Living in the Weimar era of Ruby

There was an interesting time in German history, right between the two World Wars - the “interbellum”, the time of the Weimar Republic. It was very turbulent, and a lot of it wasn’t pretty in the slightest - social difficulties, unemployment, incredible inflation, squalid living conditions, the emergence of the wildest movements, cabarets and cults imaginable… but there was also something else. The “Roaring Twenties” of Weimar Germany also produced an incredible number of great, whimsical, fascinating artistic movements. From the Bauhaus to the Berlin gay cabarets, from Kurt Weill to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis - it was a booming time, and a lot of what appeared then is still valued and cherished today.

And it was a technological boom as well - the ever more widespread use of electricity, the large-scale deployment of modern pharmaceuticals, the subways, the automobile… fascinating times.

I know how that era ended, and no - that is not the part of the analogy I am after. The part I am after is this: the old order had lost interest, nobody was in charge, the ground was shifting under everybody’s feet - and that is precisely when the most interesting work got made. Great turmoil, great industrial change, no adult supervision. Sound familiar?

Yes, there's a lot about our current AI situation that sucks. Companies are straight up committing felony hacks with zero consequences. Data centers are popping up everywhere, the cost of GPUs is sky high, etc. etc. etc.

But.

The cost to making computers do useful things is now exponentially cheaper. One dork with Claude Code can, for example, completely recreate the entire Adobe suite.¹

Yeah, that means the bad guys can do terrible things with it. But think about the other side of the coin!

With LLMs and some good ol' fashioned engineering, I'm hopeful that those performance dorks among us will pick up the mantle that DHH dropped and keep making Ruby and Rails better for all of us.