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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

I saw a post recently about how LLMs are much more effective in Ruby on Rails because it's batteries included, so you don't get so many implementation details crapping up the context window.

I assume the same benefit applies to humans as well!

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I am not into the Ruby on Rails world, but I find LLMs much more effective with powerful type systems like Typescript. Especially if you nudge it to keep things strict and (statically) eliminate invalid states. Do they use similar systems (build-time typing) for Ruby?

When the LLM can verify its own output by running static analysis they produce better results. They also seem to understand type definitions and avoid going to the source which, in theory, should reduce context size.

Elixir started adding a type system as well after Typescript proved to greatly help AI feel confident in its output.

So yeah others are catching on the importance of a type system to enforce that successful contract for AI agents.

I've read much of the same for Go. It's half true. Python doesn't have as many batteries but its common external packages are probably more present in training data than Go stdlib.

If agents are good at RoR, it's ironic because they're bad at Ruby. They aren't good at holding a model of the 20 different things various code you've loaded has monkey patched, no longer respecting their original contracts.

I don’t believe they are better at Ruby. Agents got better overall and people draw bad conclusions from their anecdotal evidence. Ruby on Rails is mostly DHH cult with people praising Ruby as poetry.

This is coming from someone working 13 years as Ruby dev. I love the language, but I want to be honest that I didn’t had experience with other languages before and seeing statically typed languages (Java, TypeScript), Elixir opened my mind to the amount of cargo cult inside Ruby community stemming mostly from people limited to knowing only 1 language.

Those are strong claims and I think we need better evidence to support it. Most of the backend frameworks are batteries included to extent like Django, Laravel, Phoenix. Also many decisions made by Rails team are quite debatable, hotwire and getting rid of TypeScript being top ones recently.

Tbh we need to do some real research about it, because all those articles are just feelings that it seems to work better. But mostly it feels better, because we got stronger models and improved agent harnesses

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