Most definitely! I've been writing a small generative AI application the last few months as a side project and have been consistently impressed with how well it works in this context. Plus since there's so much writing on RoR on the Internet, it makes it really easy to program with Cursor or Github Copilot. Great choice all around. I recently wrote up some examples of how great it works with things like Web Sockets here: https://blog.spellbooks.ai/posts/move-over-spas-rails-is-bro...
Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
61–70 of 182 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rails (and its ecosystem) is anything but boring with Turbo/Hotwire, StimulusJS, a shift away from queues using Redis to the database w/ Solid Queue, a reexamination of how SQLite can be used as a prod database (when tuned), and a new rich text editor on the way… Some of these are eyebrow raising and certainly not boring!
Shifting to solid queue, backed by your rdbms, is more boring than using redis. Successfully deploying an app without anything but a database server is pretty powerful. Everything just works. I would say that's pretty boring :)
> Everything just works.
I long to live in your world where this is the case!
Unfortunately the migration from Sidekiq + Redis → Solid Queue has been anything but boring.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#63Personally I would use .Net
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#64The biggest risk when going with a long established solution is the potential danger of picking something that is on its way out of the zeitgeist. Not that picking your tech stack should be a popularity contest (and in fact many people make the wrong choice by chasing trends), but picking a component that has been left behind can have some real consequences (e.g. might become increasingly harder to find good talent f…
Alternatively, hire people because of their intrinsic competency and not because they check the "X years of experience in Rails" box. Hire people who can pick up new languages easily
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#65Yes and I would also take a look at Laravel.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#66Modern React is a "full-stack" framework - with the current recommended implementation being NextJS. If you build on NextJS you will get the entire tailwinds of the industry behind you. Having Cursor write a full-stack app that leverages server components alongside client components is a 10x velocity unlock that you won't get if you bifurcate your codebase (as is the rails model) Typescript is going to be the languag…
> any modern language should support this It seems that people who use Visual Studio Code expect LSP to exist for every language for some reason, then blame the language itself when it doesn't, as this commenter did. It's strange to me. It isn't that the language doesn't support VSCode, the problem is that VSCode doesn't support the language. VSCode is the bad thing, not the language. > elite engineers will not want…
Your comment is profoundly ignorant. The Language Server Protocol is a standard across all modern editors. It's the reason for the resurgence of Neovim. It is absolutely the responsibility of the language to provide a language server.
> Engineers who care more about the specific web technology being used rather than solving the problem don't sound like "elite" engineers.
Naive
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#67I would not. I've used PHP, Python, Go, JS/TS, and Ruby in production with small to medium teams. Teams that I managed on occasion and recruited, to a certain extent. RoR is great at first but in my experience quickly becomes full of hard to diagnose bugs, its magic metaprogramming seems too tempting for developers to use and leads to all sorts of problems. There is a lack of good quality, well maintenained 3rd party…
> RoR is great at first but in my experience quickly becomes full of hard to diagnose bugs, its magic metaprogramming seems too tempting for developers to use and leads to all sorts of problems.
I think this is true. With Rails you want to be very deliberate about who you hire (there are lots of "Advanced Beginners" out there) and how you vet and manage abstractions outside of the MVC architecture. But if you can stick to those tenets, you'll be rewarded with a very productive engineering org.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#68I've actually just did exactly that a few weeks ago.
I knew what to expect from Rails from my previous experience.
Yet, I wasn't prepared for how freaking fast it is to iterate with Rails and some LLM (I use Cursor atm) when you know what you are doing.
The MVP I expected to take at least 2 months to finish, is going to be done in under 3 weeks, with the current speed, given there are no large blockers.
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#69I would not. I've used PHP, Python, Go, JS/TS, and Ruby in production with small to medium teams. Teams that I managed on occasion and recruited, to a certain extent. RoR is great at first but in my experience quickly becomes full of hard to diagnose bugs, its magic metaprogramming seems too tempting for developers to use and leads to all sorts of problems. There is a lack of good quality, well maintenained 3rd party…
> If you're doing AI stuff, any Python framework will be best.
I understand that AI stuff now is mainly Python. But is it possible to connect Rails with some Python program/service, is this one of the purpose of microservices?
Re: Ask HN: Would you still choose Ruby on Rails for a startup in 2025?
#70The biggest risk when going with a long established solution is the potential danger of picking something that is on its way out of the zeitgeist. Not that picking your tech stack should be a popularity contest (and in fact many people make the wrong choice by chasing trends), but picking a component that has been left behind can have some real consequences (e.g. might become increasingly harder to find good talent f…
Alternatively, hire people because of their intrinsic competency and not because they check the "X years of experience in Rails" box. Hire people who can pick up new languages easily
Most companies don't do that in my experience. It'd have been easier to get hired over the years if they did.