I absolutely love Ruby On Rails. I’ve been using it since around 2019. Its a beautiful language that has stood the test of time. Watching the Rails World this week with DHH has been… interesting.
I understand the hype about AI.
I personally love AI. I use it regularly. I think its a fantastic tool, but I still need to look at the code. I need to know how it all works.
Convert My Rails App To Rust, Make No Mistakes
Personally, trusting your AI to do everything exactly how you want it is nervewracking. I cannot fathom allowing AI agents to do every single task. I am still constantly surveying and seeing small but serious issues when I allow AI to run on itself.
I think as time progresses, we will see more and more collaborations between humans and AI, however humans will always need to review everything.
DHH says “English > Ruby”
I understand this train of thought as well. Why would we be coding everything, when we can just tell AI what to do? Then we can just choose the programming language that does everything the fastest. It’s easier on your computer, datacenters, etc.
But, what happens when you no longer understand the code it writes and it breaks?
What happens then?
I think this is why I will never be able to just let go of Ruby. I think this is why I could never fully embrace Rust. What happens when your vibe coding lands into a problem AI has never faced and you’re staring at 150,000 lines of code you’ve never read? You haven’t written any of it?
Ruby
# Filtering and transforming data reads like a natural sentence
active_usernames = users
.select(&:active?)
.map { |user| user.name.downcase }
# Expressive syntactic sugar
puts "Welcome home!" if user.logged_in?
Rust
// Explicit, safe, and aggressively optimized by the compiler
let active_usernames: Vec<String> = users
.into_iter()
.filter(|user| user.is_active())
.map(|user| user.name.to_lowercase())
.collect();
I think this is why I’ll never be able to fully embrace vibe coding. I think it’s why I’ll never be able to fully embrace Rust.
I still need to know what is happening under the hood. While my work focuses less on the code and more about the business. I still need my developers to understand the code they are writing. I still need it to be simple enough for others to be able to debug.
I think we are just getting to a stage in AI where we aren’t thinking about the consequences of what happens down the road when we need to fix sloppy code.