Rails Is Built for AI

9 points by cdnsteve 2 hours ago | 3 comments

AI needs typing.

Also AI does not benefit from abstractions such as ORMs - you are far better to have your AI write SQL.

That goes for all abstractions including CSS JavaScript and everything else Rails has wrapped.

Golang with raw SQL CSS JavaScript works really well cause it avoids many abstractions and affordances that Rails makes to humanize programming.

earthnail 35 minutes ago | |

Rails no longer wraps CSS or JS.

And it can benefit from ORMs, because it means less tokens.

The biggest advantage of Rails is convention over configuration. Standardisation means AI is trained on lots of standardised codebases. So that still pays in AI land. The question to me is whether that’s such a big upside that it gives a real edge. Not sure on that; Python has way more code overall.

bbaron63 1 hour ago | |

I don't see why using AI with ORMs has no benefits. The AI could be useful in analyzing the SQL that is generated by the ORM to advise and surface potential performance bottlenecks. The AI could advise whether using lazy or eager strategies should be used.

lucisferre 1 hour ago | |

AI needs typing? Why? That seems counterintuitive to me.

I agree on ORMs, but that would apply with or without AI for me personally. ORMs and ActiveRecord are an obvious and well documented anti-pattern at this point in time.

zbentley 43 minutes ago | | |

AI can benefit significantly from type checking. This provides a minimal-setup-required feedback loop that it can use to address errors. User defined types are also a greppable “what do I need to look at in this codebase to implement feature X?” signal, and serve as a means of hinting what you want the AI to change without writing code (stub out some functions and/or refer to new nonexistent types rather than writing prose for some parts of your spec).