DHH and Vercel's CEO clash over Rust migration tradeoffs

The agents finished porting Campfire to Laravel and Django too. I'm sure there are optimizations that could be found there too, but the whole point is to get a sense of how frontier agents do with different environments out the box.

everything i know about managing agents i learned from the amazing programmers and computer scientists that came before constraints in your codebase are freeing for both humans and agents! this has always been true, but if you were a small dev team you likely never had to think that deeply because you could trust your fellow programmers to write code and review well but large companies have had to solve this problem since even before agents. because before you had agent slop, you had human slop. lots of engineers wrote bad code out of necessity (eg backend engineer forced to write frontend or reverse). the solution to this was constraints: lint rules, smarter compilers and diagnostics, high quality tests, investments into observability, and so on the arrival of agents just means that big…

Agents need abstractions, tools, and structure as much as people, and maybe even more so given the limited context. Implementing something in Rails might still make more sense than in Rust because it has a ton of solid patterns and abstractions that we’ve developed over the years.

Keep your mind flexible! Rust has an edge at the moment, but Rauch is spot on: We should rethink the entire stack from first principles given the transition to agent-led programming. Very little of what was will remain that way.

Last conversion of the Campfire from my token stash goes to JavaScript/Express. As with the others, I'm sure you can find more to optimize. But this gives you a sense of what order of magnitude these options exist within with agent-led development.

I can't believe that we're actually debating whether or why Rust — a systems level language meant to rival C/C++!! — would be much faster than the interpreted or GC-using alternatives people have historically used for web apps. Programming tribalism is a hell of a drug!