Bro, it’s cringe af to go to Rails World. I won’t judge you if you went in 2025. But for 2026… just don’t! Why pay money to go hang out with rancid, creepy guys? I’m not one to kink shame but going to Rails World 2026 is a sign that you’re willing to humiliate yourself for David’s benefit.
from TFA:
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.
and lo and behold in 2026 he stood up on stage and told everyone that Rails is not important anymore. isn't that a kind of shameless disrespect for the audience? gotta love it, thanks for coming to grovel at the David Hamburger Helper show.
I’m left wondering what the vision for Rails really is now, and who’s going to drive it.
It could very well be that projects like Rails do not have much of a future, at least not in the current form. Rails, Django, Flask and other things were there to solve a problem that in this form no longer exists. At least not for people who use coding agents.
But at the same time plenty new problems are appearing and need fixing. Is it a good idea for such projects to make a major switch to try to solve that? I'm not sure.
For a start you might have to do with the Ruby part to solve the present day problems. Maybe Ruby will want to make a transformation on its own to solve the present day problems, but Rails is one step removed from that.
I think it's quite tricky for such projects to make a shift when everything around it changes.
Rails is in a weird place right now. My favorite line from the Rails “Doctrine” is:
We write code not just to be understood by the computer or other programmers, but to bask in the warm glow of beauty. Aesthetically pleasing code is a value unto itself and should be pursued with vigor.
I believe that, as do a lot of people in the Rails ecosystem. It’s one of the things that has set Rails apart: “developer experience,” “principle of most joy.”
But now it seems that DHH has abandoned those values in favor of LLM written slop Rust code that “you never, ever, EVER have to look at it yourself.”
I hope that Rails moves on from DHH, like DHH moved on from Rails, and continues to be a place where you write code “to bask in the warm glow of beauty.” Because that’s what made Rails distinct.
filipamv | 2 hours ago
about 11 months ago i wrote:
from TFA:
and lo and behold in 2026 he stood up on stage and told everyone that Rails is not important anymore. isn't that a kind of shameless disrespect for the audience? gotta love it, thanks for coming to grovel at the David Hamburger Helper show.
mitsuhiko | 6 hours ago
It could very well be that projects like Rails do not have much of a future, at least not in the current form. Rails, Django, Flask and other things were there to solve a problem that in this form no longer exists. At least not for people who use coding agents.
But at the same time plenty new problems are appearing and need fixing. Is it a good idea for such projects to make a major switch to try to solve that? I'm not sure.
For a start you might have to do with the Ruby part to solve the present day problems. Maybe Ruby will want to make a transformation on its own to solve the present day problems, but Rails is one step removed from that.
I think it's quite tricky for such projects to make a shift when everything around it changes.
matthiasportzel | 49 minutes ago
Rails is in a weird place right now. My favorite line from the Rails “Doctrine” is:
I believe that, as do a lot of people in the Rails ecosystem. It’s one of the things that has set Rails apart: “developer experience,” “principle of most joy.”
But now it seems that DHH has abandoned those values in favor of LLM written slop Rust code that “you never, ever, EVER have to look at it yourself.”
I hope that Rails moves on from DHH, like DHH moved on from Rails, and continues to be a place where you write code “to bask in the warm glow of beauty.” Because that’s what made Rails distinct.
brad | 22 minutes ago
Meanwhile the current Rails release is broken (and has been for weeks) and users can't even get through the first steps in the official getting starting guide without errors that have no actionable stacktrace and points the user to a csrf tag in a template file. https://discuss.rubyonrails.org/t/internal-server-error-500-while-going-through-guide/91629/9