David Heinemeier Hansson

Engineering teams achieve excellence by running unreleased edge versions of frameworks and libraries in production, becoming co-creators rather than just consumers. Companies like Shopify, GitHub, and 37signals have been running Rails 8.1 beta in production for nearly a year, catching bugs through automated testing and diligent development practices. This approach transforms teams from passive users to active contributors, significantly elevating their engineering competence and culture.

Engineering excellence starts on edge

Someone from the companies mentioned is probably reading this article and having a heart attack while screaming, “WE’RE DOING WHAT?!?!”

I respect DHH for continuing to release Rails unchanged even after Next.js became mainstream, but this view may be a bit too avant‑garde. 
DHH envisions developers with exceptional engineering skills, yet in reality most companies deprioritise updates to frameworks and libraries, and it isn’t guaranteed that the developers who love Ruby are the ones building Rails. 
Rails has succeeded in producing great features such as Kamal, Turbo, and Stimulus after several major version upgrades, but it has ruthlessly discarded things like Webpacker, jQuery, CoffeeScript, Haml (Slim), and the like. 
Or is my perception wrong, and most companies that adopt Rails are actually running Rails 8 in production?