Michael Rhee

“English is a better programming language than Ruby.”

Ruby on Rails creator DHH made this proclamation at this year’s Rails developer conference keynote, and while I don’t think he’s entirely correct I agree with the sentiment.

When I first started learning to program over a decade ago, one of the first languages I learned was Ruby. Rails was the first web application framework I ever touched. To be perfectly honest, I was so new to programming that while I was learning both, I did not understand the distinction between them at the time. In the first tutorials I tried and pet projects I built, each of the core elements — the language and the framework — were so indistuigishable to my novice mind that I could not tell the difference between what was a feature of the language (Ruby) versus a feature of the framework (Rails).

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Software is cheaper to make than ever. Maybe the economics will change if the way tokens are being subsidized today goes away, but given that we will probably be able to do more inference with fewer tokens in the future, I would imagine the dynamic will hold true.

I don’t think being able to move faster is all good, however. I liken it to having a fast car. Sure, you can travel a longer distance in a short amount of time, but all that mileage is a waste if the destination isn’t clear. A higher rate of work does not equal progress.

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When building Zyteghost, I set out for myself a few artificial constraints. The first was time. The first version needed to go out in a week, from ideation to launch. This seemed reasonable to me given what is possible with LLM’s. The other constraint was a revenue system. The initial version needed a way for a user to sign up and pay for the service from day one. These seemed like reasonable requirements. And most importantly, both were geared to serve one purpose: to truly follow the “minimum viable product” methodology. I was going to build an AI-powered newsletter generation service in a week that people could try for free and subscribe to after one week if they wanted to continue receiving daily digests. Simple enough.

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