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Comment by ryanSrich | Hacker News Reader

Simple litmus.

Ask ChatGPT to create a basic Rails app that has authentication, routing, and a dashboard page only accessible after login.

Then ask ChatGPT to do the same thing, but with any other language/framework.

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So batteries included user signup auth flow?

I can see why that would get you going quick. Certainly Django doesn’t provide that. Most other frameworks I know don’t provide that.

I know I’m dead sick of building my 50th user signup flow.

Having said that, once it’s built that’s done. What’s the ongoing productivity gain beyond that?

It isn't batteries included sign up. You have to select a 3rd party lib for that (a gem).

Yeah that was first thing that struck me about Rails, I had kept hearing "batteries included", then DHH suggests rolling your own auth? Always seemed a strange gap.

Django provides built in auth that is pretty great and extensible. OAuth/SAML and canned or customized registration flows are just a matter of adding the django-allauth module.

No. My point isn’t about using devise (I’m almost certain that’s what ChaGPT recommended). My point is that if you actually attempt to do both (code a simple app using ROR vs. another framework), you’ll find ROR just works 95% of the time. You might not like Ruby, or the syntax, or how a lot of what’s actually happening isn’t obvious. But to people who need to standup and build an MVP in a weekend there’s nothing that allows you to do it as fast.

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