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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

The summary is exactly why a lot of people is upset.

>That’s what bothers me most. I’m skeptical of his AI claims, but that’s not the real issue here.

>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.

>Maybe Rails is done, in the way the Mosscap project claims. Maybe it’s time to focus on stability and maintenance. If that’s the plan, someone needs to say it. If it isn’t, then let’s hear about where we’re headed. DHH did neither.

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It's kind of crazy to witness.

Rails is very insular tech.

A lot of people bet their entire careers on Rails. I've worked on Rails shops, and the majority of developers have not touched another language in years. There are people who never shipped anything in anything but Rails, and haven't done anything in other language since college, or ever if they did a bootcamp.

I have even interviewed a significant number of people doing Rails for ten years who did not know it was possible to launch a Ruby application with `ruby script.rb`.

Not to mention that with the emergence of frontend frameworks, most Rails developers were doing API-only stuff, and barely interacted with the frontend.

I recently left a company that was moving to from Rails to Go (might have been partially my fault), and there were was a bit of a mutiny where several teams have refused to change languages.

DHH is pretty much saying AI is gonna eat this people alive.

These people who refer to them selves as a "Rails Engineer" (or substitute any other language/framework) and fail to realize that there are other tools in the box are of course first against the wall in the AI-driven future.

A carpenter who only knows how to use a hammer isn't a very good carpenter.

Why is Rails a hammer not Milwaukee/DeWalt/Makita/etc? A carpenter with only DeWalt brand power tools will do just fine.

Not if the job provides only Makita.

And before you say "a carpenter can switch from DeWalt to Makita just fine": that's why the analogy was made with a hammer.

Rails is the most cult-like, anti-learning, anti-choice and even anti-engineering technology I have ever used. It does NOT want you to make your own choices, it does NOT want you to decouple from the framework, it does NOT want you to grow. It’s frightening.

I mean, in an app that uses Rails by-the-book, you won’t even find a class instantiation. No call to new. You won’t find a class that does not inherit from a framework bass class either. The framework handles everything, don’t worry.

I did interviews almost weekly from about 2017-2024, when I was working in a Rails company.

About half the people had no idea how to use Ruby without Rails, and most of them would open a whole-ass Rails app to do a simple FizzBuzz (I would naturally provide assistance in maths).

A minority (only 3 or 4 people) were unable to create a Rails app, and had to run FizzBuzz in their employee's own app.

Those were people in Mid-Level and Senior positions in other companies, that had documentation proving as such, and also managed to pass an HR screening.

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