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Its easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh). You literally don't need to care about how any of this affects your job security.

Right, or paying for AI models in general.

There is a world of difference of having tens of millions of dollars and paying hundreds of dollars a month for AI subscriptions vs someone making 100k / year doing the same.

For the DHH's of the world that's not even something to think about, but for most people who are working (even in tech), now we're talking 2-8%+ of your income depending how much you use AI. Just to have the "luxury" of being able to experiment with it. I use air quotes on luxury because I personally find a lot of AI results to be quite bad, but then again, I'm not spending hundreds of dollars a month on the premium models.

The premium models are worth 10% of your income at least.

There is no future without these models. They truly are an entirely different league than the cheap stuff. You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.

People generally don't have 10% of their income to just give away on a whim.

Additionally, if I'm 10% more productive I don't get a 10% pay increase.

10% of a software engineer salary is a lot of money. That's just ridiculous.

Like the other commentor said, its just going to be a net negative, because whatever productivity increase you supposedly do get, you will see exactly 0 of that translated into salary increase.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude on cost.

Have you tried to negotiate a 10% pay raise because “you can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5”? I’d wager you’re more likely to get a “the fuck do we need you for then” than that pay raise.

The whole AI issue is and always has been a social question. It's hardly a ridiculous concept to have a skilled worker control a $10k budget to buy tools. In many fields that is normal.

Previously, the tools in our field were free or trivial cost. Seems like that has changed, that's OK, there are models to solve that.

I teach a couple courses currently, there is an enormous gap between what my students can create with AI and what I can create with AI. I don't think it's that much smaller than the difference of what we can create without, the only difference is that the schedules are compressed.

They surely weren't, and piracy was quite common in many European countries, buying tapes and floppies from bazaars back in the days.

I swap between Fable and GLM 5.X and both work fine. Fable tends to do stuff that I didn't want it to do, and claude is probably a bit more capable as a harness (though I haven't spent the effort configuring pi properly yet so that's probably on me). Otherwise it's hard to spot the difference.

> You can move mountains with Astra or Opus 5.5.

Mountains that were made out of molehills, an ever-growing heap of bullshit.

Let’s see the moved mountains I’m sitting here waiting to see any improvement in software

On the contrary, I say software got even worse

Even if you believe this surely it should be paid for by the employer not the individual.

You can pay $5 for deepseek 4.1 flash and be on the pareto frontier. And you can pay between $20-200/month for a huge amount of usage of the absolute frontier models. I was concerned about costs a year ago but with the proliferation of great cheap models, I think it's no longer a concern at all. I'd be fine if I could only use 4.1 flash.

I think the fear, threat, and valuation, of the frontier labs is that they will cross some line and have models that are infinitely smarter and more capable than everyone else. If that should happen, your deepseek account would be meaningless.

But I also think that premise is bullshit and not gonna happen.

sure but if that's the case society and i will have much bigger problems anyways

I make 55k working at a dental office and a restaurant and I'm paying 200$ a month on open source models because I'm having an absolute blast with them.

Plenty of jobs have expenses built into them. Maybe a subscription is more than it used to be, I had great jobs on a used 200$ thinkpad, but it's still cheaper than being a photographer. And 100k is more than most jobs.

Software dev, even if it's all agents now, is still pretty dang economical

I'm paying $20 a month using opus 5.5 and having a blast.

20 a month and using sonnet mostly for random fun stuff.

At work, it seems a bit different - I'm certainly having to declaudify things it can be hard starting there's a lot to dig into - you can see it's overwritten but need to understand every detail to sort it out.

It's easier to enjoy it if you don't see how the sausage is made.

I am definitely not having a blast at work with LLMs. Everyone in the team has become simple rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out. There are mountains of documentation which gives a false sense of understanding of how things work, but the code repository itself could have been written in Brainfuck and it would make almost no difference. And we keep getting told by management that this is fine. We've become simple janitors in the slop hall.

Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. I'm very glad I am not dealing with anything even remotely corporate during this time, because I'd absolutely hate it

    Everyone in the team has become simple 
    rubber-stampers for whatever the AI puts out.

Whoever figures out better ways to:

1. Present a big AI PR to a fellow human for review 2. Understand a big AI PR, as a human reviewer

...is going to be a hero. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems of this new era.

I've been experimenting with this, but it's early days. My efforts are mostly along the lines of having AI generate artifacts that guide the reviewer through the PR in execution flow order, explaining the reason for changes along the way.

I don't think that's the way forward. We don't accept mega-PRs from people, why accept them from machines? The best practice of small, focused commits - whether it be from a person or a LLM - will win out in time once we're past this manic phase.

Have you tried OpenRouter and the DeepSeek-like models? If you try to optimize a little you could probably slash those costs.

I send a ton of requests and even reaching $10 for the month would take more calls than I have capacity to review and use. And as I said, that's for a ton of requests.

I use Synthetic, Neuralwatt, and Opencode. My usage is fairly high, I'm at 1.5B tokens in the last 7 days. ;)

Meta just gave DHH $1m in credits fwiw

Can you expand on that? I couldn't find sources

I think it was for that linux script thing fwiw, omarchy

He posted about it on his Twitter, I don't have an account so it's hard to find for me

You think 2-8% is a problem? There's a large world outside the US. "Hundreds of dollars" per month is most of my salary, I can afford that only by going hungry half the time.

Probably going to if I want to keep my job, since I'll be making about the same amount of money moving boxes or cleaning toilets, only in much less comfortable conditions.

Yeah, I feel bad about those situations.

It's essentially trying to turn programming into a micro-transaction based pay to play / pay to win outcome, a concept that was gaming related for decades.

The list of people who have made millions and would be indifferent when the source of those millions is being challenged can not be very long.

Really? Pulling the ladder up after making your millions is almost idiomatic for those people.

> It’s easy to be optimistic when you're sitting on millions (dhh).

It’s natural to be pessimistic if you are unskilled. Your ability to keep your job is directly proportional to how good you are.

Nobody believes that

Some people live in gutter, to them, they believe world is always dirty.

Good point. Most of us at the conference are still trying to make a living with Rails. That's not a concern for him. Can he remember what it was like to have to do that? Probably, but he feels very differently waking up each day than the rest of us.

Here is the description for the Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote:

"Opening Keynote highlighting what's new in Rails, what's coming next, and where Rails is headed in the future."

DHH literally did not cover that. Not even close!

The first response in the conference chat described it as the "worst opening keynote possible to setup the Rails World conference." While someone soon disagreed with that, another guy later said he felt it undermined the later talks, and someone else said the Laracon conference had more about what the framework is doing in the AI age. He barely mentioned Rails. I get how he was excited about his experiments but I certainly wish he had focused more on what Rails is doing for this new era.

How can Rails live long if no one creates new things with it? Our web applications aren't like the Pyramids at Giza. DHH literally said that even without a blank canvas (Hey's backend) they were still able to re-write the backend in Rust and are not looking back.

That sure sounds like any savvy business should pivot away from Rails and Ruby in general as fast as they can, assuming they have tokens to burn. Personally, I built my career on Python, but any new thing I build is almost always in Go or Rust. Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

He clarified today, saying he would build any new app today in Rails. Should that app become so popular that it would benefit from Rust, he would rewrite it in Rust.

Source?

According to the schedule, today had a keynote on "AI and the future of Ruby & Rails — a chat with Matz & DHH". I suspect that might have clarified, but sadly they don't seem to have released a video (yet?)

This might just be damage control or politeness more than the truth.

You can accuse DHH of many things, but not of grifting, insincerity, political politeness/correctness just not to offend people. The guy speaks his mind and is unapologetic about it.

It would have been the case if he said all the things in keynote unprepared like in a podcast. i.e Speaking his mind.

But it wasn't.

I often need to prepare to speak my mind

How is DHH not a grifter? Is the white replacement conspiracy theory he promotes suddenly not a hoax?

The drastic change in the ethnic/cultural makeup of people leaving in many Western countries is a fact. In Finland it is +70% foregners only in the past 10 years. Do you want to dispute stats? Write to the Finnish department of statistics.

Or are you arguing that this is a natural process and politicians can't influence it? Wrong. Pre-post Brexit stats show the opposite. As do the stats from Denmark, after politicians started working on the issue.

You are fine with stats, but don't like DHH's opinions about those facts? Well, those are opinions and everyone has a right to them. Opinions and feelings based on morals can't really be proved incorrect.

Or are you tone policing?

So what exactly is the actual problem? "Someone on the internet has wrong opinions and is not a carbon copy of me, politically"? What a silly and totalitarian behavior to call other people dirty names!

Stop pretending that racism and xenophoby are just political opinions. They are not.

Stop calling anyone with differing opinions a racist or xenophobe. It really feels like these activists are deliberately misusing powerful words in order to weaken them (if everyone is called a racist, no matter how undeservedly, then no one is). Or they are simply stupid and do not understand the reaction they are causing with their totalitarian tactics.

When someone says that people who are UK citizen aren't british because they are black or brown, yes this is xenophoby.

This is not an opinion, and it is actually a lie because the actual law and constitution of said country disagree.

Or from Hong Kong

He was't talking about the color of the skin or a passport. He was talking about the culture, does it integrate well, is it compatible, is it "enriching" or actually enriching. Is the person and the group this person belongs to, a negative or a positive for the country, the society, the original/native people.

This has nothing to do with the race or a color of one's skin. Like Idris Elba is British as is Rishi Sunak.

Racism is also an opinion some people choose to have. If people don't like being called racist there's a very easy solution to that.

Are you really so ignorant or just pretending to be? White replacement is a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. You are not under attack. You are not being suppressed or silenced. DHH just doesn’t like people with skin tones darker than his own and who don’t live their lives as presented on nazi party’s propaganda posters. Statistics ain’t on his side. I’m just relaying what he said, if you don’t like that, take that to DHH. I do not endorse nazism.

And I’m not saying anyone’s opinions are wrong, I’m just saying calls to violence, such as DHH’s suggested deportations of people based solely on their skin color, are not opinions. Violence mustn’t be re-labeled as an opinion. Advocating for harming people or violating their agency cannot pass as political position, not even fringe one. You are free to have opinions, values and beliefs, but don’t think other people will be fine with that when your opinion starts affecting their lives. No matter what someone’s external appearance makes you think about a person, they also have opinions, values and beliefs.

(This just a short summary of what basic human decency is.)

I agree with him. All software should be written in safe languages, but there is a wide selection available. For new projects you should pick a language that does as much for you as possible. Ruby and Rails both go out of their way to provide the developer with as much power as they can. They make development less expensive. That’s exactly what you want when you are first building something, before you know exactly what you will need.

Later after you have lots of users and your hosting costs are rising, then you can rewrite it in a language that gets you closer to the machine. You won’t need to do any exploration at that point, and you’ll already know where the performance hot spots are. Of course I recommend Rust for that, but that is merely my personal preference.

Yes, true enough.

But there is a "dead middle".

If you have a big cash flow to go with "...lots of users and [rising] hosting costs" then, yes, you're spot on

But if there is insufficient cash flow then costs are rising and you are a bit stuck.

Perhaps, but if you don’t have revenue then you have lots of problems besides this one.

Oh well that's... um.

Having built two apps in the last two years using Rails (one making front page on Hacker News and has 10,000 plus users), there is a sweet spot that Rails hits that other frameworks don’t.

The fact that you get so much out of the box that just works and you don’t have to do much beyond configure it reduces a ton of headaches.

Absolutely would rather be using Go instead of Ruby but for apps of a certain kind and size, the omakase approach of Rails still wins out.

> Why mess with an interpreter if you don't have to?

I mean I haven’t touched Ruby in years but if you’ve got tokens to burn, who cares? Compute is pretty cheap these days and Ruby is usually fast enough for web stuff, and as far as I can tell 2nd hand the robots write it just fine.

And I say this as someone building a strongly typed programming language that compiles to native code.

Maybe not the most popular answer, but... because JIT?

I actually have no problem with him even if he directly say it out loud announcing the death of Ruby and Rails. And I am not even against agents taking over some jobs meaning less jobs for current developers. That is part of how new technology has always been, replacing some and we move on.

It is just that it shouldn't be done in the opening keynote of a conference. I thought it was very irresponsible to the other smaller sponsors and those who paid to join. I know Shopify fund most of it and is likely on the same stand.

> In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.

> Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.

> p(bloom)

These aphorisms try to put a more positive spin on the keynote, but they miss the point that made it so disappointing for a lot of people.

They travelled to a Ruby on Rails conference because they wanted to hear RoR talks. The keynote was all about AI and Rust and ended with “don’t be losers” about the AI debate.

Ruby on Rails content not found.

I suppose the die hard fans who have been around this long and who continue to travel to see DHH speak have aligned themselves with him as a personality figure, maybe more so than with Rails itself. Outside of that bubble, it just feels sad that one person used the conference to do yet another controversial move in an inflammatory way while ignoring the topic everyone travelled for. I say this as someone who uses a lot of AI and also agrees that programming work has changed. It’s just so insulting to be surprise-lectured about it with condescending “don’t be losers” comments when the topic was supposed to be Rails.

There was an opportunity to talk about what AI meant for the future of Rails, but instead he went off bragging about rewriting Hey in Rust. Rust has been my primary language for years, but I don’t want to be lectured about it in a Rails keynote while Rails discussion is nowhere to be found.

I think his talk is all about what AI means to rails. It's dead.

Those who travelled to a soon to be dead web frameworks conference might appreciate the heads up.

Those who refuse to accept or believe it might be salty.

> Those who travelled to a soon to be dead web frameworks conference might appreciate the heads up

If it was me, I would have preferred to be informed it was dead before spending $699 on tickets and buying airfare and hotel reservations.

lol, yeah wtf. DHH's keynote could've been a blog post and saved everyone the money and time. But of course, we are in the Grift Era of tech.

> the vibe here is far from doom and gloom.

To be fair, this is true of most of AFK world. Things start seeing a lot less doomy and gloomy when you're actually outside talking with other humans. Seems to mostly be online and various darker corners where they're dooming and glooming.

the algorithm is programmed to deliver it. Better engagement metrics with misery and anger than joy and hopefulness. (yes I know that you will reply 'but I prefer the joy and hope', but that's not the case across the wider population)

I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers.

Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.

To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.

If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.

Why are you saying he got rid of engineers? Did you watch the talk?

Yes, I watched it. I'm not saying he got rid of engineers so much as just not hiring new ones.

If he's hiring new people they won't be engineers or the people that used to do engineering.

They'll be people that are better suited to writing English than code.

I don't think that hiring the engineers was ever an option. He said that he couldnt maintain six native apps before agentic coding. The business never even considered expanding headcount by 6X to do it, it was a complete nonstarter.

There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).

It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.

It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.

I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.

People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.

Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.

Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work

It is a real world example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"

But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.

So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.

Jevon's paradox has to do with consuming resources, not employment. There are plenty of examples of fields getting more efficient and employment falling. Farming and manufacturing being 2 examples.

You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.

SE is not like farming.

37signals typically doesn't do hire a lot of software engineers but just last week they hired Rob Zolkos who is very clearly a software engineer.

https://x.com/jasonfried/status/2100668586851537195

And I think the online reality is much closer to the truth than AFK reality. I can't think of a single founder I've talked to in the past two years that's building with rails. That doesn't mean rails dies overnight, but it does mean it's simply all downhill from here.

I’ve made a similar point to my colleagues recently about cross-platform vs native apps. If we’re using AI anyway, do the arguments we made years ago still hold today?

I know some people might disagree, mainly because AI isn’t a new architecture or a new programming language in the traditional sense. But I still think it’s worth revisiting the assumptions and having the discussion.

Depends a lot on the token budget I think, different situations for established businesses or strapped founders vs side hustles or hobbyists. So in a way you outgrow Rails or frameworks like it once you can afford a software factory on autopilot 24/7.

Publishing mobile apps in Apple store or Google Play is a shit show.

You have to adhere to bizarre requirements, you can be taken down on a whim without possibility to appeal.

You have to pay for a developer account at least to Apple each year $100, Google one time fee $25.

Nothing like that for a web app.

I mean, that’s like half an hour of tokens, right? (Half joking laugh/cry etc)

I think more often the comparison is web techs (like React native) VS native apps.

It’s not really as bad as you make it sound.

It is that bad.

You forgot the 30% revenue share the App Stores take.

For a lot of companies it is not a factor because they have free app complementary to their services.

Main point is that even if you could slop out some code to have a mobile app there is enough of additional burden that makes it not really worth it when you can get away with web version that is good enough and you don’t have to care about all that bs coming with publishing and maintaining a mobile app or to be specific you need to maintain exactly 2 apps.

Put aside the usual web-dev perspective for a moment. As developers, we build for our users.

The web and native apps serve different purposes. Users do not use a website the same way they use a mobile app, and the trade-offs are different.

I’m getting tired of web developers failing to acknowledge that and treating web technology like a hammer that needs to be applied to every nail they come across.

And especially when people say “the web”, what they often really mean is Chrome and the Chromium ecosystem. A lot of web apps barely get tested properly on Firefox or Safari, which only reinforces Google’s monopoly over the web platform.

Yes, app stores have their problems. That does not make the web the right answer for every product.

Put the money where the mouth is.

If I name the price for actually developing apps no one will pay, there are only nerds nagging about how they are annoyed by web apps.

Clients paid us just fine. It really isn't that hard or expensive. It's not rocket science.

They aren’t paying us enough. Well then we are in worse business I guess.

shopify agrees https://shopify.engineering/back-to-native

With cross-platform frameworks, you’re only paying once for tokens. As businesses’ AI costs continue to rise, that can be a huge decision factor.

I can’t imagine how agile apps and difficult environment you have to develop for to really feel tokens cost at implementation level. Meetings, research, PoCes and everything else eats thousands times more.

DHH is right (pun intended), p(bloom) is the ONLY WAY to LIVE.

Living in the fear of p(doom) is miserable. We're all gonna die one day anyway.

That worldview assumes that technology is like rain or an asteroid shower, and we just have to accept it. Its not. Humans make technology and decide what is going to be used.

No technology is inevitable. Technology isn't nature.

How long will that last? It's evident that they are trying to squeeze the engineers to the max.

Ask the COBOL guys

They’ll be getting nervous too at some point the agentic port will come for cobol. The past hesitation and risk aversion will subside once the less risky stuff is addressed. Once someone big enough sets a precedent, it will gain momentum

The market being what it is, I took a job in ColdFusion last year.

There are people here who have worked in the same CF codebase for over twenty years. They might start and finish their careers in a language everyone else forgot about decades ago.

I think Ruby has enough momentum that career Rubyists will have a home for as long as they want one.

Smart. Bravo.

Buddy of mine pivoted to doing just SQL and road into retirement as a DBA.

With hindsight, we both wished we had gone all-in on SQL way back when.

That is actually a smart move. You only have to learn SQL once to use it for 50 years.

The foundations yes, the rest only if you never change between RDMS products.

On my 50s, learnt SQL around 1996, have used SQL across Access, Informix, DB2, Sybase SQL Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, Postgres, PrestoDB, Neo4j.

How'd you find the job? And was it remote?

I spent 2 years coding in ColdFusion maybe 25 years ago. I've got experience!

robbyrussell, creator of oh-my-zsh?

1. thank you for omz, it's great

2. how is it possible you've been on HN for over 15 years and have just 254 karma?

Lurkers abound.

The constant has always been tools that maximize developer productivity. What's changed is that LLMs are now the best way for developers to tell machines what to do. We've all been given a much bigger lever we can use to spend our waking hours (and even sleeping hours if you run agents overnight) to move even bigger mountains.

From your profile: CEO/Founder of Planet Argon...

Looking it up: Planet Argon is a Ruby on Rails development agency.

I think most people on HN know robby russel. Have you ever used ohmyzsh?

Robby is well known in the Ruby community.

> a Ruby on Rails development agency.

He's sitting in the front row at a Ruby on Rails conference - what did you think his job was?

Probably not a lumberjack.

Promoting his rails services where the creator and biggest defender of rails replaced rails with an AI generated rust version without writing a single line of code.

His comment is just damage control and biased, it did not state he's heavily invested financially in rails. Not everyone knows who he is, I didn't.