> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration.
Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review
And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.
I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.
If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?
Author of the article here (hi! Anxiously watching my Grafana stack right now...)
I've only just noticed that on the Rails homepage, and while I acknowledge everyone's chasing that sweet sweet AI hype, I gotta say that's... disappointing[1]. The reason I fell in love with Ruby (and by extension, Rails) is because it enabled me as a human to express myself through code. Not to become a glorified janitor for a LLM.
[1]=Well, I had a stronger response initially but I toned it down a bit for here...
> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review
This is so painful... I can't help but wonder who they're trying to target with such inane slogans.
Rails is amazing, but "token-efficiency" is not on the list of reasons why.
There was a post last week about the best programming language for LLMs, and in the comments people loved Go, with the claim being it's very opinionated and there's really only one way of doing things. I'd say the same is mostly true for Rails apps as well.
However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types. For LLMs thats important as well, the more guard rails you can give them the better. What's the state of type checkers today?
> However having worked with Typescript for 8 years now... I'm not sure I could go back to Ruby without types.
Very true for me as well. I've never worked with Ruby but feel the same way about Django.
Btw, if you're looking for a "Rails but with TypeScript," my colleagues and I are working on almost just that: https://wasp.sh/.
The main difference, besides the ecosystem, is that we're more in the "configuration over convention" camp. Wasp has a simple DSL for specifying said configuration, but it's about to be replaced with a TypeScript file.
Wasp is still in beta and nowhere near Rails-level polish. But, depending on your early adopter tendencies, you might find it interesting regardless. If you do try it out, please reach out and share your thoughts.
TS is very AI native to the point i'd agree it's near magical in terms of contract.
However, the fact its still the js ecosystem with react, thing is even though it's super productive in churning out the code, there's too many possible ways to do something. it's unwieldy.
For example Claude is obsessed with making react context providers. it'll make tons of them to power every feature. and your app will happily hold 20 layers of russian doll'd state in memory with no way to link to anything.
you have to tell it, no don't do that. i need you to power this thing through the router, through the url. and that has to be designed cohesively. and that's very different from the context free-for-all.
> TS is very AI-native, to the point I'd agree it's near magical in terms of contracts.
I agree.
Not only that, I feel like TypeScript is currently the only popular high-level language with a type system capable of communicating all meaningful information. It seems to have hit an LLM sweet spot.
Looking at other candidates:
- Rust is popular and has a powerful type system, but it forces you to program at a level that's lower than necessary for most projects, hindering usability.
- Go is much more usable and very popular, but its type system can't communicate much.
- Haskell has an excellent type system, but it's nowhere near popular enough, and its usability suffers due to esoteric constraints (laziness, purity).
- etc.
I don't know the recent developments in Python's and Ruby's type systems. They may be able to compete these days, but they were nowhere near TS's level in terms of contract a few years ago when I last tried them out.
And I admittedly have no idea what's going on with C# and Java, but I'd love to hear about it.
Ruby has types with RBS and Steep now. It's a lot like using .d.ts sidecar files alongside JavaScript, via jsconfig.json configuring tsc. I like it a lot!
>The claim seems quite clear to me: "convention over configuration allows coding agents to be more effective".
The agents pick up conventions from the extensive code in their corpus and aggressively follow them. I don't think Rails being explicit about it adds a lot unless someone is prone to prompting towards absurdity.
doesn’t forcing your agent to think in ruby put it at huge disadvantage though? since the language isn’t that popular it can’t have learned it as well as say python or Java?
>If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference[...]?
it's a little cringe, but arguably the benefit of having agents use rails would be tht when you review and audit the agent produced code, you review something that is, as you put it: "beautiful and simple code" and "making it easy to reason about..."
I loved rails back in 2017. I may be an outlier but the line tempts me to try it again despite having adopted the who cares attitude to langs. Would be nice to hear from someone first hand if they felt it helped.
Don't worry, it's just the hype phase and it will pass. (By 'pass' I mean agent-coding will be so ubiquitous that it's a given and not worth mentioning.)
I haven't found anyone pushing back on it at all, which has been making me a bit nervous! There was a HN post about it, though it didn't get any traction. [0] Seemingly nothing in any of the usual rails community areas either. It's going to make recommending rails confusing because that pitch really does make it unclear what rails is even aiming to do.
And yeah you're right, like what is the difference at that point? If the pitch is "AI agents write this", then the obvious response is "well why would I not use what has more training data then?".
both statements are true though. rails excels in the AI world because it's extremely cared for and intentional with language. and there's a ton of built up knowledge.
fwiw that headline is cringey for sure. but DHH has proven himself a great marketer. it very likely is riding the wave.
> Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review
And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents.
I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard.
If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?