DHH's keynote at Rails World has been widely discussed, and to this author it sounded like the voice of someone in an existential crisis, and a jaded one. "Look how I don't care anymore, and you should not care either" is a poor message from the headline speaker at a conference he helped lobby for. The keynote's message was clear: HEY was rewritten in a more performant way, it worked well, and the speaker no longer needs or cares about Rails. The author argues that instead of earning applause through blunt criticism, he could have left the project and its community alone. Still, when prominent figures lose interest in something valuable, the rest of the community is not obliged to follow, and the gap opens room for others.
The author admits feeling depressed for a few days, though not because AI is writing code. The LLM shift is clear and the author accepts it. What troubled them was the dismissive treatment of the Ruby ecosystem and community, with the Rails and Ruby culture discarded for the sake of running an app on a single Raspberry Pi. Yet the author sees a renaissance. Many prominent Rubyists have moved to other stacks, where exploration is easier because the tedious parts no longer have to be typed by hand.
The author draws a parallel to the Weimar Republic, the turbulent period between the World Wars. It brought inflation, unemployment and social hardship, but also a remarkable flowering of art, design and technology, from the Bauhaus to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The author's point is that when the old order loses interest and no one is clearly in charge, the most interesting work often gets made.
The Ruby community has always been artistic, from the early work of _why to the aesthetic qualities that drew many developers to Rails. With new tooling abundant, the author suggests the right mindset is to see the moment as an opportunity rather than a loss.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing