Basically (paraphrasing a bunch) DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails, opens up the conference by saying agents changed the economics of software development and admitted Ruby & Rails is less valuable than it used to be. Before agents, shipping software across multiple platforms was crazy expensive and required big teams. Lots of stacks to learn, people to employ to build/test, etc. Rails - and React Native to a similar degree - had a different approach. If you need to do that sort of cross-platform development, build your app as a web app and create wrappers/transpilers to ship the same app across many platforms. These apps would work across platforms, but usually the experience wasn't as good. But now with agents, you can build apps on any platform quickly and cheaply. So now, V2 of their email app Hey (which was a single Rails web app) is now going to be a native app on every platform with a Rust backend. Agents are essentially turning "hand-written code" into a hobby more than a profession. And the hard part of software engineering is no longer "how do i get the computer to do this" and more "what should the computer do?" This has probably always been the truth, but probably a hard pill to swallow for an audience full of people who built their entire identity around "i can speak the language of computers"
