It's one of those things you shouldn't trust LLMs to such an extent; that part should be very solid because the consequences of bad practices are getting to front page of hacker news :)
There was a recent interview with Dax Raad on the Pragmatic Programmer podcast, and they talked briefly about it. We would like a future where we do just a bit more work and are happier with legacy codebases or work on getting rid of tech debt, but that definitely won't be something our employers are interested in.
other thing could be also true, if you are great developer who spent decade honing their craft (vim, working on hobby projects, grinding when your friends party) you would hold cognitive bias against it as it flips the script. I don't think our profession is going away, but the shift is happening and it's not very comfortable one.
they introduced static typing (Sorbet) to avoid problems, it's completely different app and looks nowhere close to what you experience in standard Rails app
I was on team dynamic typing for about 12 years, and Ruby was a big part of that. I still think dynamic languages can be wonderful to read and write.
But after using modern statically typed languages with good inference, I changed my mind. Many of my old objections were really objections to verbose type systems, not static typing itself. With inference, you can keep a lot of the readability while gaining safer refactoring, better tooling, and earlier feedback.
That doesn’t mean dynamic languages can’t produce high-quality software. They obviously can. But I don’t think appreciating modern static typing is just evangelism.
And yes, I understand what this library is about, it's for "beautiful" easy to use interface to AI providers for Ruby apps. It's the popular play nowadays with litellm, bifrost, gomodel and vercel gateway. We have at least couple AI gateways, libraries like that every week on HN.
Even as rails dev, I am seeing that you might be right. It’s really hard to find specific pros nowadays that Ruby brings to the table. All that talk about conventions over configurations and vast presence of Rails in weights is fun, but if writing speed isn’t an issue anymore, then Ruby on Rails has serious problems with larger codebases
And the effort to produce valid benchmarks is tremendous. You are probably right and that’s very annoying. We already had flame wars over frameworks and this is way worse, your vibes vs. my vibes. Who would thought non-deterministic outputs would lead us here?
Looked at your repo, even starred. On the surface, I like your approach a bit better. It looks like your idea sits at the space between semantic search and compressing tokens. I was into semantic search before, but mostly trying to vectorize codebase instead of tree sitter and couldn’t make the semantic search work for me. Thanks for sharing!
1. Are you sure no one is fooled? It’s the main thing managers are praising rtk for and using as an argument for it’s validity. If this is gamed, then it paints a very different picture.
2. No, I didn’t vet all the reports. But they paint quite convincing picture of the problems present in the library, which has a very ambitious goals of handling every popular command and making it less verbose.
3.
You know this is not a valid point. Engineers tanking performance and choosing based on hype is nothing new. Github stars and usage is not a valid argument, when the tool is not very transparent and could quietly fail. If it’s only couple percents less accuracy, most wouldn’t easily recognize it with the whole stack of skills, mcps and agents.md
4. Is it something more than a feature? If the benefit is $3 on $900 as other commenter pointed out using maybe better and well researched article than mine from codepointer, why would I risk that for all the possible bugs and worse accuracy.
5. Hard to address this one. Tough problem domain to handle with endless cli commands to capture and process properly.
Congratulations on your accepted PR. I didn’t want to make you grumpy today. If you feel I am wrong, it’s very possible. I am just a guy who wrote my point of view, it doesn’t automatically make it valid. Once again sorry for making you grumpy.
As an author of the text, I can say you are „absolutely” not correct. I might be already spending too much time with llms and they start to shape my texts, so I am not proud of that either. But thanks for bringing very valuable insight to otherwise interesting discussion.
That’s the fair point. The rtk promotional posts point to 60-90% tokens savings and there is no mention how they perform accuracy wise. The commenter below did great job pointing to resource showing caveman, rtk saving just couple bucks on $926 bill. Thanks, Llyoyd Christmas for linking to useful substack