# Ruby on Rails 337 Hacker News commenters recommended Ruby on Rails and 145 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 14 years (38 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Long-loved for convention over configuration, built-in batteries and expressive code that lets small teams and LLM agents build quickly, though older apps can be painful to maintain and upgrade. ## Why people recommend it - Works great with LLM agents (6 comments): "LLMs have an obscene amount of context built into their weights about Ruby on Rails, and can work within it extremely quickly." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48662304)) "The LLM performance with Rails was much better - it handled the increasing complexity as features were added much better." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579482)) "The Rails apps I've programmed with LLMs seem to work a LOT better than arbitrary python or ruby or JavaScript apps." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287835)) - Conventions make codebases predictable (6 comments): "Rails has always been about any programmer looking at an existing application and getting a grasp on the code right away cause of the conventions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179987)) "I like Laravel/Rails/et.al. because I don't have to make decisions about the parts of the application that aren't unique to what I'm building" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923937)) "Shared constraints and boring conventions age better than clever mini-frameworks built around one team's mental model." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46375373)) - Batteries included, highly productive (6 comments): "just defining data relationships in YAML and typing a single command to get a functioning website and database was in fact pretty cool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47424677)) "It takes intentional effort to internalize the idioms before it clicks and you unlock the magic that makes it so insanely productive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347791)) "the extra capabilities you get from an ActiveRecord framework such as full-stack admin pages, free migrations, etc. win overall" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48791342)) - Proven at scale in production (4 comments): "Laravel, Django, Rails, and Spring each have thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of times more websites in production" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47590312)) "It's launching massive new releases regularly and still underpins a healthy chunk of the top websites on the planet" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46528763)) "You'd be shocked how far you can scale with a few good baremetal servers running something like Rails and Postgres." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836932)) ## What people warn about - Old apps costly to maintain (3 comments): "I love the batteries that RoR or Django gives you, but then I also remember how much time it takes to maintain old projects" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347775)) "I've probably spent more time maintaining a trivial Rails app originally written in 2007 than I spent writing it in the first place." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47353542)) "Rails did not bring me joy 12 years ago when I needed to update dependencies for a legacy cloud service we relied on." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154979)) - Seen as dated by some (3 comments): "Rails worked extremely well for its time, especially around 2007–2015, but it started to show its age as newer, more capable languages and runtimes matured." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842417)) "I don't think anyone should really believe in Rails at this point. It was a monumental leap forward at the time but other stacks have shown that there are better ways." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49837218)) "I've never been a rails dev, but it popularized opinionated MVC, correct? For that reason I would avoid it these days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50179493)) - Friction in large codebases (2 comments): "That's probably why a lot of long-time Rails developers still love it for small teams and product work, but feel friction once the codebase crosses a certain size." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47359058)) "If a Ruby/Rails codebases get to a large enough point it's really difficult to keep track of what types a method you wrote accepts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968648)) - Idioms take effort to learn (2 comments): "It takes intentional effort to internalize the idioms before it clicks and you unlock the magic that makes it so insanely productive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347791)) "I have never really grokked Ruby on Rails and I passionately hate all the frameworks that try to adapt it to some other language." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46382900)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Django](https://hackerapproved.com/p/django.md): 277 recommend - [Next.js](https://hackerapproved.com/p/next-js.md): 127 recommend - [Phoenix Framework](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phoenix.md): 85 recommend - [Laravel](https://hackerapproved.com/p/laravel.md): 71 recommend - [SvelteKit](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sveltekit.md): 67 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Ruby on Rails", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ruby-on-rails/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).