The Long Game: why Rails survived the hype cycle and what it means for your startup

Just a few years ago, Rails was supposedly “dead.” The framework that once powered 90% of Y Combinator batches had lost favor. Shiny new alternatives took center stage. Rails was declared passé.

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What happened next teaches us everything about how to evaluate a technology, not just Rails, but any framework, language, or tool that promises to change how we build and collaborate.

The real test of technology

Here’s what I’ve learned after two decades in this industry: technology is not an idea, it’s the result of decades of work by multiple groups of people.

When a new framework or tool is new and trending, making everyone excited, it is not a technology yet. It is a promise, or better yet, a hypothesis of what can be built. The real groundwork is years of investment—not just by authors or maintainers, but crucially, by users. It’s those integrating it into real workflows who reveal its future.

The real test is: are people still using and investing their time, money and effort into the technology and its surrounding ecosystem when the hype wears off? Are they choosing it for pragmatic reasons, and despite the skepticism, even when it’s not lit anymore?

This is exactly what we saw Rails go through. And why it is now headed into a brighter future.

The Gartner Hype Cycle, explained

Let me back up and explain the framework that illustrates this very well. The Gartner Hype Cycle cuts technology life into five phases:

• Technology Trigger: A breakthrough creates buzz and interest
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity leads to unrealistic expectations
• Trough of Disillusionment: Reality bites, excitement fades
• Slope of Enlightenment: Practical applications emerge
• Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption based on proven value

The magic happens in phase four. When a technology claws out of the trough, it’s surviving on real value, not FOMO fuel.

Rails: surviving the cycle

The Peak (2005-2015)

Rails burst onto the scene in 2005 with DHH’s famous 15-minute blog demo. It caught the Y Combinator wave—90% of early batches launched on Rails. Heroku, built for Rails, and on Rails, became YC’s first big exit, setting a precedent and funding the organization for years to come.

Companies like Shopify, Meraki, Twitter, Zendesk, Github, Airbnb, Doximity, GitLab, Intercom, Chime, Gusto, Instacart, Coinbase were founded on Rails. Stripe and Figma were founded on Ruby. Zendesk and Shopify went public. Gary Tan built YC’s internal social network that became “YC founder’s secret weapon”, on Rails.

In short, Rails made web development accessible to a new generation of developers who could build and ship faster than ever before.

The Trough (2016-2020)

The disappointment came early as well: Rails was not yet ready for all the use cases and the scale it was being applied in. Disappointed, companies started migrating away, with Twitter famously starting migration off Rails already in 2009. It was probably the first time the press declared Rails dead.

Visibility waned, new adopters slowed. And perhaps, this is where most technologies die: the hype fades, and the tool becomes a footnote in history.

But Rails wasn’t dying. Something remarkable was happening at the same time. Companies and individuals were not only building with Rails—they were investing into it.

• Shopify: YJIT to turbocharge Ruby.
• Stripe: Sorbet, static types for Ruby.
• Gusto, with Stripe: Packwerk and modular monolith patterns.
• Evil Martians: AnyCable for performant WebSocket transport.
• Samuel Williams: Fiber-based asynchronous Ruby.
• Nate Hopkins, Julian Rubisch, et al.: StimulusReflex, Hotwire’s predecessor.

The Slope of Enlightenment (2021-2025)

Next, progress became visible:

• Rails IPO parade: GitLab, Coinbase, Doximity, Instacart; GitHub got acquired.
• Rails-powered startups on the rise: Bolt.new ($40M ARR in 5 months), Whop ($1.4B transactions).
• Ruby IPOs this year: Chime, a Rails fintech; Figma!

New and ambitious startups: Yetto, Stepful, Prepared, Craftwork, Ubicloud, Sixfold, Luthor, Ordinal, Corepilot, Cravd, Wawa, Tramline, Goodbill, v360, cashU, Rescale and many more, are choosing and thriving with Ruby and Rails.

This is the result of steady investments by multiple groups and organizations over a decade.

Under the big tent

What makes Rails enduring is its gentle “big tent.” Key components of the framework, like databases, background jobs, testing frameworks, frontend solutions—are adapterized behind clear developer-friendly interfaces. Implementations behind those interfaces can be swapped with ease. MySQL, Postgres, Clickhouse; Minitest, RSpec; SolidQueue, Sidekiq. Even the front-end—Hotwire for native Rails reactivity, Inertia for those who prefer a modern JS approach—can be swapped in and out.

This design lets the community innovate at every layer without starting from scratch. New ideas, infrastructure, or tools can be embraced with little disruption. By separating interface from implementation, the “big tent” keeps Rails productive, adaptable, and a place where developer happiness thrives.

What this means for your next startup

When evaluating technology for your next project, don’t get caught up in the hype. Instead, ask yourself these questions:

• Is it a technology, or a hypothesis? What is it capable of today?
• What are the key risks you are taking? No free-riding: the risks are the same regardless of who else is in the same boat.
• What are the pragmatic success cases?

The Rails Renaissance

Ruby on Rails today is a developer productivity-focused framework that’s never been better for startups. Rails 8 ships with everything you need to build modern web applications. Performance concerns have been addressed with YJIT and ZJIT, concurrency, caching and more. Sorbet provides type safety for Ruby, while tools like typelizer serve type safety for the frontend, and so on. The frontend story is getting more exciting every day.

Most importantly, Rails has a mature, pragmatic community that’s focused on shipping products, not chasing trends. When Y Combinator partners recommend Rails for AI startups, when companies like Figma and Stripe continue to scale on Ruby, when new developer tools like Bolt.new choose Rails for their backends. That’s not hype. That’s Enlightenment. As per Gartner, at least!

The Long Game

If this made you wonder what this whole story teaches us in the context of AI, that makes two of us. My take is simple: AI flop cannot be avoided. Expectations of investors and early adopters are guaranteed to come ahead of what’s achievable in reality at any given moment. Regret is a rule. How to avoid it on a personal level? Be realistic: make decisions based on pragmatic value, not promises or FOMO. Watch out for the unfair negativity as well! Choose your stack wisely and contribute to it yourself, and you’ll see it winning the long game.

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