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The Future of Ruby and Rails in the Age of AI

33 points by Stwerner 2y ago

obiefernandez 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Stwerner 2y ago
I've been working with Ruby + AI for the last year and couldn't agree more with this post. It feels like there are so many brand new ways to build software with LLMs that have yet to be discovered and I find Ruby's flexibility makes it easy to try out new ideas almost as quickly as you can think of them. Obie also mentions my company's product Blueprints. Blueprints allows you to capture existing, known-good patterns in your code base, and then use them as a base for an LLM to generate variations from. We've got editor plugins for the major editors and we're also starting to roll out downloadable packages like this DaisyUI-styled Phlex component one: https://blueprints.sublayer.com/packages/phlex-daisyui https://blueprints.sublayer.com/packages/phlex-daisyui Happy to answer any questions about it!
- obiefernandez 2y ago
  I've been using Blueprints extensively. I see a future that includes curated collection Blueprints servers for many different programming languages and niches.
brigadier132 2y ago
> The very qualities that drew us to the Ruby and Rails ecosystem — the expressiveness, the readability, the emphasis on developer happiness — are precisely what position us to spearhead the AI-powered future of software development. These are exactly the reasons why ruby will not be the future of programming. Do you think AIs are going to write code in dynamic languages? They would have to search the entire space of possible programs that includes infinite syntactically incorrect programs whereas if they used a statically typed language they could be hooked into the language server and each token that is generated will only come from the space of syntactically correct programs.
- dalyons 2y ago
  > They would have to search the entire space of possible programs that includes infinite syntactically incorrect programs That’s not really how AIs work, at least not the LLMs of today. They aren’t operating on a search space, and they aren’t following or explicitly constrained by any defined rules of grammar (programming or English or otherwise). It’s “just” probabilistic next token generation, it doesn’t care if your language is typed or not.
  - brigadier132 2y ago
    What do you think all these Ai agents are doing when they are rerunning the prompt over and over with the error output? Very ineffective search.
vemv 2y ago
As a long-time professional RoR developer, I disagree with the article's premise. AI seems like the last nail in the coffin for an easy, slow-evolving, highly standardized ecosystem like Rails'. In short, using Rails was already pretty easy pre-AI, now it's just too easy. That might be nice for misc purposes like prototyping something, or teaching people how to make webapps, but for all other purposes it makes us disposable peons. Even in better times than 2022-24, I expect Rails salaries not to grow particularly. I don't expect it to die either - probably it will be not unlike PHP: easy, pretty nice, but ultimately a voluntary choice to have a lower salary. I thank Ruby/Rails for various aspects that have made my career better, but it's wiser to move on to something more niche and that doesn't pretend we're still living in 2008.
- JamesAdir 2y ago
  more niche? Isn't RoR niche now?

33 points by Stwerner 2y ago

obiefernandez 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

Stwerner 2y ago

I've been working with Ruby + AI for the last year and couldn't agree more with this post. It feels like there are so many brand new ways to build software with LLMs that have yet to be discovered and I find Ruby's flexibility makes it easy to try out new ideas almost as quickly as you can think of them. Obie also mentions my company's product Blueprints. Blueprints allows you to capture existing, known-good patterns in your code base, and then use them as a base for an LLM to generate variations from. We've got editor plugins for the major editors and we're also starting to roll out downloadable packages like this DaisyUI-styled Phlex component one: https://blueprints.sublayer.com/packages/phlex-daisyui https://blueprints.sublayer.com/packages/phlex-daisyui Happy to answer any questions about it!

obiefernandez 2y ago
I've been using Blueprints extensively. I see a future that includes curated collection Blueprints servers for many different programming languages and niches.

brigadier132 2y ago

> The very qualities that drew us to the Ruby and Rails ecosystem — the expressiveness, the readability, the emphasis on developer happiness — are precisely what position us to spearhead the AI-powered future of software development. These are exactly the reasons why ruby will not be the future of programming. Do you think AIs are going to write code in dynamic languages? They would have to search the entire space of possible programs that includes infinite syntactically incorrect programs whereas if they used a statically typed language they could be hooked into the language server and each token that is generated will only come from the space of syntactically correct programs.

dalyons 2y ago
> They would have to search the entire space of possible programs that includes infinite syntactically incorrect programs That’s not really how AIs work, at least not the LLMs of today. They aren’t operating on a search space, and they aren’t following or explicitly constrained by any defined rules of grammar (programming or English or otherwise). It’s “just” probabilistic next token generation, it doesn’t care if your language is typed or not.
- brigadier132 2y ago
  What do you think all these Ai agents are doing when they are rerunning the prompt over and over with the error output? Very ineffective search.

vemv 2y ago

As a long-time professional RoR developer, I disagree with the article's premise. AI seems like the last nail in the coffin for an easy, slow-evolving, highly standardized ecosystem like Rails'. In short, using Rails was already pretty easy pre-AI, now it's just too easy. That might be nice for misc purposes like prototyping something, or teaching people how to make webapps, but for all other purposes it makes us disposable peons. Even in better times than 2022-24, I expect Rails salaries not to grow particularly. I don't expect it to die either - probably it will be not unlike PHP: easy, pretty nice, but ultimately a voluntary choice to have a lower salary. I thank Ruby/Rails for various aspects that have made my career better, but it's wiser to move on to something more niche and that doesn't pretend we're still living in 2008.

JamesAdir 2y ago
more niche? Isn't RoR niche now?