robgough

My first thought after reading this title: Oh cool, they've taken part in a drill and used the motor. I don't really know what that looks like inside a power drill. This will be an interesting post.

Immediately opened it and laughed out loud. Perfect execution, no notes.

This is when I was getting into the industry and I probably held on to UML diagrams as being the one-true-way for far too long ;). Nowadays I'm more than happy with just a post-it note and an arrow.

I do think we lost something in the middle ~20 years there as the industry (understandably) matured. For those of us in tech-forward companies, and industries, everything continued forward... but what I'd certainly missed was how much fear(?) was in the industries that were left behind.

I've been doing some fractional work and I've been getting more and more outreach from organisations that don't have much development knowledge internally and have come to understand the limitations of what they've been building and want expert review. I think there's going to be plenty of work in that, although the bigger question, of course, is how we up-skill people if they're not going through the same learning process that we did.

I think this is a pre-existing problem, as there's quite a lot of people who now have senior in their title but their expertise is very shallow, as they've just been picking tickets up most of their career and have been handed acceptance criteria and requirements on a plate, without really being involved in that part of the process. Obviously not talking about the best of the best here, but the other 90% of working software engineers today.

Inside of organisations, there's still a lot of place for that very human back and forth on what exactly you're building. Navigation of internal politics, org structures etc. What is really exciting for me, is I've never seen so much appetite to actually build ... there's plenty of companies out there for whom that was unthinkable for one reason or another, and now they're hungry for it. Of course it means those companies are going to be learning for the first time the ups and downs of owning your own stack, and there's plenty of opportunity for us there too.

I'm a paid Kagi user (not the API) and one neat feature they have is if you search for something without a question mark, it's just search results. If you stick a question mark on though, it does the quick answer ai response. (this pattern might be common elsewhere, I'm not claiming it's unique)

I've noticed that I'm now getting frustrated if I forget the question mark, as I actively want and prefer an assistant response. I'm sure this wouldn't always be true, but chat is a nice way to do search... and I suspect more thorough than I'd actually be at checking longer-tail sources.

My point is, I think this interface might be what a search engine for humans looks like now.

One of the strengths of Rails was that it helped developers who maybe didn't always know the "best way" to build things to build in a standards compliant way – not that you couldn't do things like return a 200 for Not Found if you really wanted to etc.

I'm always pleased when working with a dev who has Rails experience even if they've since moved stack, as often they have picked up and learned the value of these good behaviours. Perhaps it's as much a community thing as a framework thing, or combination of both.

Agentic development definitely still has room to improve, but I suspect that there is some future framework (maybe even language) designed to help minimise these types of mistakes.

Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.

It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.

For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.

I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.

If you're on one of the betas for about-to-be-released apple OS’s, there's a new describe an extension functionality and building a dark mode for HN is exactly what I just used it to do. Super easy, and synced across all my devices.

I know this sounds like an ad, but I was pretty impressed with it

The only listed feature here I've not got is the automated translation. It will currently draft responses in the incoming language right now – though that's not terribly useful if you don't speak that language.

I'd been considering mostly an English speaking audience at launch. To be more accurate, I was generally thinking about users physically local to me initially, so I could meet with them for customer onboarding and feedback etc.

Your post has got me thinking on an approach to making translation work in an open and honest way, so that is something I will experiment with and hopefully get in quite quickly.

If you'd be interested in helping me test that, please feel free to reach out to [email protected]

I get the temptation to self-host your support platform, as the existing tooling out there can be quite expensive when you want to upgrade from just using an email inbox.

If any founders find themselves reading this, and don't think it's the best idea to self-host your own support infra, I've just spent the last 6+ months building stayupfront.com which has, I think, quite reasonable pricing, and a few more features than this... largely around the customer's portal experience (changelog, roadmap, etc.) and includes monitoring & incident management which I think should all be ran from the same surface.

I've only just soft-launched, so still have founding pricing on there. Would certainly love to speak to others in this space too, as I was surprised how neglected an area it seemed to be when I was trying to find a replacement for jira service desk for a company I was working with at the beginning of this year.

Same here. Over the last two weeks I switched back to Opus 4.8 and turns out that still seems to last the week like it used to. These new models must be eating tokens.

On the other hand, all the little services I'm building for myself are passwordless and use passkeys with emailed codes for setup/reset.

Passwords were a really poor solution to the problem of security, they didn't take the human factor into account. After a rocky start, I'm now finding passkeys super easy and convenient to use. Far more convenient than OTP codes.

I appreciate that if you're OS/browser doesn't integrate nicely with passwords you might be in for a bad time. I'm having a great time with 1Password, though I believe native apple handles them nicely now too – and I suspect this is true of any modern password manager (even the ones built into the browser).

I'm seeing a lot of this across all sorts of apps right now. We're at a sort of cambrian explosion point for software.

I too built my own equivalent of this (belfry.robgough.net). I take it as a good thing, we're all using these tools and coming to similar conclusions.

I suspect over time it'll settle down, once we've gotten comfortable with the new ways of working and found the new normal.