Yet another Hacker News

Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era

59 points mike1o1 2 hours ago 57 comments

xutopia 1 hour ago | parent

Loco is a Rust framework that adopted all Ruby on Rails conventions and they're applied through and through. The naming of this project confused me.

joshmn 1 hour ago | parent

Rails has a ton of conventions but also implements a lot of patterns described in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. People seem to forget the latter.

firemelt 1 hour ago | parent

whoa cool can u elaborate more?

xutopia 1 hour ago | parent

Josh is right. ActiveRecord, MVC, Front Controller(router + ActionDispatch), Template View(ERB) as well as a lot of what works under the hood in ActiveRecord comes from that book.

Though when I mean conventions I also mean where files are placed, how tables and fields are named, how migrations work and how DRY is part of the framework through and through.

A Loco app doesn't require fiddling with the database at all to replace its Rails counterpart. Hence why this naming of project confused me.

Kerrick 59 minutes ago | parent

Try reading the aforementioned book, and look at the classes in the Rails API. They are often named very simply after the pattern.

For example, Active Record is on Page 160, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord.html. Model View Controller is on page 330 and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel.html, https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView.html, and https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController.html. Template View is on page 350, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Template.html.

Not all patterns used in Rails are so directly named, though. Layer Supertype is on page 475 and is behind the `class Company < ActiveRecord::Base; end` style. Single Table Inheritance is on page 278, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Inheritance.... Repository is on page 322, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/FinderMetho.... Value Object is on page 486, and is a key part of https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Aggregation....

curun1r 19 minutes ago | parent

My guess is this is where the "off" part of the name kicks in. As in they've left the tracks and are no longer on Rails. As in they've moved beyond the Rails paradigm but are claiming to be a spiritual successor to the original philosophy.

To paraphrase Doc Brown, "Rails? Where we're going, we don't need Rails."

This is Rails with the AI-equivalent of a hover conversion and Mr Fusion to address perceived limitations of Rails.

poszlem 1 hour ago | parent

"Mostly Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, with one human steering by prompts. "

I find it funny that I would happily use a version of this if I created it (with Claude), but somehow cannot get myself to use it since it's been prompted by someone else. I wonder what's that about.

bitbasher 1 hour ago | parent

That's something I don't fully understand with a lot of these (clearly ai generated) projects.

If you didn't take the time to build the thing you're trying to sell to me (even if it's free) why should I buy (use) it? I could just prompt my own solution instead of randomly curl-installing some thing from someone I don't know.

Am I the crazy one here?

dumberquestions 1 hour ago | parent

Well, tokens cost money, and in theory, if someone else already built something you need that costs a billion tokens, it makes more financial sense to use theirs than prompt your own.

darkwater 50 minutes ago | parent

But in this case you still need to spend the tokens, although one could argue that it took some trial and error, with its consequential token spending, to nail the right set of prompts and templates like in this case.

ModernMech 1 hour ago | parent

> I could just prompt my own solution

Okay but in the limit, you can't prompt all the things. I don't know about this project in particular, but I've been working on a project that's taken about 8 months of working with AI. Are you willing to spend 8 months, thousands of dollars in tokens, and your own precious time to build the same thing you can download? How many projects are you willing to do that for? Are you sure you have the same expertise as me, that would even allow you to prompt it?

lowbloodsugar 1 hour ago | parent

For me it's because I've seen what others do with Claude vs how I iterate with Claude. There's an enormous range in the bound "one human steering". Oh, is that a zen koan? What is the sound of one human steering?

microsoftedging 1 hour ago | parent

I think that's it really, the fact that someone else made it. Sometimes we make things for ourselves that lean perhaps on the _functional_ side, (tools, food...) that we would never want served to us. And AI just exacerbates this. I do wonder why that is though.

reassess_blind 1 hour ago | parent

Very true with the food analogy. I’m not eating whatever this persons concoction is, but I’ll make it myself at 3am and chew it gloomily.

red_hare 1 hour ago | parent

It reminds me of when everyone was trying to build their own frontend framework. Like "neat, I agree with this in concept, but I don't trust your code or you to maintain this project"

rj_hoff 1 hour ago | parent

I feel the same way, there’s a disconnect between writing the code and prompting the code that requires a different form of interaction from the human, I’ll call it respect for lack of a better word.

The problem for me, and I suspect for you, is I don’t know how to quantify the level of respect other humans have put into their prompt engineering and iterative processes to ensure the output is satisfactory.

I think we’re going to eventually learn how to determine prompt competence the same way we’ve determined code competence but it’s going to take a while before it all shakes out.

danso 1 hour ago | parent

> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app: one blessed stack, one layout, one way to do each thing. The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code...Other frameworks ship a library. Rust off Rails gives your agent the judgment

I suppose I wrongly infer "deterministic" from "opinionated". But this approach still doesn't particularly opinionated other than "AI agents are sophisticated and reliable enough nowadays to build a stable Rust app from Markdown instructions"

ambicapter 1 hour ago | parent

We live in a post-truth and post-definition world.

smt88 37 minutes ago | parent

Opinionated never meant deterministic. It meant strong conventions and narrow options for customization. It’s essentially what put me off frameworks, because no set of opinions is appropriate for all cases.

logankeenan 1 hour ago | parent

This already exists and it’s called loco

https://loco.rs/

roarcher 1 hour ago | parent

That's not the same thing at all. Loco is an actual framework. This project apparently contains no code at all. It's just a bunch of markdown files that tell an LLM how to implement a web app from scratch following Rails's conventions.

mchusma 1 hour ago | parent

Have you used loco? Curious any thoughts.

xutopia 59 minutes ago | parent

I have an and absolutely love it. Rails dev for 20+ years. The conventions are drop-in replacements for a Rails app. Aside from using different commands in a day-to-day it's pretty much the same thing but so much more performant.

One Rails app used ~700MB of RAM at peak (live speed dating events with emails and heavy Hotwire/Turbo Streams use). I converted it to Loco with HTMX and the app now uses about 60MB at peak and benchmarks show 30x the traffic possible on the same hardware.

What more my CI/CD pipeline runs about 5 times faster including my entire test suite (TDD with hundreds of tests and BDD setup with about 60 scenarios running headless chrome). On a day to day while doing development my unit tests feel nearly instant.

Also Rust isn't as pretty on the eyes as Ruby but me downgrading my VPS server from 4GB to 2GB is something I benefit from when I'm away from my computer.

If you're a Rails developer nowadays I don't see the benefit of the framework anymore.

lta 37 minutes ago | parent

I have used it and it's really not up to the rails level (yet?) It's mostly a wrapper around Axum and the link between the two is sometimes not super well documented. Coming from rails I didn't feel at home TBH. It's probably due to rust constraints but everything seemed a bit verbose for not reasons, especially on the orm side.

That being said it's an interesting effort that could become something nice with some community love

jph 18 minutes ago | parent

I use Loco extensively on many projects and it's great. The creators are very responsive to ideas and questions. Loco feels like it's a perfect halfway point between Axum and Rails.

On my wishlist is batteries-included command-line setup support for database access using Diesel instead of SeaORM because I like formal types, and security tokens using PASETO instead of JWT because I like specific algorithms.

pjmlp 1 hour ago | parent

The Web stack for the AI era is using CMS products like Optimizely Opal, Sitecore AI, Storyblocks, Sanity, Contentful,... combined with Vercel V0.

tayo42 1 hour ago | parent

Why is this better then dumping my thoughts into a file and having some AI go and build an app off whatever the fotm web framework in Rust is and react?

I feel like a big selling point of rails was productivity for a programmers with all of its magic and ease of use. But if your not reading the code,who cares? Ai should be smart enough to work with any format of notes?

nemothekid 1 hour ago | parent

I think my new tell for low effort sites is if they default to the standard Claude Design language. This site has all of it

* Unnecessary badges

* text-uppercase section headers

* Randomly italicized words

jshen 56 minutes ago | parent

Everything anyone does comes with resource constraints. Does everything warrant a custom designed web page?

tyushk 54 minutes ago | parent

Web stacks? Probably.

_visgean 54 minutes ago | parent

well not everything, but one would expect some effort to have a good web from ... a web framework?

rob74 45 minutes ago | parent

Well, I mean, even the name itself is low effort: it's obviously a pun on "Ruby on Rails", but apparently no one stopped to think that being "off the rails" is generally not something positive...

0c3ca83 37 minutes ago | parent

Neither is "AI era", but here we are.

omneity 33 minutes ago | parent

Not a native speaker but I liked to interpret it as rustless rails. (Rust off) rails rather than rust (off rails)

rspeele 28 minutes ago | parent

Don't forget excessive use of the verb "built", euphemism for "asked for".

This particular project is so low effort I'm leaning towards it being parody.

See: https://rustoffrails.org/how-it-was-built

> Hey Claude, write a set of guidelines for how Claude should build Rust web apps. Like Ruby on Rails, you know, but in Rust. Claude doesn't automatically know how to do this so I'm counting on you, Claude, to teach it. Make sure it's opinionated. I don't care what the opinions are, but it's gotta have them.

Edit: oh my God, not only is the framework just markdown files, it has an MCP server for agents to read the markdown files. Ok, I'm convinced it's a parody.

roarcher 59 minutes ago | parent

> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app [...] The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code.

What exactly is the benefit of this? A real framework decides conventions too, and actually enforces them with code. This just sounds like a way to burn more tokens for fewer guarantees.

hmokiguess 58 minutes ago | parent

I am so tired

whobre 48 minutes ago | parent

I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink, I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink. I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink. No, no, no.

honeycrispy 45 minutes ago | parent

Greed. It's all greed. Nobody is bothering to ask why. Nobody cares about being happy. Just mindlessly consume and produce. We're all cogs in a machine, and only God knows where we're headed.

recurseP 58 minutes ago | parent

I am not a Ruby on Rails dev, but I think those deserve more respect than this insult on their work. DHH's lately statements are injury enough.

bennettpompi1 51 minutes ago | parent

why does this slop have so many votes

uludag 47 minutes ago | parent

It's such a shame that sleek looking sites and project depth aren't a sign of human effort and by extension longevity.

For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!"

Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.

thr1owaway9621 8 minutes ago | parent

> sleek looking sites

Once something becomes mass-produced, it goes out of fashion.

This website was generated by Claude. Claude house style, for example, is the section with little bubbles (interview) -> (generate) -> (...) with the table under it. I've seen this exact UI in Claude-generated documents several times now.

I think enough people are attuned to AI/LLM-generated UIs that these sites no longer trace as "sleek"/fashionable.

rspeele 42 minutes ago | parent

The "web stack" is a bunch of markdown files. It's more of a wish list than a framework.

Also: "No line of the framework was typed by hand."

So it's not even your wish list.

I could prompt Claude "write down best practices for building web apps in rust, then build <my idea> as a web app in rust following those practices." How would that differ?

I can't tell if this is a satire of "markdown engineering" or not. Poe's law in action.

pjm331 35 minutes ago | parent

markdown specs are certainly the funniest way to claim to distribute software

mhermoso1993 33 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, I wanted to migrate some of my app modules to Rust but was complicated without tools like this, now I could do a second shot on it

slowin 32 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn't build a web app with a Rust back-end simply because of the compile times. Go is a better choice here because it will compile in seconds vs 10+ minutes for even a moderately sized Rust app. I also don't feel Rust's strengths shine very much in a web back-end. Go performance is more than sufficient and you don't need to call native code directly.

skrebbel 29 minutes ago | parent

Ok so AIs can pretty reliably write tight for loops now. How the hell did we, as an industry, go from there to “we don't need to think anymore”? Just fart into the idea processor and register a tld amirite?

Wtf is going on folks, can we lay it off already and start thinking and caring about thinking again?

arecsu 12 minutes ago | parent

Maybe the endgame, the end of all abstractions, is to get rid of computers and live an analog, simpler life. Woops seems like Unabomber already thought of this one!

ghusto 5 minutes ago | parent

Writing just code isn't thinking, it's a fun distraction. Designing, problem solving, solution engineering, is thinking. So arguably, this project is more about the thinking than "traditional" programming, going by their docs.

Hamuko 5 minutes ago | parent

>How the hell did we, as an industry, go from there to “we don't need to think anymore”?

You'd have to ask my manager, since he's the one demanding that. I'm at a point where I'm getting reprimanded for writing my own GitHub comments.

SwellJoe 9 minutes ago | parent

Slop all the way down.

rtpg 9 minutes ago | parent

Can people please make something with the tools they are pitching before putting it out in the wild?

Not the stupid useless field tests that no one uses. Make a real thing that gets used by more than 5 people. Then consider whether your thing is actually useful. Then maybe put it out to the world