Oh man the hype around RoR was nuts. You’d get these enterprise Java developers getting their first taste of a “python/php/ruby” language and they’d all make gushing blog posts about how quickly they put together some (rather simple) app. They’d all say how many orders of magnitude more productive they were thanks to RoR.
And to be fair they weren’t wrong. RoR was one of the first “opinionated” platforms of its kind, really. (Well, that isn’t really true but we’ll just pretend it is… it sure was hyped that way). It did make a lot of the pain points of web apps easier… it handled database migrations, testing, ORM stuff, template stuff, etc. It was opinionated. It had some very vocal people pushing it (DHH of 37signals). It was the zeitgeist of the time.
Hell Twitter was started on rails, from what I remember. Eventually they turned into a java shop but yeah. But that was going to be the natural progression. People found all the edges of RoR and we learned what worked and what didn’t and where to apply it and where it doesn’t belong.
But things like RoR didn’t make developers less valuable it made them more valuable.
And to somehow tie it back to LLM’s… it will be the same thing. Software will eat the world and all LLM’s will do is accelerate it. But we don’t know all the edges yet because the story is still unfolding. But I promise it won’t be the end of developers… anybody who uses LLMs daily can already tell you they’ll never be able to replace a dev. They are developer assistants not replacements no matter what the hype says.
…end ramble (which is clearly not the output of an LLM)
Actually curious - where have they? Zuck's claim didn't seem to be true.
I'd imagine a few places that have low technical acumen have tried, but I'll want to see how much they pay for SWEs willing to clean that codebase after they let LLMs run amok on it.
>Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs.
Don't worry. As the other commenter said it: we've seen it all a few times already.
I clearly remember how some people reacted to Ruby on Rails as if it's going to replace them just because it provides... well a framework.
LLMs won't replace even a junior dev anytime soon. Not to mention senior dev etc.
People who's main job was creating landing pages and simple shops might be in trouble.