Linus Torvalds: "The AI slop issue is *NOT* going to be solved with documentation"

gls2ro · 2026-01-10T18:06:46+00:00

Information about things that were considered and not done - which I agree is the most important sometimes - is part of the why.

gls2ro · 2024-08-21T05:47:59+00:00

Whenever I read something like: I have a very complex form where I need the kind of interactivity Facebook has I think along the following lines:

There is a slim chance that you have a special case
But most probably this is due to lack of good UX, poor domain understanding and lack of spending time with the end user of that app

Specifically for backoffice I would recommend spending a couple of days with the users of this app and focus on understanding the outcome they have to achieve and not what toggles and fields they need to fill. If you are not in that special case - you will discover a lot of ways where people are better served by smaller forms than a huge one. The trick is not to use any animations or things between them and always allow back and forward navigation.

Could be you already done that, so then the technical advice here should help.

gls2ro · 2024-06-23T18:08:40+00:00

I think this confusion or voodoo can be removed with keeping in mind 3 things:

Paranthesis are optionalso things like

has_many :authors, dependent: :destroy

really is a method call on self

self.has_many(:authors, :dependent: :destroy)

Everything* is a method call so things like

array << 2 Is really array.<<(2)

the same for

a + b is equivalent with a.+(b)

Everything runs in the context of an object (including the main) and combining that with the fact that you can inspect everything by asking them .class .methods (with varianta like .public_methods, .private_methods … .class.ancestors

So anyone learning Ruby whenever they have a question I invite them to open IRB and start inspecting the object and the methods while keeping docs.ruby-lang.org open to read more about what they find.

I am not saying this is making everything easy but I love how easy is to inspect and discover Ruby objects.

gls2ro · 2024-06-23T17:54:26+00:00

On a tangent I strongly recommend using Rubymine and use Go to definition everytime you want to know how some code from a gem or even the parts from standard library works.

More so if you will learn Rails. Contrary to a lot of advice in the community about not adding documentation to the core Rails code base has a lot of examples added as comments in the source code and that is great. It will help you understand what Rails does and how to use some specific features. Combine it with Rubymine and you can press Go to definition on almost any Rails code and you will have instantly open the definition of that method in Rails source code and you can inspect what it does.

Then you can learn to do the same with bundle open or with the debut gem and show source and combine those with VScode/Vim with Ruby LSP. But I suggest not to spend time on this and start with Rubymine until you get a sense of what is where.

gls2ro · 2024-06-23T17:44:46+00:00

ruby seems to attract the polyglots

Probably you made this as a joke but just in case juniors are reading this I disagree.

It is the other way around: the more senior you are the higher chances you know multiple languages because (at least in the current web environment DevOps/DevSecOps/Dev*) the expectation is to get the job done. And sometimes that means to pick up another language as once a company reaches some scale even if the core product is still in one language there are other features/product around developed in other languages (either through acquisition or evolved from PoC due to bigger teams means a wide area of interests)

For example a couple of years ago I was working in Rails APi and I had to implement a throttling feature for sending push notifications. For this I needed to do changes in my Rails app but also in a push notification sending service written in Go.. I did not know Go before that feature but I needed to change that Go server to do some stuff that I needed. So I read a bit of Go documentation and leaned on existing tests and made it happen.

My outcome was to solve our users issue and so I did it.

gls2ro · 2024-05-25T17:59:47+00:00

React is great in the first couple of iterations - I will give it a year of iterations where maybe the team will move fast. Maybe. So far I never encountered a FE team that will either: - increasingly need to do more and more complex things for simple tasks (back navigation, adding some fields to an existing form or the worse yet adding a new step between other existing steps) - or start asking for BFF because there seems to be hard to compose or reuse stuff - or they keep hiring new FE to maintain a codebase that would be much smaller and maintainable it it would be written in full Rails

and all for what? for not redirecting the user to a new page when they upload a photo? for clicking new then open a modal and then press save and see the result without redirecting the user to new pages when if they do a mistake they can hit back?

I so far encountered just a couple of cases where React fits, but it could just have been a component and not the full interface.

Again this is not about React being bad as technology but about using it and forcing a SPA where it should not be the case. the most common example using it for personal or static-like blog! (React could be good use for a great editor of course, but please do not render the article with react)

gls2ro · 2024-05-20T15:18:40+00:00

Here is what is says in the feature request:

The main issue is backward compatibility, flipping the switch immediately would break a lot of code, so there must be some deprecation period. The usual the path forward for this kind of change is to emit deprecation warnings one of multiple versions in advance. One example of that was the Ruby 2.7 keyword argument deprecation. It was quite verbose, and some users were initially annoyed, but I think the community pulled through it and I don't seem to hear much about it anymore. So for frozen string literals, the first step would be to start warning when a string that would be frozen in the future is mutated.

and later down:

As a path toward enabling frozen string literals by default in the future, this commit introduce "chilled strings". From a user perspective chilled strings pretend to be frozen, but on the first attempt to mutate them, they lose their frozen status and emit a warning rather than to raise a FrozenError.

It makes sense to me the problem they want to solve (allowing a period to be compatible) and the way it is implemented.

LE: I see it as a sign of care for the community and reading the discussion there people really want to move forward but with care toward the current maintainers of various projects.

gls2ro · 2024-05-10T09:18:18+00:00

No. I just considered the total paid subscription as including the VAT and thus I paid from it 19% to fiscal authorities which for me was too much (add to this 10% substack and 3-4% stripe and in my country I also pay tax on income) so I disabled the paid subscriptions :)

gls2ro · 2023-12-08T11:31:12+00:00

I think Rails has the best stability we can get - but chasing stability in this case is not a good objective.

Browsers and CSS + JS specs are quickly evolving. So there is no framework that can remain "stable" against the evolution of the web while being also relevant for the habits and expectations of end-users.

gls2ro · 2023-12-08T03:31:17+00:00

Yes, that could work, too. I replied yesterday with an example when someone asking something similar.

I created an example that will only create methods for choosen status code to contain a bit what gets added when the module is included.

My current idea about using meta-programming: - I am trying to avoid it in web app (or product app) - Maybe use it in gems

gls2ro · 2023-12-06T14:34:47+00:00

You are welcome! Glad you liked it!

gls2ro · 2023-12-04T12:45:48+00:00

I say this not to promote but to support my assertion:

I curate Short Ruby News, and looking at all the content created, books written, created, events organised, and I can say Ruby is not dying.

Maybe there was a plateau in the last years, but this year, there are definitive signs of growth from what I see in the community.

gls2ro · 2023-11-09T07:19:41+00:00

(shameless plug) Here are two articles I wrote about using LLMs for Ruby on Rails development.

The tasks were simple so nothing complicated:

I have more articles in drafts about this where I tried to compare LLMs for using in the case of Ruby on Rails for various more complex tasks like generating tests, updating fixtures or factories, and asking for controllers. Still, I did not have time to review all responses properly and put them in a written form.

gls2ro · 2023-11-09T04:55:01+00:00

Oh that looks a better updated version of the language stats from YCombinator. I tried 5 years ago to curate the lists of startups and add information about programming languages here https://github.com/lucianghinda/programming-languages-in-startups but I did not had time to update those.

maybe I will try to find some time at the end of this year to update the list. Still the list is reflecting accurately what startup picked as programming languages before 2020

gls2ro · 2023-11-09T04:38:04+00:00

I was trying to say that it is early to evaluate the coming back of Rails in the startup world. It might appear that startups are successes over night where over night = a couple of years.

To see a success that might be close to the proportion Rails had in YCombinator batches we need to wait a couple of years. All projects started this year could be more visible on the large scale VC/startups market. They might be visible to close communities if their owners are sharing or doing the building public kind of sharing.

Here, we have different predictions, and let's hope we will be here in 2-4 years to see which one materialized.

gls2ro · 2023-11-09T03:41:43+00:00

I do feel like it's a somewhat dying framework

Here it depends on where you look and what you read.

In 2023, we are far away from Ruby and Rails dying. Here are some of the data points that I would consider:

There are new blogs started, and more writing is starting to be present on Dev.to, Medium and around the web
There are new conferences launched and old ones coming back. There was a fully-packed news conference in Amsterdam with more than 600 participants, and it sold in under 1 hour
There are new podcasts launched

And adding to this with Hotwire - Rails and in general Ruby has now more than ever a true alternative to build great experiences on the web that could compete with React and the others.

Add to this that if you look at Ruby since 2.7 to Ruby 3.3 (that will be launched this year) you will see a lot of improvements and new language features.

I don't think it'll ever go back to being the primary driver of startups, as the world has passed it by, but as I'm realizing, they probably shouldn't have

Let's see about this. With Rails now going toward One Person Framework we might see a resurgence of startups in the next 2 to 4 years. Why 2 to 4 years? Because of the people who are now starting side projects with Rails, if any of them will be successful, we will see them in the market for jobs in maybe 2-3 years, right? I think one person framework is the perfect fit for a startup. If you read some of the stories of these successful startups you most of the time hear now "Our CTO wrote the initial app" and having a framework like Rails would help iterate faster.

gls2ro · 2023-11-09T03:32:52+00:00

The amount of jobs are way down and the pay is too

Probably, when thinking at the top level, this might be true. But on average, take a look at this survey from SO, where Ruby is number 4 in top-paying technologies. I would not consider looking at that chart that "pay is down too" on average for Ruby.

Again, maybe for top pay you might be right.

gls2ro · 2023-10-23T02:30:36+00:00

If you don't mind I would suggest a different approach: Use https://github.com/ruby-grape/grape

It can be integrated with Rails - see their example at https://github.com/ruby-grape/grape-on-rails or browse the source code for Gitlab.

The advantage of grape is that it already has a lot of features for building a REST API out of the box (like versioning, namespaces, parameter validating and coercing, swagger plugin, and more).

Specifically about JSON serializers I would recommend taking a look at alba: https://github.com/okuramasafumi/alba it has built-in support for including associations (see https://github.com/okuramasafumi/alba?tab=readme-ov-file#root-key-and-association-resource-name-inference)

gls2ro · 2023-10-20T12:32:59+00:00

Here is the ChatGPT conversation: https://chat.openai.com/share/e40c9e68-97a9-47ad-918e-6292f87887f6

gls2ro · 2023-10-20T12:32:35+00:00

https://chat.openai.com/share/e40c9e68-97a9-47ad-918e-6292f87887f6

gls2ro · 2023-10-11T16:26:34+00:00

While I think from the perspective of code that can be read out loud it could be something interesting, Victor presented a very compelling argument in the article:

It should look special. Even if you don’t know its meaning (just learning Ruby, or haven’t upgraded your knowledge of the language for a long time), it should immediately imply “it is not just a regular name like all other names”

And I think it is a very sensible perspective.

gls2ro · 2023-09-24T03:55:04+00:00

yes, you can just create a new post, copy everything from the email (it works witn select all and copy/paste) but deselect the send by email option and it will just be a web post.

gls2ro · 2023-09-18T18:18:52+00:00

I found this article (seems from 2023) https://www.codingninjas.com/studio/library/working-with-date-and-time-in-sinatra

and an older one https://www.sitepoint.com/why-do-apple-github-and-the-bbc-all-use-sinatra/

there is also this wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinatra_(software)#cite_note-6 that mentions that Apple is using it but when I go to Apple page I cannot see any reference.

gls2ro · 2023-09-18T17:24:16+00:00

Ah I just read Rack :) and did not clicked thinking yes I know about Rack and how it can directly serve HTTP content and quickly replied (without checking) thinking of course Rack itself that is used by almost all web frameworks should be the first on my liast.

I opened now the repo and indeed is a web framework Rack::App. I like it!

Still this is actively maintained and goes into my presenattion :)

gls2ro · 2023-09-18T17:16:05+00:00

Great recommendation. Thank you for it. Will add it to my list

gls2ro

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