I hate native apps. There are use cases better suited to native apps but often it's just not what I want.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
It looks like he spent about 4 minutes out of the 1:03 making that point.
I can't but help think that he would have spent longer on it if that's what he really thought.
I don't think he believes in Rails any more.
It's clear that he was more excited about thing that are not ruby or rails and now considers rust better suited to the output of AI.
To be honest, I could see rust taking over from typescript/javascript as an output language for the web too. If no one needs to read source code any more why not use rust for everything?
I don't think anyone should really believe in Rails at this point. It was a monumental leap forward at the time but other stacks have shown that there are better ways.
I get why DHH would be really happy about getting rid of engineers. It's less clear how this isn't a little bit gloomy for the engineers.
Is the idea that they'll switch to doing "product owner" roles overseeing agents? I don't see that employing the same number of people or paying as well as engineering used to.
To be honest I expect that that role to suit different people to those that used to be engineers.
If this feels gloomy to some people, it's because it is.
I don't think that hiring the engineers was ever an option. He said that he couldnt maintain six native apps before agentic coding. The business never even considered expanding headcount by 6X to do it, it was a complete nonstarter.
There is no fixed pie of work that AI is taking from us. In this circumstance, increased productivity caused the company to just make more stuff, not lay off people (or avoid planned hires).
To clarify, my point isn't that the market for software won't expand due to the greater productivity unlocked by AI.
It's that the benefits of that productivity won't go to the kinds of people that previously wanted to stay in engineering their whole career.
I'm not sure the Jevons Paradox applies because you're not just making engineering more efficient you're replacing it altogether with something much more commoditised.
People will gain from this but it won't be the same people.
Likewise, consumers will eventually reduce the amount they’re willing to pay for software so it will balance out. It will be a blip in time we look back on. Like, remember when elevators used to employ an operator. Now we just push a button and happily do it without another person’s labor.
Well at least in this particular case, it was the same engineers on the team. He specifically said he tried getting UX people to vibe code things and the results didnt work
Jevon's paradox has to do with consuming resources, not employment. There are plenty of examples of fields getting more efficient and employment falling. Farming and manufacturing being 2 examples.
You're conflating different categories of activities. Farming and manufacturing are amenable to automation precisely because not much real thinking and communication is required.
It's an interesting example in that a switch from web/React -> native seems like Jevons paradox from the perspective a developer considering "amount of effort I'd need to put in"
But Jevon's paradox is about consumption of a resource increasing. The resource being "developer effort" but the new supply all running inside GPUs and dev machines. He actually says he decreased their server deployment by 90%.
So on net, did they basically deliver their users a much nicer but functionally equivalent app, which in total now consumes less resources / spends less $ into the economy? And then the $10T question is to what degree this is representative of AI's effect.
Is there any financial motivation for OpenAI to stop doing this other than reputational damage? In some ways, it may actually be good for their reputation.
If an individual gets in to a poorly protected system they're still criminally responsible for the damage or disruption caused.
You can't use the excuse of "well they used 'password' as their password[1], they were asking for it".
Until the management of OpenAI is held to the same standard this is only going to get worse.
1. That's not to excuse poor system management. If you leave data exposed then you should be held responsible for that separately.
How much cable are we talking about here and can you go into more detail about where your house is located...?
Joking aside, I'm not sure that metal thefts can totally be blamed on addiction.
I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.
They would do things like hack phone cables from telephone polls, attach them to an SUV and attempt to rip them out of the ground, with varying levels of success.
A week later the same people would break into a works yard in another part of the country after reels of fresh cable. The empty reel would usually be found in a field somewhere after they'd used petrol to burn the casing off.
I don't think the people involved were doing it for want of housing, healthcare or addiction treatment, as we have all of that in the UK. They just saw it as a source of money.
Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.
And that is well into anti-social, intentional criminality territory, so you can have harsh punishment for those crimes and investigate and make examples of people if it remains a problem.
>I used to work for a large British Telecoms company, that shall remain nameless. They regularly suffered from certain mobile sections of the community stealing metal.
I cannot imagine which entities you could possibly be alluding to;)
>Once the law changed to make it a crime to buy scrap metal without a paper trail that cut that down massively.
No, you don't understand, it's free healthcare and housing they really need.
Seriously, I remember it being an epidemic about 13 years ago or so, I wondered what happened. Banning people from buying stolen metal is such an obvious step that I wonder how the UK government ever thought of it.
You have little to no control over privacy, tracking or advertising compared to the web. That's left to the original developer and there's nothing you can do about it.
You can't do things like disable autoplaying videos. Often you can't even copy text without taking a screen shot. On a phone it's also much easier to zoom random parts of the screen in a browser compared to a native app.
There are legitimate reasons to prefer the web to native apps.
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