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
3,823 karma · joined November 24, 2014
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
What he was saying in his talk was that his customers (people using Hey for email and calendar) never really wanted hybrid web-native apps, they want native apps (like most people prefer on mobile). His business could never afford to have a dev team that built and supported six different native apps, so they always built using hybrid web-native stuff using Turbo Native.
Now that his development team has access to agentic coding, they can build and maintain six mobile native apps. For his app, the back end part then becomes small and simple and they can reimplement it in rust to reduce server cost.
His point wasn't that rust is better than ruby, or anything like that. His point was that agentic coding allows smaller teams to do bigger things. For most people building on rails, their customers don't need native mobile apps (I know mine don't) and for them Rails is a fantastic choice for agentic coding.
Rails is so into agentic coding that they publish benchmarks of how effective different models are for building with rails:
TLDR: DHH isn't anti-rails, he is pro-agentic coding. Rails is great with agentic coding. AI doesn't mean layoffs, it means your teams can do much more than they could do before.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
I'm not predicting that this will happen, but we do need to take the debt seriously and not assume we will be able to just print money to get rid of it.
People would move more instead of being locked in to a low effective property tax.
The tax burden would be much fairer: instead of the police and schools being funded by newcomers, everyone would be contributing their fair share to fund the city, instead of the longest tenure residents mooching off the rest of us.
Unproductive use of land would be discouraged. If a tract became highly desirable, it would be expensive to let it sit in an unproductive form
Cities could raise taxes as high as their residents wanted them to be, instead of being limited by the opinions of non-residents. Some people want to have better funded police and schools, and local government would actually be allowed to deliver that. Citizens who didnt want to live in expensive cities could vote with their feet to cheaper towns.
I use virtual desktops, where each desktop contains a single thing that I am working on, and everything related to it. Then any good window manager can switch between them quickly and even give you a spatial sense of where you are. I organize them as a priority stack, so the topmost priority is in top position and then it goes downward from there
There's a lot that this "campus" product does that isn't present in such a set up (multi user, zooming, etc...) but virtual desktops give you a lot of the benefit and come built in to most of our operating systems
I completely disagree with this. I don't "give a pass" to humans killing other humans with a car.
Every year that skeptics delay adoption of autonomous driving is another year where tens of thousands of deaths could be prevented.
Hiring is really hard and its relatively common for someone to look good on paper and do really well in interviews and completely bomb on the job.
The difference with hiring a CEO is that the blast radius is much larger for that role
Many books can only be bought this way. Publishers don't want to sell books through platforms that don't have DRM, because they are scared of piracy.
It would be great if we could have open ebook reader software that could display these books.
eReaders like the Xteink X4 are beautiful but lots of books are impossible to legally read on it. Yes, I know that I can break the DRM, but I think its sad that this is the only path for legitimate purchases.
https://www.thestack.technology/hugging-face-hacked-turned-t...
If there is a great post on a topic and the author used AI when generating it, what’s so bad about that?
Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the tab grows until it swallows all 62 GB of RAM + swap and the kernel kills it."
From my experience people who complain loudly about the price tend to be people who are either (1) working primarily on hobby projects so are unwilling to pay much for Claude Code or (2) using astronomical amount of tokens through elaborately orchestrated multi-agent setups that only make sense when someone else is paying the bill.
I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.
Just as americans don't trust AI or the tech industry, they don't trust any public institutions.
The fundamental problem is not AI or tech or institutions being bad. The fundamental problem is that the way we distribute information about the world has a deep negativity bias. This exists because the information economy is supported by advertisement, which requires attention to profit, and attention is easiest to attract with negativity. "If it bleeds, it leads" has been true forever.
If you want to understand the impact of AI technology on the economy, don't listen to software engineers, listen to economists.
So an engineer joining a country that already has engineers still creates a ton of value in the destination country
Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.
Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.
But if you hold that position, you also have to be fine with companies not offering products and services in your country. AI systems will eventually be good enough (in 10-20 years) for companies to be able to deploy such systems with sufficient accuracy to afford the lawsuits. Until that time, such countries would just not have access to systems before they were bulletproof.