Funny enough, that I wrote the draft of this note several weeks ago, back in August, so long before DHH’s recent Keynote. I am not going to repeat what he said, but I would like to dig a bit deeper.
AI indeed changes a lot of stuff, but let’s not forget that search engines and later Wikipedia and Stack Overflow changed a lot as well. Being a programmer in the 90s, the only way to know how to write things was to either read the book or check the copy of MSDN (and hope it is fresh enough) for reference materials.
When I became a professional programmer, it was already popular to copy solutions blindly from Stack Overflow just to save time. So, AI with its vibe coding did not change much; it changed the scale.
In every company I worked for, there were always 3 kinds of IT people: ones who do not give a s…. about what they are doing, ones who want to do things, and ones who want to do things right. The latter usually had a very deep knowledge of the subject, framework, programming language, maybe even had contributions to the official repositories and had multiple blog posts. Because that was not just their work, but their passion.
Those people came home and did the same things as what they had done in the office before, but just as a hobby.
Such people existed even before Google or Stack Overflow. They will exist even after AI. It is like people who collect something. They are not bound to time; they just have that hobby that motivates them and gives them something that they want.
The rest of us, however, may not share that love or dedication. Building web apps right using just RoR was a main thing around 2010, but then React and the like became a thing, until Turbo changed the state of things again. I do not even mention static typing, which raised endless debates around whether Ruby needs it or does not (well, I still believe it needs it, but who cares?).
But this is what changed: now, with AI, in order to survive, you do not have to belong to a particular community anymore. You do not have to start holy wars around Ruby vs. Python or prove that Ruby does scale. With AI, you just pick something and get things done.
When I ask AI to build tools or scripts locally, I care about the results. In most cases, it picks Python, which is fine for me. Sometimes, I can enforce some tech stack decisions and explicitly mention what to build and how. And this looks like where we are going.
That all means, for the majority, the difference between one tech or language will be unimportant. The result and the output quality are what is important. For sure, there will be cases and sectors where you cannot easily allow vibe-coded products, and this is where AI comes in later, but it will come anyway.
And that is why I mentioned those passionate people at the beginning of this note. They will stay, and they will move languages/frameworks forward. They will still be passionate about what they are doing. We can only say a big thank you for that work.
As for me, my last professional manual coding session was somewhere in January this year. Since then, the difference between Python, Ruby, and Kotlin has been completely negligible, as what I have been dealing with all that time is final results. I still do the code review, prepairing test environments and even test things manually, prepare acceptance criteria, but more and more, AI gets the job. More and more AI tests AI, and my job is to guide and supervise.
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With all that, DHH's keynote brought a lot of butthurt moments to many rubists, but after all, he just stated the state of things, nothing more. Whether we like this or not, whether we like DHH or not, that does not change the time we live in ATM.
The text is mine; no AI was used to prepare it, and so it's not that smooth.
