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The linked article does not speak of tests, it speaks of a team that failed to properly review an LLM refactor then proceeds to blame the tooling.

LLMs are good at writing tests in my experience.


The trick is in the mud between what's yours and what's theirs. The induced doubt is lucrative.


It's pretty clear. If you have your bank account with 2 owners, and with X on it, X/2 are yours and X/2 belong to the other owner, at any point in time. Case in point, if one of the owners deceases, you can withdraw X/2 at most. The other half is blocked until the inheritance paperwork is completed and that half has a new legal owner(s).


I find the thought daunting but the reality surprisingly easy.

You just keep up as you go, as long as you keep things close to the framework it's fine.


> You just keep up as you go

He said "Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time."


Yes but GP said "In reality it's not that much".


Not much work every few months turns into a lot over years, especially if you skip a few of those "every few months" events.


I'm confused. It's too much work to upgrade dependencies, but not too much time to write from scratch and maintain, in perpetuity, original code?


Yes. I've probably spent more time maintaining a trivial Rails app originally written in 2007 than I spent writing it in the first place.


But if you would have rewritten the entire app every time you needed to update the dependencies, that would have taken even more time.

That is obviously true but doesn't mean as much as you seem to think. Washing laundry is also not much work but it adds up to a lot over the years, especially if you skip a few weeks of laundry every once in a while. That is not an excuse to not do it.

The answer is the same in both cases: acquire some discipline and treat maintenance with the respect it deserves.


I've been a Rails DevOps and nowadays a web one-man-show with it for over 10 years and I'd do it again.

Not many frameworks have been thriving that long, and there's good reason.

It packs everything, is tidy and productive, with a pleasant language to read and write.

In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Give it a try.


The "one-person framework" thing is a big draw. I'm amazed at how productive I was in it, and it's not just at the code level. Even though I've been doing sysadmin/devops/architect work for over 25 years now, it's just so damn nice now not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis and deployment is largely a solved problem.


> not to have to think about e.g. standing up a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis

I don't understand...Rails does not replace a HA PostgreSQL cluster or Redis, they are orthogonal. Why would you not have to think about them?


And most folks getting stuff done with Rails ain't be filling out surveys to boost their stack - or maybe that's just me.

So everyone just stop worrying what everyone else thinks or seems to think and just use the right tools for you and get on with it


There are two types of devs: those that ship and those that fill out surveys (and not because their stacks are so much more efficient that they have time to fill out the surveys)


There are two types of dichotomy: those which are autoreferring and sound, those which are absurd, and those which are really going too far.


Over TWO decades! Rails has been around since 2004, making it just slightly younger than Django.

edit: Django was release in 2005


Rails is definitely older than Django. Django wasn’t released publicly until 2005.

Django had private use before then, but rails was also in private use before it was released.



Adding Simon Willison's announcement: https://simonwillison.net/2005/Jul/17/django/


Thanks for the correction!


> In the latest Stackoverflow survey, it's back at the "top 5 of desired stacks to use for next project" over a decade after its inception !

Oh, where did you find that?

Only info I could find was that Rails is at rank 10 in the Web Frameworks category for Admired vs. Desired in the 2025 survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology/#2-web-frame....


Two decades. Rails was released in 2004, IIRC.


rails = ruby = oo/mutable && slow && resource hungry


And for a lot of folks that just doesn’t matter. Paying 50 or 100 USD for a server per month won’t be the thing that breaks you.

Before you get to a scale where Rails become a problem you need to have a product that drives a pretty significant engagement, that’s where most fail.


You could get rich by solving ARC 2 tasks yourself instead of forwarding the work to an LLM, given a client willing to pay LLM rate.


People will find a way to not need as much RAM, and thus the devices that require it.

Same way the price of groceries going up means people buy only what they need and ditch the superfluous.


First of all, ruby-lsp does a great job at this, and the recent Herb helps with frontend templates.

This is enough to navigate between controllers, models and libs, unless you're trying hard to be clever which you shouldn't.

Then, in Rails, things have a canonical place in the codebase, that is consistent between codebases.

This is in contrast to languages and frameworks where every codebase is setup differently, but the static typing helps find code wherever it's hidden without pain, and thus without need for cleanup and thoughtful design.

To each their own, I prefer power for me, and pain for whoever drifts from the convention.


This is so obviously right.

I may add that investors are mostly US-centric, and so will the bubble-bursting chaos that ensues.


This is a massive change for cache in webapp templates as it makes their rendering more stable and thus more cacheable.

A key component here is that we are trusting the user's browser to not be tampered with, as it is the browser that sets the Sec-Fetch-Site header and guarantees it has not been tampered with.

I wonder if that's a new thing ? Do we already rely on browsers being correct in their implementation for something equally fundamental ?


The entire web security model assumes we can trust browsers to implement web security policies!


I appreciate that, but in the case of TLS or CSRF tokens the server is not blindly trusting the browser in the way Sec-Fetch-Site makes it.


Sure it is. The same-origin rule that holds the whole web security model together is entirely a property of browser behavior.


That's indeed a good example of prior full trusting of the browser by the server.


It's a shame you talked about browser tampering, since better caching is indeed a benefit of fetch metadata headers.


This is my take as well. I've never come accross a JS project where the built-in datastructures were exclusively used.

One package for lists, one for sorting, and down the rabbit hole you go.


I think this is mostly historical baggage unfortunately. Every codebase I've ever worked in there was a huge push to only use native ES6 functionality, like Sets, Maps, all the Iterable methods etc., but there was still a large chunk of files that were written before these were standardized and widely used, so you get mixes of Lodash and a bunch of other cursed shit.

Refactoring these also isn't always trivial either, so it's a long journey to fully get rid of something like Lodash from an old project


This has improved recently. Packages like lodash were once popular but you can do most stuff with the standard library now. I think the only glaring exception is the lack of a deep equality function.


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