Look at all the things he’s not doing

The useful part

Andy Croll image by South Park Studios Look at all the things he's not doing There's a moment in the early seasons of South Park when Cartman et al find the source of an underwear crisis in their mountain town. Developer, Movie & Gaming t-shirts printed (on demand) and sent around the world. Profit I've been considering David's opening Rails World keynote and realised that this is the main problem I have with it.

How it works

• I'm engaging more judgement on how much I code review when I can verify in other ways.
• I'm not seeing evidence I can abdicate my taste to Anthropic, OpenAI or the fast-following open-weight models.
• Ruby was "about 3%" of his work this year, and he's "talked about nothing else but Omarchy for about 3 months." Now the models can one-shot a calculator and convert existing applications to Rust.
• He seems uninterested in the useful guardrails, determinism and token efficiency 1 that a battle-tested framework can provide when using agents.
• In the keynote he admitted the designers' vibe-coded work on Basecamp 5 left the architecture "a little like Swiss cheese", and they went back to manual review.

What to take from it

Problem is, the rest of us need to work now, and the next model might not be perfect. Not sure waiting 5 minutes for the models is a good solution to having to solve problems now. It'll take the cheap path because agents always do." Robby argued for improving the "workshop" of our apps, making the preferred way obvious for humans and agents.

Example or evidence

• The published failure mode in the foundation's own AI research is hand-rolling.
• David said "I don't mind slop grenades at all… I don't have to catch".
• Instead what we got was opinionmaxxing: a lot of certainty about the destination, but in his own words, not much that was 'practical' or 'prescriptive' about getting there.
• The room was already there: when he polled the audience only five people out of 1,200 were still writing material amounts of code by hand.

Details worth keeping

Rails World is about "shaping the future of Ruby on Rails". I was left with a "what's the point?" feeling. I think David meant it as a provocation, to jolt the room.

Related coverage

• Mynbc5: Looking for activities for this Labor Day Weekend. Don't worry, NBC5's Andrew Grautski has you covered with this edition of "Things to Do."
• Mynbc5: Looking for your weekend plans? NBC5's Andrew Grautski has you covered with "Things to Do."
• Welikela: Need little jolt to get your Saturday going? You're in the right space. To-dos for today in L.A. include the A..