Rust off Rails: The opinionated web stack for the AI era

I think my new tell for low effort sites is if they default to the standard Claude Design language. This site has all of it

* Unnecessary badges

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> 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"

Ok so AIs can pretty reliably write tight for loops now. How the hell did we, as an industry, go from there to “we don't need to think anymore”? Just fart into the idea processor and register a tld amirite?

Wtf is going on folks, can we lay it off already and start thinking and caring about thinking again?

Loco is a Rust framework that adopted all Ruby on Rails conventions and they're applied through and through. The naming of this project confused me.

This already exists and it’s called loco

https://loco.rs/

I have been programming with rails since the beginning and it annoys me that nothing to this day solves any of the problems that made me jump to it back then. And this obviously just rhymes with Rails.

- Convention over configuration - db migrations - one way to do something - easy to pick up someone else's project and make progress - great for Jrs to build and be productive - enjoyable to maintain apps for decades - consoles that let me fix and explore - ...

I still use it every day solving problems for customers that pay me to make their lives better.

If an AI slop startup comes to me for help I will direct them to a rails rewrite if they have paying customers and my hourly rate will be based on current 128 ddr5 ram prices.

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.

I think there’s a lot of value in a “stack skill” like this offers. I don’t personally buy that the scaffolding around “markdown source of truth” makes sense; I prefer to work as close to the agent harness as possible. An iterative conversation and then “cool, write a doc to memorialize and then build this” usually goes well for me, keeping the back-and-forth in context for as long as possible.

Since most of the comments are just throwing shade, here’s what this is actually doing:

https://rustoffrails.org/docs#the-stack-in-one-breath

>>>

Axum on hyper (the binary is the web server: HTTP/1.1 + HTTP/2, no app server or nginx needed)

Tokio · SeaORM (SQLite locally,

Postgres in production, same code)

Tailwind

a frontend mode chosen at birth:

htmx (default): Askama (compile-time checked templates) + htmx. No Node. Optional React or Svelte islands.

inertia: React or Svelte pages with Rails-style server routing, via a generated Inertia adapter. The default when you want a JS UI.

spa: a Vite SPA (React Router or SvelteKit in SPA mode) + a JSON API.

api: no UI, for mobile backends and public APIs (in progress).

I am so tired

Can people please make something with the tools they are pitching before putting it out in the wild?

Not the stupid useless field tests that no one uses. Make a real thing that gets used by more than 5 people. Then consider whether your thing is actually useful. Then maybe put it out to the world

I wouldn't build a web app with a Rust back-end simply because of the compile times. Go is a better choice here because it will compile in seconds vs 10+ minutes for even a moderately sized Rust app. I also don't feel Rust's strengths shine very much in a web back-end. Go performance is more than sufficient and you don't need to call native code directly.

markdown specs are certainly the funniest way to claim to distribute software

> 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.

"Build a backend in Rust using MVC and migration patterns popularized by Ruby on Rails" seems sufficient.

Interesting, I wanted to migrate some of my app modules to Rust but was complicated without tools like this, now I could do a second shot on it

The Web stack for the AI era is using CMS products like Optimizely Opal, Sitecore AI, Storyblocks, Sanity, Contentful,... combined with Vercel V0.

We have reached levels of slop that I never thought would be possible.

As a rust fan I'm ashamed of what atrocities are happening with fat rust labels ontop. But as a dev I know it's not about frameworks or languages, but about the loud wannabes with skill issues, who just got their new toys and can finally proclaim that code is solved and that they where right to never learn the basics. Well let's see

This is an interesting experiment. Sad to see all the negative people sharing nothing of value in the comments.

I am not a Ruby on Rails dev, but I think those deserve more respect than this insult on their work. DHH's lately statements are injury enough.

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.

Similar in go: golazy.dev

why does this slop have so many votes

Slop all the way down.

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?

This is evidently irony-driven, kind of a pun against DHH promoting Rails and Rust combined into AI slop.

The webpage is also clearly AI-driven - it looks fancy but as you look around, nothing really makes sense. Just scroll down: "The convention lives in the prose. The agent writes the code." - isn't that a verbatim quote from DHH?

Then you go there:

https://rustoffrails.org/how-it-was-built

And it says:

"This website Built by an agent following only the docs."

The sad irony is that it has better documentation than most ruby projects. :(

(Not all; some ruby folks like Jeremy, write useful documentation. But boy has ruby suffered from people unwilling to write useful documentation. I mean, look at rack; tell me it is well-documented please. Ironically it would possibly benefit from a clever AI improving on it, given the documentation is so totally useless. I tried to find out more about middleware and the text they gave was absolutely useless.)

Here is how this slop page was created:

https://rustoffrails.org/docs/generators/new

Well, a lot of text but the text is totally a waste of human time. AI skynet wastes human's time. Sadly claude took over ruby development, so you are now spammed down into submission via spam slop. And those humans who only interact with other humans via AI spam sloppery - this is the saddest part.

I think we have to admit finally: AI skynet is winning.

The webpage here is still fun, but I think it could be funnier still. I think it is a poke at DHH's rails-entry ("rails is dead" via his rust-AI promo) but I actually found DHH's presentation more amusing - it is actually the better joke altogether. The final post-mortem on ruby on rails.

Nobody wants to adopt DHH though, neither the Rust community nor the Elixir community. We need an adopt-me-a-DHH webpage - poor guy would otherwise soon be homeless and striding the lands with the gypsies he compares to wolves (and he hates wolves: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a, not sure why he hates wolves, perhaps they bit him when he was young. Must be tons of wolves in Copenhagen.)

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