Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, recently posted about why Ruby on Rails plus Claude Code is a “crazy unlock.” Rails is designed around strong conventions, predictable patterns and expressive DSLs. That combination means an LLM has far less ambiguity to fight through before it can be useful. As he put it: “Rails was designed for people who love syntactic sugar, and LLMs are sugar fiends.”

And it got me thinking about Django.

Django has some convention. The framework will tell you roughly where your models and views and URLs live. What it won’t tell you is where your business logic goes. Or how your views and models should be structured. Those questions get answered differently by every team, in every project.

The thing about those decisions is that you don’t really know if they were good ones until years later. A pattern can feel perfectly sensible in year one and leave you maintaining a small archaeology project by year five.

That experience is what pushed me to write Django RAPID Architecture.

RAPID adds convention where Django leaves things unsaid. It gives you a clear horizontal structure: data, interfaces, readers, actions. It makes it obvious where different kinds of code belong. And with django-readers, the specs layer gives you a compact, expressive way to describe what data a view needs and how it should be shaped: something close to a DSL.

Well, it turns out that Garry was right. When the codebase has already made the structural decisions, a model doesn’t have to reverse-engineer your team’s habits before it can be useful. With a bit of guidance, the shape of the thing is immediately visible. And LLMs love it. I’ve seen agents one-shot large, complex features, and the code is exactly as I would’ve written it.

That’s the deeper point in Garry’s post. It’s not really about Rails specifically. The most AI-native codebases are the ones that are already legible, where the important decisions have been baked into the structure itself.

So RAPID isn’t just for humans, it’s for agents too.

If you want help moving your Django codebase in the direction of these huge AI productivity gains, get in touch: www.dabapps.com/django-consulting/

And if you just want to learn more about RAPID: www.django-rapid-architecture.org/