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RoR creator sparks new “death of coding by hand” debate
(blog.pragmaticengineer.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2026
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Programming
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I know a lot of people love RoR, but I don’t. I have a long list of reasons, including it being slow, the syntax is weird, and while it’s possible to do compile-time type checking, it feels clunky and bolted on. RSpec especially annoys me with its use of dynamic language features to “cheat” when writing tests instead of creating code that is loosely coupled and testable. Don’t get me started on ORMs.
At work, I’m forced to work in legacy RoR codebases, and honestly, AI coming along and letting me work at a layer of abstraction above RoR was a welcome change. I used to spend the a whole day getting pissed off whenever I had to work in these RoR codebases, and letting a LLM generate the code lets me disconnect, keep my emotions out of it’d and pump out whatever drivel is needed to earn my paycheck for the day.
I’ve always chafed with the rails design philosophies.
I’m fine with the idea of a standard set of tools used across projects (if you’re in the ecosystem), but I hate the centralization of thought and implicit magic’s that RoR embraces.
I’m very much an explicit is better than implicit person.
I totally agree. Whenever I've criticised Ruby, e.g. for it's insane level of hard to follow "magic", people just say "that's just Ruby on Rails... not all Ruby is like that". I have no idea why it's popular or why we should listen to anyone that thinks Ruby is amazing and Rust is terrible. It shows an astounding level of poor taste.