, that is a fact at this point it just hasn't sunk in for everyone yet.

We are only ~6mo in to agents being good enough to write code. A year from now our profession will be entirely changed. Agents will get better (how much? don't know) but importantly they will definitely get cheaper and access will be broader. Which is really the point DHH was trying to make.

Access and economics are finally going to do what no-code failed to do, which is democratise software. Maybe not to the point that everyone writes code or even that shit programmers are good, but it will enable shit programmers to write Rust which was literally impossible 6mo ago and they will have better programs as a result.

Which is the other thing he touched on. Good programmers are going to excel here and great programmers are going to dominate. I'm already seeing the 10x programmers hit 100x and 1000x with more access doesn't seem out of sight. It's also restoring the will to create in a lot of people that lost the passion for the mechanical part of programming, unlocking the experience and skill of these people that were otherwise considering cashing in the bag is huge.

So yes. Rails is done but what is coming next is way more exciting. I'm with DHH here, be glad it happened but get moving on where things are going to be instead of clinging to the past.

I code and maintain a Rails stack. About 20% of the time an endpoint takes to respond is spent in Ruby. New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99, and it’s very rare for an endpoint to take more than 100ms. Most respond in under 80ms. I could LLM-port it (and probably will one day), but end-user response performance wouldn’t be the motivation.

What does make me consider switching is reading about things like how Shopify’s native apps are moving towards superfast product cores that can be tested incredibly quickly, with the slower UX layer kept separate. I think that model is the future, and in that world Rails starts to look pretty dead.

As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of human understanding on what is going on under the hood. Which is fine if you trust the LLM to write great code, and great tests for the code, but fundamentally you have to have 100% trust, 99.9% is not going to be enough in any serious industry, would it ?

Also eventually you'll also have to trust it to write the deployment code or even run the deployment itself, otherwise SRE is going to be the bottleneck. And only then should I feel anxiety about the rest of my career (that, or my employer decide LLM are good enough to get rid of me, even if they are imperfect).

Interesting article. I understand the fury and disappointment.

But still, let's face reality. Rails with Ruby and Django with python's biggest advantage was readability and accessibility. For many, it is just much nicer reading Ruby code than Rust code. But LLMs have completely changed the equation, and development with a statically typed language plays much better into the agentic feedback loop. Add the memory safety guarantees of the rust compiler and the incredible runtime speed even compared to the Java Stack you will see many benefits.

I am biased since I love Rust, but I think backend technologies are going to move more towards statically typed memory safe languages.

Also if you use an agent to write most of your code, with python it gives me a lot of stomach pain just thinking about error potentials and hallucinations, with Rust, that fades to only security implications

It is quite irrelevant to examine political opinions or if the conference turned into a Jonestown cult etc.

The only thing that matters in AI is to examine the flow of money. DHH is a Shopify board member and surely got Shopify stock.

Additionally, his Omarchy is sponsored by the following AI boosters (https://omarchy.org/patrons/):

  - Meta Superintelligence Labs
  - DigitalOcean
  - Alibaba Cloud
  - Shopify (Tobi Lütke)
  - Stripe (Collison)
  - Dell (Dell)
  - Cloudflare (Prince)
  - Dropbox (Houston)
  - OpenClaw (Steinberger)
  - Coinbase (Armstrong)

His Fridman promotion was sponsored by Shopify:

https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep501-sb

His future is tied to the AI narrative and he sells out stuff he no longer needs like RoR. Anything he says is an advertisement.

I really like Rails and I don't see the controversy in anything DHH said. The strongest points for Rails always were productivity, developer ergonomics and strong conventions. Two out of three are now neutral in the age of agentic coding.

Strong conventions are my selling point to still choose rails for green-field projects in 2026. But I'm talking about LoB or CRUD-heavy apps. I wouldn't have chosen rails for an SMTP server. The HEY architecture was based on the productivity/performance trade-off. That trade-off is no longer worth it, since productivity is through the roof, let's prioritize performance and first class UX (the one you can only achieve in native apps).

In his shoes, I would have made the same decisions before and now.

Regarding the future of Rails. I feel this applies to a lot of other frameworks. The idea of frameworks was always to give devs a set of tools to solve problems faster and better. Tools that resonate with you. That you can find "synergy" with. Now you're not writing any of the code; you're barely even looking at it. So, what's the point of frameworks then? I don't know. Popular ecosystems already have out of the box solutions for almost everything. Rails, Django, Laravel, .NET, JVM and many more are mature enough. You could turn them all to maintenance mode and everything would be just fine. What future lies ahead? No idea.

Two slightly disconnected thoughts:

1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.

2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).

If all this is true, why are election apps still popular instead of native?

Why are high level managed languages still being used?

For that matter, why aren’t LLMs generating everything in wasm or native assembly?

A snarky talk tldr could be

'Overrated Ruby programmer finally tries fast languages in domains they are clearly better suited to than Ruby, now that he does not need to write the code himself. He unsuprisingly draws the wrong conclusions and also inevitably mentions his Linux for techbros project, since this is his conference and his keynote.'

People are reading into moving to native apps for each OS for an email app as a move away from Rails or that Rails is dead. The hot-take headline could be "Web applications are dead!" Rails, Django, Laravel, HTMLX, every one of them is in the same spot Rails is in.

We as an industry have been abusing HTTP and HTML for 2+ decades now by building web apps that were traditionally installed client/server applications or standalone client applications. There was a time in the industry that managing all the OS versions, patches, etc. was extremely labor intensive, hence the move to the web. If the cost of building native apps is near zero, in comparison to before AI, then how many web applications are better suited to client/server apps?

Take everyone's favorite app (sarcasm) - ticket tracking for IT or software work. Back in the day (late 90's) this was an installed app, the UI was extremely responsive and restrictive. People building native apps in Visual Basic didn't have to deal with HTML, CSS, and all the trade-offs of a markup language for an application, they had modules/components they could build for UIs. There wasn't weird DOM hierarchies, a data transform to text, send it over HTTP with auth, protect the web server that is open to anyone on the planet to hack, transform from text to data types, save to a database. The native app had a database driver in it or nearby and you did SQL from the app to your database server.

We can containerize application runtimes now. Look at what 37signals did with ONCE as an example, yes they are Rails apps but they could be anything that reduces IT install time compared to the '90s.

My takeaway from that keynote (watched the whole thing) is we need to re-think everything in software: process, tech stacks, architecture, etc. as the industry moves forward. AI has advanced a lot in what it can do in the last 10 months, it might plateau at some point and become another usable tool, but what it opens up is the ability to do things differently because the cost of creating (and throwing away crap output and re-creating) is very cheap.

The web as an application delivery model is very complicated compared to building small native apps. If your average Joe or Jane is going to be creating apps, I would think the thing to reach for is not web.

You're fucking rails programmer. You're the best of of the best. This is goddman Top Gun I'm looking at here -- DHH, Rails World 2026 opening keynote, moments before calling everyone loser

Related:

Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49817680