u/robbyrussell

I had the chance to close out day one of Rails World 2026 with this talk.

As code gets cheaper to produce, I think we have more room to wonder about the workshop around it. To unpack what we inherited, tinker with what’s getting in our way, and share what we learn with whoever comes next.

Human or otherwise.

Thanks to everyone who said hi, shared stories, and traded ideas throughout the week. A lot to keep wondering about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXjTdyhml0c

Curious what sticks with you.

I sat front row for David's talk yesterday morning. Having talked with him the day before, I’ll admit… I wasn’t particularly surprised.

A bit of a field report from Rails World: the vibe here is far from doom and gloom. Quite the contrary. Wherever our industry is headed, most of us are still employed as menders… tending to systems that customers rely on and businesses are quite happy to keep paying for.

Most of us aren’t waking up to a blank canvas and designing the architecture of the future. We’re inheriting decisions made years ago, updating old patterns, working around constraints, and keeping this shit running reliably.

I think these newer tools give us an opportunity to wonder a little more about the systems we’ve inherited. To unpack why things work the way they do. To tinker with assumptions we haven’t had the time, confidence, or permission to revisit… and share what we learn so the next person, or agent, has an easier time.

That deployment model we picked eight years ago? Worth another look. Some of our web apps probably wish they were native apps. And there are plenty of architectural decisions we’ve been living with mostly because… well, we’ve been busy living with them.

There’s plenty of understandable anxiety about what these tools mean for our work. I’m increasingly curious about what they give us permission to revisit.

Once my keynote is published, I’ll share more about a little programming-language-adjacent framework I’ve been working on for approaching exactly this kind of curiosity.

In the meantime… keep showing up. Keep wondering.

Long live Ruby. Long live Rails.

I recently had Joanna Wang from Sixfold on the On Rails podcast to talk about what happens when a small team starts leaning heavily into AI-assisted development.

We got into the homegrown orchestration system they eventually replaced with Hatchet, some painful lessons from going fully agentic, and how working across Java, Go, Python, Node, and Rails has shaped how she thinks about Rails’ particular flavor of “magic.”

We also talked about a question I keep coming back to lately: if generating code keeps getting cheaper, where does the value of an experienced developer move?

Joanna had some thoughtful answers.

Listen/watch wherever you do that.

https://podcast.rubyonrails.org/2462975/episodes/19665210-joanna-wang-code-is-cheap-now-developers-still-valuable

New episode of On Rails with u/tenderlove is out today. Listen/watch in your favorite podcasting app.

Recent discussion with the creator of Ruby on Rails with me On Rails

https://podcast.rubyonrails.org/2462975/episodes/19335416-dhh-basecamp-5-vibe-coding-and-the-future-of-rails

A recent interview with the co-founder of Higher Pixels (makers of Buzzsprout)