DHH's agent-built Campfire benchmarks under fire: Rust was fast because it got hand-tuned
rakyll · x · 2026-10-06
DHH had agents implement and optimize the Campfire web app in Elixir, Go, and Rust, admitting Ruby is slowest but arguing the productivity payoff was worth it.
mattnjp then exposed the benchmarking trap: the Rust port contains hand-tuned fragment splicing, cached digests, and compiled templates, while the Go port re-hashes and re-copies the entire page every request. The comparison isn't measuring languages — it's measuring how much human attention each port received.
The takeaway for the agent-coding era: when nobody reads or writes the code, you get distorted benchmarks and hidden quality gaps that no framework can paper over.
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