Returning to Rails in 2026

shafyy

The main line on the Rails website now reads: > Accelerate your agents with convention over configuration. Ruby on Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO. Token-efficient code that's easy for agents to write and beautiful for humans to review And I fucking hate it. If I read this the first time I would think this is some kind of tool to optimize your LLM agents. I have been using Rails for over a decade now and always liked the focus on writing beautiful and simple code. On making it easy to reason about with colleagues. Now it seems like DHH is throwing all what made Rails special overboard. If we are all supposed to be talking to agents now, what's the difference if my agent uses fucking Next, Nuxt, Rails or Django?

ramon156

I had a project I already tried out in Symfony and then full typescript, both a normal REST setup and ORPC. They all felt like - at scale - they became messy and I was unsure where goes what. I gave RoR a try last year, and so far I'm at the same level I was with the other projects but I actually enjoy programming the project after the PoC phase. Maybe because third time's a charm? Maybe because I know what I need to do? Who knows! But RoR fits in that idiom. Just to note, its a really boring app thats been done before (odeva.app)

bronlund

I've never used Rails, but I agree upon "the state of the modern landscape". Instead of looking backwards, I tried to look forward, and what I found was Elixir and the Phoenix framework.

paozac

I love rails and the recent improvements are great. I have the impression, though, that these days it only appeals to those who picked it up before version 3 or 4, when it was smaller, maybe more understandable, and incredibly better than all the competing frameworks (except Django maybe). If your first contact with rails is version 7+ and you’re only comfortable with JS/TS, then you’re not going to get it and might actually strongly dislike it

neya

One thing that is not stressed enough, is Rails enforces good code patterns early on. If you follow the docs, you will know where model code should be, helpers should be, controllers should be. After all, it is an MVC framework. However, modern day JS frameworks don't care about this at all. Most of them love flaunting about their raw performance numbers. Security? Fuck that. Not even basic form CSRF protection. A lot of times, there is not even SQL injection prevention in them. Compound this with someone who just vibe codes their app on top of these frameworks - that's how you end up getting hacked. Every week there is an incident. That's why good frameworks like Rails are very important. People who actually care about writing secure, good quality software are on the decline, but thank God rails still exists as an option in 2026 despite the fact.

ssaunier_

Article nicely written, great overview of Rails current state. Kudos to the author.

dewey

Great post, this has also been my experience in the past 2 years. Rails is just a lot of fun, and that’s especially important for side projects. I’m usually a Go person and love it, but building simple crud routes is not the fun part of it.

pjmlp

Going off topic, but the article made me look into "2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey" and as usual there is the big difference between what the "Professional Developers" with and without AI claim to be using, and the usual HN discussions "X is taking over the world, no one uses Y anymore" . As for Rails, I guess now that Ruby is serious about having a JIT in the box, a few actually, it is kind of atractive. Due to my experience with Tcl, and continuous rewriting into C modules, if a JTI isn't in the box, I kind of don't bother unless it is due to external factors.

louiskottmann

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.

misiek08

Thanks for such public confirming there is a lot of more us. I’m just tired hearing how great ideas will save our overblown pseudo-microservice architecture and I’m also running into some projects during evening that just solve problems without use STOA, unnecessary solutions and architectures. I’m not into RoR, because I was mainly PHP rescuer in the beginning of my career, but they both are just problem solvers. Sit down, write minimal (in case of PHP not so cool looking) code and proceed to next task.

f311a

I love the batteries that RoR or Django gives you, but then I also remember how much time it takes to maintain old projects. Updating a project that was started 5-6 years ago takes a lot of time. Part of that is managing dependencies. For Django, they can easily go above 100. Some of them have to be compiled with specific versions of system libraries. Even Docker does not save you from a lot of problems. Right now, I would rather use Go with a simple framework, or even without one. With Go, it's so easy just to copy the binary over.

dalemhurley

Ruby on Rails and Laravel all the way. Solid, proven, stable and scalable.

zhisme

it is also very token efficient in nowadays modern AI driven development[^1]. I wish more people would renown ruby/rails [^1]: https://github.com/mame/ai-coding-lang-bench?tab=readme-ov-f...

mergeshield

The upgrade story is underrated. I've maintained Next.js projects where major version upgrades broke fundamental patterns (pages router → app router, completely different data fetching). Rails' deprecation-then-removal cycle is slower but way less disruptive. When you're shipping product, stability of the interface you build against matters more than having the latest paradigm.

shanjai_raj7

we run next.js on the frontend and the page router to app router migration was really painful. rails having stable conventions sounds very good when you go through something like that. I keep thinking about this trade off - move fast with the latest thing or just pick boring tech that works for 5 years.

midnight_eclair

i returned to rails in 2025 after 12 years pause and my experience has been frustration and annoyance rails lost it's convention over configuration ways, the generated app is dozens of files, lack of explanations and guidance on how to setup various things like environments, kamal being the worst offender and the changes between recent major releases aren't making it any easier to read the (often ai slop) articles and docs

dzonga

Rails for straight up CRUD is top, autogenerated things etc however if your app doesn't fit the standard crud pattern you end just fiddling with a lot of things that you shouldn't and in that case I recommend Django which provides enough flexibility while providing a good base. There's less magic in Django

andrewstuart

Remember only one programming language delivers developer joy - Ruby. No other programming language brings developer joy because……. errrr because ……. Well because we are just super certain and confident, that’s why! Oh and DHH said so.

livando

I used to think ruby/rails was the best way to solve most problems, I still do, but I used to too.

neomindryan

We've been running Rails apps in production continuously since 2007. If you treat software as anything other than completely disposable, it's been a no-brainer for the entire 19+ years I've been paying attention (not despite its age, but because of it). The premise that you get meaningful efficiencies from JavaScript on the back-end just because you have to use it on the front-end has been pretty thoroughly debunked at this point. Instead you mostly get a larger blast radius when the front-end ecosystem has its monthly identity crisis. OP's "stacks-du-jour" and programming language "flavour of the month" framing is exactly right. A shocking amount of web software architecture is just following fashion trends dressed up as technical decision-making. Most of the churn in tech stack isn't driven by engineering requirements, it's driven by résumé optimization and Hacker News anxiety. Rails has quietly been powering serious businesses the whole time. Does anyone think NPM's 3.1 million packages enable more functionality than RubyGems' 190,000 packages?