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by mbell 481 days ago
> Rails has started to show its age amid with the current wave of AI-powered applications. It struggles with LLM text streaming, parallel processing in Ruby

Not at all my experience, actually it was incredibly easy to get this working smoothly with hotwire and no javascript at all (outside the hotwire lib).

We have a Rails app with thousands of users streaming agentic chat interfaces, we've had no issues at all with this aspect of things.

2 comments

Agree. What Rails actually lacks is thousands of ready-made boilerplates that everyone and their grandma can use to spin a chat interface. Any programmer worth his salt should be able to write his own.
The real problem is programmers that understand how a computer works end-to-end is becoming increasingly rare, and possibly accelerated by the adoption of LLMs.

A lot of them prefer to write Ruby because it is simply the most beautiful language they know of. Technical details are merely a formality expressed in code that borders art.

I was under the impression the industry was collectively moving in that direction, but then bootcamps ushered in a new era of midwit frontend developers hell bent on reinventing the wheel from scratch (poorly).

This makes it sound like new devs entering the work force are learning Ruby, which doesn't really make sense. I mean, look at the article title. Ruby's audience seem to be people that have been using it for 8+ years.

The commenter you're replying to, in fact, is saying lack of fundamentals is the reason people AREN'T using Ruby

I've done all of the above in Hotwire. It really is a fantastic tool.

I'd rate it as about 90%-ish of what react gives you at 5-10% of the development effort. React sites can definitely be nicer, but they are so much more work.

This has been my experience as well. Hotwire is actually a more pleasant experience than React.

React is a good choice if you’ve got a huge dev team that can split things into components and independently work on things but otherwise React is so full of footguns that it’s almost comical that people choose it for anything other than bloated VC projects.

I wonder how it compares to Svelte for people. I weighed both but Svelte didn’t require me to learn Ruby (as much as I’m sure I’d enjoy it).
> but Svelte didn’t require me to learn Ruby

You can use HotWire with any language/framework you want.