> 37signals differentiates their products with opinionated UI/UX, not novel features. They are rewriting Hey as six native apps because the web fidelity isn’t good enough. So UI matters enough to justify complete rewrites, but also everyone just wants CLIs?
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.
(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)
> I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot.
Same happened when the first smartphones came out, and everything was about "mobile first". Everyone will use their mobile phones for everything, desktop is dead, every app should be primarily designed for smartphones, everything comes after. Turned out smartphones just another interface that are good for some things, and not good for some other. Same for the "cloud native" movement.
It is pretty obvious rails is dead as it hangs massively on its founder for good and for bad.
And it is quite telling that he prefers to kill it off like this rather than handing the reigns over to someone else.
A technical note - the big difference is that a design with a number of fat clients don’t need server side rendered html - that lowers the load on the server regardless of the programming language.
You can probably write quite light json apis in Ruby and the performance of them will be dominated by network and db usage anyways compared to a similar implementation done in a compiled language.
DHH's keynote was like listening to David Brent give a motivational speech.
"Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"
You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We listened to him because of Rails not Hey or Basecamp. They were just application of Rails as a technology.
If he no longer has a vision for Rails' niche what do we need him for? What's the pitch?
He might as well just be a Barry Gibb impersonator droning on and on about politics. :P
The summary is exactly why a lot of people is upset.
>That’s what bothers me most. I’m skeptical of his AI claims, but that’s not the real issue here.
>The problem is that he stood up at Rails World and told everyone that he was moving his product off Rails and the best thing he could come up with to say to people still using Rails was that we’re “the best of the best.” Thanks, I guess.
>Maybe Rails is done, in the way the Mosscap project claims. Maybe it’s time to focus on stability and maintenance. If that’s the plan, someone needs to say it. If it isn’t, then let’s hear about where we’re headed. DHH did neither.
Rails, or even more so php have VERY little to bring to the table in 2026 going forward. Rails (ruby) is still a saner language than PHP, but as slow as php is. (granted ruby is not idiotic like PHP and runs rather than start/die).
If you go the LLM route something like Go is probably the goto default for MOST networking/web-first apps. You get static types, and a fast compile cycle (rust is still very slow here), and IF you want more from the language you can use something like Lisette (https://lisette.run/).
Bottom line is dynamic languages are obsolete. There is really no benefits from using them outside very small throw away scripts.
Well that's not something you say in a Rails conference, best language or framework for a project has been debated before I was born and will continue to be
Why would I bother with anything but Laravel for small CRUD apps? Not having to think about concurrency is neat, having tons of abstractions built by people with 50x my experience is neat, just being able to get going is neat.
Building the things I've built using Laravel with Golang would probably take 10x the development time as I have to handcraft everything Laravel already natively provides. Or I have to trust 100 packages from 100 different random devs to simulate the Laravel experience in Golang.
I've seen this one a few times lately. People should stop building UIs, nobody wants to interact with a UI. Everyone's app should just be an API that you can use with a chatbot. Except for my app — my app is a handcrafted miracle of artisanal UX and its UI will change the way you see the world.
It's exactly the old argument, just now with LLMs in the place of shell pipelines: in terms of functionality and value to users, software ought to be malleable and composable. We've known it since the eighties. But the model of selling a piece of software as a product as if it were a pair of shoes is incompatible with that. You need a big monolithic application to justify users paying a bunch of money for it, and you need it to have a fancy interface that makes an impression. And the whole software industry is built on top of that model. Where monolithic software is completely unfit for a purpose, like when it needs to be a component of a larger system, we rely on (mostly unpaid) OSS.
Except now LLMs let you, with very little technical know-how, plaster a ‘programmable’ interface on top of unstructured data/interface meant for humans, and because that's what we actually want, of course everybody does that. So the end result is a wildly expensive pipeline from API to UI and back to API again. I wonder how long the legacy ‘human-oriented’ layer in the middle, and the industry that's been built on top of it, will last.
(Separately, chatbots are not great as a UI for most things, and the problem of building the universal UI still also stands. But it turns out for a lot of things people would rather have a bad universal UI than a good special-purpose UI for each task.)
Same happened when the first smartphones came out, and everything was about "mobile first". Everyone will use their mobile phones for everything, desktop is dead, every app should be primarily designed for smartphones, everything comes after. Turned out smartphones just another interface that are good for some things, and not good for some other. Same for the "cloud native" movement.
And it is quite telling that he prefers to kill it off like this rather than handing the reigns over to someone else.
A technical note - the big difference is that a design with a number of fat clients don’t need server side rendered html - that lowers the load on the server regardless of the programming language.
You can probably write quite light json apis in Ruby and the performance of them will be dominated by network and db usage anyways compared to a similar implementation done in a compiled language.
"Some of you will loose your jobs. I know, I know. Gutting. Gutting. On a more positive note, I'm getting a promotion. So every cloud. Oh, you're still think about the bad stuff aren't you?"
You have to laugh about it because he's kind of making himself irrelevant too. We listened to him because of Rails not Hey or Basecamp. They were just application of Rails as a technology.
If he no longer has a vision for Rails' niche what do we need him for? What's the pitch?
He might as well just be a Barry Gibb impersonator droning on and on about politics. :P
>That’s what bothers me most. I’m skeptical of his AI claims, but that’s not the real issue here.
>The problem is that he stood up at Rails World and told everyone that he was moving his product off Rails and the best thing he could come up with to say to people still using Rails was that we’re “the best of the best.” Thanks, I guess.
>Maybe Rails is done, in the way the Mosscap project claims. Maybe it’s time to focus on stability and maintenance. If that’s the plan, someone needs to say it. If it isn’t, then let’s hear about where we’re headed. DHH did neither.
If you go the LLM route something like Go is probably the goto default for MOST networking/web-first apps. You get static types, and a fast compile cycle (rust is still very slow here), and IF you want more from the language you can use something like Lisette (https://lisette.run/).
Bottom line is dynamic languages are obsolete. There is really no benefits from using them outside very small throw away scripts.
Building the things I've built using Laravel with Golang would probably take 10x the development time as I have to handcraft everything Laravel already natively provides. Or I have to trust 100 packages from 100 different random devs to simulate the Laravel experience in Golang.
It’s founder has converted to AI driven Rust.
DHH will bring his tribe of true believers to where he has gone, where he has set up a new sideshow tent.
Do you follow the leader.