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block_daggertoday at 4:58 PM9 repliesview on HN

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compumiketoday at 5:41 PM

You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:

  raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ...
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.

I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.

BirAdamtoday at 5:00 PM

Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.

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blacksmith_tbtoday at 5:12 PM

That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.

vidarhtoday at 6:05 PM

Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.

I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.

jazzyjacksontoday at 5:39 PM

I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.

I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.

m12ktoday at 5:25 PM

The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.

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lfxtoday at 5:06 PM

I understand why rust, but why TS? just for a front end?

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graboidtoday at 5:25 PM

I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.

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throwaway613746today at 5:20 PM

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