Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I code and maintain a Rails stack. About 20% of the time an endpoint takes to respond is spent in Ruby. New Relic tells me our Apdex is 99, and it’s very rare for an endpoint to take more than 100ms. Most respond in under 80ms. I could LLM-port it (and probably will one day), but end-user response performance wouldn’t be the motivation.
What does make me consider switching is reading about things like how Shopify’s native apps are moving towards superfast product cores that can be tested incredibly quickly, with the slower UX layer kept separate. I think that model is the future, and in that world Rails starts to look pretty dead.
by fhub - Two slightly disconnected thoughts:
1. This is why BDFL culture in open source is bad. Because if the BDFL decides to go all in on some completely bizarre mess, all of a sudden there’s massive fork politics.
2. Hey is the marquee product now?? Does anyone actually use Hey? I tried it for a year, and basically found I was paying for the privilege of having a slower, buggier, less feature-rich gmail that can’t even dent the have-a-paid-email-that-doesn’t-exploit-you market (Fastmail and Proton exist, yo).
by paultopia - I 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.by jkartchner
- As an SRE I would be very interested on experienced devs point of view on that stance, "we don’t even necessarily need to read the code the LLMs produce". To me, that is the only way a single dev can manage > 1 agent. Because I feel running the code will always be slower than a single agent generating it. On the other hand, it implies lack of human understanding on what is going on under the hood. Which is fine if you trust the LLM to write great code, and great tests for the code, but fundamentally you have to have 100% trust, 99.9% is not going to be enough in any serious industry, would it ?
Also eventually you'll also have to trust it to write the deployment code or even run the deployment itself, otherwise SRE is going to be the bottleneck. And only then should I feel anxiety about the rest of my career (that, or my employer decide LLM are good enough to get rid of me, even if they are imperfect).
by bionsystem - Most managers don't read the code of their direct reports. They just trust that the code is "good enough" and that there are enough other processes in place to catch bugs before they cause too much damage. I think I'm a pretty skilled programmer, or I'm at least good enough at interviewing to convince other people of that, but it's pretty obvious from comparing LLM generated code to code I'd write myself that in many domains LLMs are superior to me. They do make mistakes, but so do I, and those mistakes are eventually found and corrected.
We're in the very early stages of LLM driven programming, so it's hard to say how it will all shake out, but my anecdotal experience is that LLM written software is very reliable and easy to extend and develop. I have a side project that is about 90% LLM generated code (about 25k lines of production code and a similar amount of test code). This is a revenue generating product and I've had no issues with reliability, security, or performance.
For what it's worth this app is a rails app and I have no plans to switch to anything else. Rails works nicely, the LLMs extend it easily, and almost everything is I/O bound so I don't need C++/Rust level performance.
- "If every product is used by an agent driving a CLI, what’s going to differentiate Basecamp or Fizzy from the cheapest alternative?"
At that point, why even bother with "driving a CLI"? I have a hard time seeing how this all doesn't go away soon. At the current trajectory, I am not seeing a future where software like Basecamp or Fizzy or the cheapest alternative are competitive with "Claude, build a basecamp-style project management tool for my team."
I don't mean to say that thoughtfully built, opinionated software doesn't have intrinsic value, I believe it will always be "better" in certain aspects...I just can't fathom that a market for it will exist in very short order.
I would LOVE to be talked out of this perspective.
by captainclam - > 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.)
by Twey - Related:
Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]