March 12, 2026
Rails vs AI hype: choose your fighter
Returning to Rails in 2026
Band app sparks a Rails revival: fans cheer, skeptics rage at AI buzz, others eye Phoenix
TLDR: A developer rebuilt a band setlist app with Ruby on Rails and loved the old‑school simplicity. Comments erupted: some blasted Rails’ new AI-flavored marketing, others praised its structured joy, while a camp pushed Elixir/Phoenix—highlighting a split between nostalgia, hype, and what “good” web building should feel like
Rails—the classic web framework—just got a love letter from a developer who built his band’s setlist app (setlist.rocks) and rediscovered pure coding joy. But the comments stole the spotlight. The biggest blow-up? Rails’ homepage now boasts: “Accelerate your agents… Token‑efficient code.” Cue AI buzzword riot. One reader raged it looks like a tool for “LLM agents” (AI bots), and the tagline “Rails scales from PROMPT to IPO” was roasted as startup ad-speak and a diet plan for robots.
Fans clapped back: after trying trendier stacks, ramon156 said Rails is the only one that didn’t spiral into a mess and actually made building fun after the prototype phase. Others argued Rails today mostly charms the “old guard” who learned it pre‑2014, while newcomers comfortable with JavaScript bounce off it.
The brawl escalated into structure vs speed. neya praised Rails for teaching clean patterns from day one, then torched modern JavaScript frameworks for chasing flashy benchmarks while skimping on basics like security. And for futurists? bronlund waved the Elixir/Phoenix flag, saying the real move isn’t nostalgia—it’s new tech.
Conclusion: a wholesome band app sparked a culture war over marketing, generational taste, and what “good” web dev should feel like
Key Points
- •The author built a side-project web app (setlist.rocks) to manage a band’s setlists and notes after other tools proved inadequate.
- •They returned to Ruby on Rails for this project, having last used it seriously during the Rails 3–4 era about 13–14 years ago.
- •The experience rekindled the author’s enjoyment of building web apps and reinforced Rails’ appeal for them.
- •The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey is cited to show Rails’ and Ruby’s decline in popularity (Rails around #20; Ruby below Lua and Assembly), with JavaScript at 66% and Python at 57.9%.
- •The author favors Ruby for its expressiveness (e.g., method chaining, blocks with yield) and feels less friction than with languages like Python or Go, despite broader industry trends.