Dead Code

On this episode of Dead Code, host Jared talks with Sofia Besenski and Alistair Norman of Super Good about DHH's 2026 Rails World keynote. In it, DHH announced that HEY is leaving Rails for six native apps and a Rust backend. He has called Rust hideous before, but he now argues that the language's looks don't matter because agents write the code and he doesn't read it. The panel doubts that six apps beat one good web app. Sofia warns that teams leaning on agents build up "cognitive debt" and lose track of how their systems work. Alistair says most people don't want more apps on their phones. All three dismiss DHH's lines-of-code numbers as meaningless. Jared reads José Valim's reply, which asks why DHH didn't use these tools to improve Rails itself, and the hosts point to other Rails World talks on Active Search, Herb, and Ractor safety that did move the framework forward.

Links:

Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote - DHH
Rails World 2026 agenda and talks
What About Rails?
Hardly Promethean
HEY
Omarchy
José Valim's reply on X
Active Search talk by Donal McBreen
Active Search on GitHub
Herb
Aaron Patterson's closing keynote
On Rails: Aaron Patterson on Ractors, JIT compilers, and rewriting how gems install
Steven Shaw and Gideon Nave on cognitive surrender (Wharton)
Martin Fowler's Design Stamina Hypothesis
Mosscap
Hanami

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Jared talks with Kerri Miller, a Staff Engineer at GitLab, about Keela. It's her new open-source tool that finds unused code in Rails apps, and it's named after a UK police dog known for finding buried bodies. It began about three years ago as an attempt to cut GitLab's CI costs. Kerri didn't want a tool that deletes dead code all at once, so Keela uses regex to snapshot the methods it thinks are unused and fails the build when someone adds new dead code. An exclusion file handles false positives. So far the work has removed about 290 methods and saves GitLab around $150,000 a year in CI costs. Kerri has shipped five releases in six weeks, and partials are next on her list.

Links:

Keela
Kerri Miller on GitHub
Sponsored Logs
Rubydex
TOON
Lefthook
Seattle.rb
GitLab

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Jared talks with Noah Silvera, a Super Good Software engineer and the show's most frequent guest, about treating requirements as negotiable rather than as literal instructions. Requirements reach engineers through a game of telephone, so she argues you have to go back to the client, understand the reasoning, and lead them toward better decisions they arrive at themselves. Engineers own the outcome and cannot hide behind "that's just what they told me." She makes the case for spikes, formal or informal, on the grounds that understanding an unfamiliar part of the system first is usually cheaper than fixing it later. Which decisions deserve that investment depends on how expensive they are to undo: design is easy to change in production, while data models require migrations and leave permanent gaps in what you collected. When a launch date will not move and Brooks' Law rules out adding people, the only real lever is cutting scope, which requires knowing what the business actually needs at launch. Her advice to newer developers is that working within constraints is the engineering problem, not an obstacle to it.

Links:

Brooks' Law
The Mythical Man-Month
Spike
Spikes in SAFe
Extreme Programming
Big Design Up Front
Boehm's cost-of-change curve
Technical debt
Getting Empirical about Refactoring
Churn vs. Complexity vs. Code Coverage
Minimum viable product
Schema migration

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Charles Nutter has led JRuby for 20 years and still spends much of his time correcting the assumption that running Ruby on the JVM means writing Java. It doesn't. Rails and Hanami apps come over and run, and what you get underneath is world-class garbage collection, real parallel threads instead of 50 forked processes, the Maven Central ecosystem, and profilers you can attach to a live production server. He tells Jared how a $50 Ruby conference in 2004 pulled him out of Java enterprise work and into a project that had been idle since 2001. They also get into the startup time problem and how much recent JVM work has closed it, the compatibility jump through JRuby 10 and 10.1, invoke dynamic, fibers on virtual threads, and what Panama, Valhalla and Project Babylon could mean for Ruby. Charles now funds the work himself through Headius Enterprises after Red Hat's sponsorship ended.

Links:

JRuby
JRuby on GitHub
Activerecord-jdbc-adapter
Headius Enterprises
Maven Central
Prism
Hanami
TruffleRuby
Project Loom
Project Panama
Project Lilliput
Project Valhalla
Project Babylon

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Host Jared Norman talks with Nik Suresh, who runs Hermit Tech, an extreme programming data consultancy in Melbourne, about why Scrum fails. Nik argues Scrum spread through dishonest marketing (Sutherland's "twice the work in half the time" promise) and that its rituals amplify bad management rather than fix it, from Fibonacci story points that are really just time estimates to one-hour standups he's seen more often than the correct version. His core point is that the map is not the territory: Jira boards and status PowerPoints give executives a simulated cockpit rather than an accurate picture, and he admits he once moved cards to done without doing the work and nobody noticed. He advocates treating any deadline slip as evidence the whole estimate was wrong, paying attention to morale and sick days as the real project signals, and tells engineers stuck in dysfunctional standups to just quit before the environment warps them. His closing lesson is that dropping Scrum alone won't help, since the conditions that produced it will just produce the next silly framework unless teams honestly ask how they came to follow a process on faith.

Links:

Tossed Salads and Scrumbled Eggs
Praise The Machine Spirit
Ludicity (Nik's blog)
Hermit Tech (Nik's consultancy)
The Agile Manifesto
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

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