Rubyist Julik Tarkhanov responds to David Heinemeier Hansson’s RailsWorld keynote, in which the Rails creator said 37signals had ‘vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way’, that the company ‘neither need[s] nor care[s] about Rails anymore’, and that he is ‘already rich’ and wants no more customers. Tarkhanov calls the talk the voice of someone in an existential crisis who should leave the framework and its community in peace, and argues the ecosystem is instead entering a productive interwar-style boom. As evidence he counts first-time gem names in the ClickHouse-hosted RubyGems dataset: about 4,600 in the year to October 2025 versus roughly 8,900 in the year since — a 1.9x jump, with new names stepping from 400-500 to 800-1,600 per month after March 2026. He credits LLM-assisted work for the Servo-based sghtmltopdf and stationery PDF libraries, new Parquet and gRPC efforts, and says a Parquet library that would once have taken months took days. José Valim’s reply urges making Ruby 10x faster rather than vibe-rewriting it in Rust.
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Rubyist Julik Tarkhanov responds to David Heinemeier Hansson's RailsWorld keynote, in which the Rails creator said 37signals had 'vibe-rewrote HEY in a more performant way', that the company 'neither need[s] nor care[s] about Rails anymore', and that he is 'already rich' and wants no more customers. Tarkhanov calls the talk the voice of someone in an existential crisis who should leave the framework and its community in peace, and argues the ecosystem is instead entering a productive interwar-style boom. As evidence he counts first-time gem names in the ClickHouse-hosted RubyGems dataset: about 4,600 in the year to October 2025 versus roughly 8,900 in the year since — a 1.9x jump, with new names stepping from 400-500 to 800-1,600 per month after March 2026. He credits LLM-assisted work for the Servo-based sghtmltopdf and stationery PDF libraries, new Parquet and gRPC efforts, and says a Parquet library that would once have taken months took days. José Valim's reply urges making Ruby 10x faster rather than vibe-rewriting it in Rust.
Source: Julik