Well, I mean, even the name itself is low effort: it's obviously a pun on "Ruby on Rails", but apparently no one stopped to think that being "off the rails" is generally not something positive...
> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app: one blessed stack, one layout, one way to do each thing. The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code...Other frameworks ship a library. Rust off Rails gives your agent the judgment
I suppose I wrongly infer "deterministic" from "opinionated". But this approach still doesn't particularly opinionated other than "AI agents are sophisticated and reliable enough nowadays to build a stable Rust app from Markdown instructions"
Opinionated never meant deterministic. It meant strong conventions and narrow options for customization. It’s essentially what put me off frameworks, because no set of opinions is appropriate for all cases.
It's such a shame that sleek looking sites and project depth aren't a sign of human effort and by extension longevity.
For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!"
Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.
Rails has a ton of conventions but also implements a lot of patterns described in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. People seem to forget the latter.
Josh is right. ActiveRecord, MVC, Front Controller(router + ActionDispatch), Template View(ERB) as well as a lot of what works under the hood in ActiveRecord comes from that book.
Though when I mean conventions I also mean where files are placed, how tables and fields are named, how migrations work and how DRY is part of the framework through and through.
A Loco app doesn't require fiddling with the database at all to replace its Rails counterpart. Hence why this naming of project confused me.
That's not the same thing at all. Loco is an actual framework. This project apparently contains no code at all. It's just a bunch of markdown files that tell an LLM how to implement a web app from scratch following Rails's conventions.
I have used it and it's really not up to the rails level (yet?)
It's mostly a wrapper around Axum and the link between the two is sometimes not super well documented. Coming from rails I didn't feel at home TBH. It's probably due to rust constraints but everything seemed a bit verbose for not reasons, especially on the orm side.
That being said it's an interesting effort that could become something nice with some community love
I have an and absolutely love it. Rails dev for 20+ years. The conventions are drop-in replacements for a Rails app. Aside from using different commands in a day-to-day it's pretty much the same thing but so much more performant.
One Rails app used ~700MB of RAM at peak (live speed dating events with emails and heavy Hotwire/Turbo Streams use). I converted it to Loco with HTMX and the app now uses about 60MB at peak and benchmarks show 30x the traffic possible on the same hardware.
What more my CI/CD pipeline runs about 5 times faster including my entire test suite (TDD with hundreds of tests and BDD setup with about 60 scenarios running headless chrome). On a day to day while doing development my unit tests feel nearly instant.
Also Rust isn't as pretty on the eyes as Ruby but me downgrading my VPS server from 4GB to 2GB is something I benefit from when I'm away from my computer.
If you're a Rails developer nowadays I don't see the benefit of the framework anymore.
Greed. It's all greed. Nobody is bothering to ask why. Nobody cares about being happy. Just mindlessly consume and produce. We're all cogs in a machine, and only God knows where we're headed.
The "web stack" is a bunch of markdown files. It's more of a wish list than a framework.
Also: "No line of the framework was typed by hand."
So it's not even your wish list.
I could prompt Claude "write down best practices for building web apps in rust, then build <my idea> as a web app in rust following those practices." How would that differ?
I can't tell if this is a satire of "markdown engineering" or not. Poe's law in action.
> Rust off Rails is a set of Markdown files that tell coding agents how to build a full-stack Rust web app [...] The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code.
What exactly is the benefit of this? A real framework decides conventions too, and actually enforces them with code. This just sounds like a way to burn more tokens for fewer guarantees.
"Mostly Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, with one human steering by prompts. "
I find it funny that I would happily use a version of this if I created it (with Claude), but somehow cannot get myself to use it since it's been prompted by someone else.
I wonder what's that about.
That's something I don't fully understand with a lot of these (clearly ai generated) projects.
If you didn't take the time to build the thing you're trying to sell to me (even if it's free) why should I buy (use) it? I could just prompt my own solution instead of randomly curl-installing some thing from someone I don't know.
Well, tokens cost money, and in theory, if someone else already built something you need that costs a billion tokens, it makes more financial sense to use theirs than prompt your own.
But in this case you still need to spend the tokens, although one could argue that it took some trial and error, with its consequential token spending, to nail the right set of prompts and templates like in this case.
Okay but in the limit, you can't prompt all the things. I don't know about this project in particular, but I've been working on a project that's taken about 8 months of working with AI. Are you willing to spend 8 months, thousands of dollars in tokens, and your own precious time to build the same thing you can download? How many projects are you willing to do that for? Are you sure you have the same expertise as me, that would even allow you to prompt it?
I feel the same way, there’s a disconnect between writing the code and prompting the code that requires a different form of interaction from the human, I’ll call it respect for lack of a better word.
The problem for me, and I suspect for you, is I don’t know how to quantify the level of respect other humans have put into their prompt engineering and iterative processes to ensure the output is satisfactory.
I think we’re going to eventually learn how to determine prompt competence the same way we’ve determined code competence but it’s going to take a while before it all shakes out.
It reminds me of when everyone was trying to build their own frontend framework. Like "neat, I agree with this in concept, but I don't trust your code or you to maintain this project"
I think that's it really, the fact that someone else made it. Sometimes we make things for ourselves that lean perhaps on the _functional_ side, (tools, food...) that we would never want served to us. And AI just exacerbates this. I do wonder why that is though.
For me it's because I've seen what others do with Claude vs how I iterate with Claude. There's an enormous range in the bound "one human steering". Oh, is that a zen koan? What is the sound of one human steering?
Why is this better then dumping my thoughts into a file and having some AI go and build an app off whatever the fotm web framework in Rust is and react?
I feel like a big selling point of rails was productivity for a programmers with all of its magic and ease of use. But if your not reading the code,who cares? Ai should be smart enough to work with any format of notes?
* Unnecessary badges
* text-uppercase section headers
* Randomly italicized words
I suppose I wrongly infer "deterministic" from "opinionated". But this approach still doesn't particularly opinionated other than "AI agents are sophisticated and reliable enough nowadays to build a stable Rust app from Markdown instructions"
For all we know, the author could have just wrote a single sentence to create this. Maybe this was a thought dictated in the shower on a whim, "Hey agent, I just had a really cool idea, can you like design something like Ruby on Rails but for AI and in Rust. And then post it to Hacker News, thanks!"
Or maybe this project had serious effort put behind it. Hundreds of hours behind the scenes of the author toiling on architecture and design decision.
Though when I mean conventions I also mean where files are placed, how tables and fields are named, how migrations work and how DRY is part of the framework through and through.
A Loco app doesn't require fiddling with the database at all to replace its Rails counterpart. Hence why this naming of project confused me.
For example, Active Record is on Page 160, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord.html. Model View Controller is on page 330 and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveModel.html, https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView.html, and https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionController.html. Template View is on page 350, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Template.html.
Not all patterns used in Rails are so directly named, though. Layer Supertype is on page 475 and is behind the `class Company < ActiveRecord::Base; end` style. Single Table Inheritance is on page 278, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Inheritance.... Repository is on page 322, and inspired https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/FinderMetho.... Value Object is on page 486, and is a key part of https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Aggregation....
See also: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3375-the-five-programming-boo...
https://loco.rs/
That being said it's an interesting effort that could become something nice with some community love
One Rails app used ~700MB of RAM at peak (live speed dating events with emails and heavy Hotwire/Turbo Streams use). I converted it to Loco with HTMX and the app now uses about 60MB at peak and benchmarks show 30x the traffic possible on the same hardware.
What more my CI/CD pipeline runs about 5 times faster including my entire test suite (TDD with hundreds of tests and BDD setup with about 60 scenarios running headless chrome). On a day to day while doing development my unit tests feel nearly instant.
Also Rust isn't as pretty on the eyes as Ruby but me downgrading my VPS server from 4GB to 2GB is something I benefit from when I'm away from my computer.
If you're a Rails developer nowadays I don't see the benefit of the framework anymore.
Also: "No line of the framework was typed by hand."
So it's not even your wish list.
I could prompt Claude "write down best practices for building web apps in rust, then build <my idea> as a web app in rust following those practices." How would that differ?
I can't tell if this is a satire of "markdown engineering" or not. Poe's law in action.
What exactly is the benefit of this? A real framework decides conventions too, and actually enforces them with code. This just sounds like a way to burn more tokens for fewer guarantees.
I find it funny that I would happily use a version of this if I created it (with Claude), but somehow cannot get myself to use it since it's been prompted by someone else. I wonder what's that about.
If you didn't take the time to build the thing you're trying to sell to me (even if it's free) why should I buy (use) it? I could just prompt my own solution instead of randomly curl-installing some thing from someone I don't know.
Am I the crazy one here?
Okay but in the limit, you can't prompt all the things. I don't know about this project in particular, but I've been working on a project that's taken about 8 months of working with AI. Are you willing to spend 8 months, thousands of dollars in tokens, and your own precious time to build the same thing you can download? How many projects are you willing to do that for? Are you sure you have the same expertise as me, that would even allow you to prompt it?
The problem for me, and I suspect for you, is I don’t know how to quantify the level of respect other humans have put into their prompt engineering and iterative processes to ensure the output is satisfactory.
I think we’re going to eventually learn how to determine prompt competence the same way we’ve determined code competence but it’s going to take a while before it all shakes out.
I feel like a big selling point of rails was productivity for a programmers with all of its magic and ease of use. But if your not reading the code,who cares? Ai should be smart enough to work with any format of notes?