alt Hacker NewsI know this is not exactly a nuanced take, but why would anyone take advice about the future of technology whose contributions are now limited to an opinionated email app? I appreciate that tech is and will change even more, but relegating an entire ecosystem to the dustbin because you're feeling bullish about LLMs seems...premature.
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The Ruby on Rails community has always been hard to separate from DHH.
The fact that he went on stage at a Ruby on Rails keynote and talked about his current passions instead of Rails is kind of typical for his style of leadership. The Ruby on Rails project and community were always the DHH show, even though there were years where they tried hard to act like it was an independent community run project now.
This late in the game, I think most RoR fans who are committed enough to attend a RoR conference have aligned themselves with DHH more than RoR, which is why you see some positive responses to a RoR keynote that didn't talk about RoR.
DHH is the creator of rails and you are listening to a very cherry picked take, like all of the internet these days.
His whole argument which I agree with is summed up in a section where he shows a clip of himself 21 years ago saying “look at how much code I’m not writing” and that is the core thesis of rails. And agents provide a better solution than rails with less downside and more upside. So now that the core reason for rails has been overturned, instead of holding onto an old inferior solution to a problem, he has moved on because he is a value driven pragmatist at heart.
He literally built rails to write code as close to English as possible. Expressiveness, get code out of your way so you can focus on solving the non technical problems, stop getting stuck in engineering decisions and focus on business and UX, etc. Now whether his values were truly accomplished some people can argue but what those values are is pretty clear.
DHH created rails for himself and he has been unabashedly firm on his own values, it’s Steve Jobs esque, provides great clarity and focus but pisses people off who deviate from that focus.
Lots of people jumped on rails but don’t share DHH exact values. They see rails as a community ownership not a DHH ownership and they believe in the framework beyond just a tool to solve problems. More specifically they rely on it and helped build it up well beyond “just a tool to write code more like English” to a robust, well maintained usable platform you can build and run sophisticated real world applications with.
DHH has left rails because it no longer is the right solution for his set of values, that’s it. Others in the community rely on Rails to run their systems and will continue to do so until the end of time because let’s face it Rails has been pretty mature since rails 5/6 and despite all the exciting “progress” it’s just a solidly good framework that doesn’t really need to keep up with the trends.