Rubyland

If your team uses Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides daily, you’ve probably developed a workflow that goes: open Claude, write a prompt, copy the result, switch back to the doc, paste it in, adjust the formatting, and start over.

Anthropic recently released two things in beta: Claude for Google Workspace, an add-on that puts Claude in a sidebar directly inside your files, and a set of Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides connectors that let Claude create and edit your files from the Claude interface. In this article, we’ll cover what the integration actually does, where it removes real friction, what changes when your AI setup travels with you into a document, and what to think through before…

RubyLLM 2.1 is out. I released it on stage at Deccan Queen on Rails in Pune.

It builds on 2.0 and adds an MCP client, typed judgments, evaluations, tool progress, OpenTelemetry tracing, and a nineteenth provider. It’s also faster, with no code changes. In this post:

• MCP client
• Judgments
• Evaluations
• Faster by default
• Tool progress
• OpenTelemetry
• Smaller changes
• Upgrading from 2.0

An MCP Client Where You Decide What the Model Sees

In RubyLLM 2.1 an MCP server is a Ruby class you own: it lives in your repo, and it says exactly which tools the model gets.

class Linear < RubyLLM::MCP
  url "https://mcp.linear.app/mcp"
  inputs :user
  oauth owner: :user

  only…

A looping GIF is a practical running joke in accessibility (a11y). It moves whether you want it to or not, you can’t stop it, and screen readers have nothing to grab onto. I built a small custom element that fixes all three at once.

The whole thing is paused-gif. Drop it in your markup and it renders a still frame with a button to play the animation:

<paused-gif src="/celebration.gif" alt="A confetti cannon going off at a launch party"></paused-gif>

That’s it. Let me walk through why each accessibility decision in there matters, because that’s the interesting bit.

Pause by default

The “poster frame” (the initial image) is captured the moment the element mounts, so nothing animates until…

RubyGems and Bundler 4.1.0.beta2 include features, enhancements, breaking changes and bug fixes.

To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:

gem update --system [--pre]

To update to the latest Bundler you can run:

gem install bundler [--pre]
bundle update --bundler=4.1.0.beta2

Release Notes

RubyGems

Changes already released in 4.0.x are not repeated here.

Features:

• Support content addressable gems in Gem::PackageTask. Pull request #9897 by Harriet Oughton, Gira Chawda and Jenny Shen
• Add --content-addressable to gem build and make --ruby-abi only set the Ruby ABI. Pull request #9906 by Harriet Oughton

Enhancements:

• Drop setuid, setgid and sticky bits when extracting…

I was in the audience at Rails World 2026 when Mike Dalessio, a Rails Core team member who joined earlier this year, put up a slide that said “You are not worried enough (probably).”

He had good reasons to say it.

This summer, Mike handled CVE-2026-66066, an Active Storage vulnerability that let a crafted image upload read files from the server, including your application’s secrets.

His talk, Hot Cell: Securing Active Storage in the age of AI, was half post-mortem and half proposal: if we can’t stop image libraries from being vulnerable, maybe we can stop their vulnerabilities from reaching our secrets.

In this article, you will learn what that CVE actually meant, why patching image…

The other day I was looking at a little project called grubby, a minimal static site generator for git repos, written in Ruby. The style is quite interesting. It feels solid and unapologetic:

def fill_template(template, page_title, root_prefix)
  template
    .gsub("{{title}}", escape_html(page_title))
    .gsub("{{root}}", root_prefix)
    .gsub("{{stylesheet}}") { STYLESHEET }
    .gsub("{{build_date}}", BUILD_DATE)
end

Nothing is particularly optimized, it just uses available tools to do its work:

def write_page(page_path, page_title, root_prefix = "")
  FileUtils.mkdir_p(File.dirname(page_path))

  header = fill_template(HEADER_TEMPLATE, page_title, root_prefix)
  footer = fill_temp…

After running git ls-tree and collecting the filenames…

PostgreSQL does not guarantee row order without ORDER BY. Use Rails 8.2 or pg_disorder to shuffle unordered SELECT results and expose hidden order dependencies, flaky tests, and application bugs. This is chaos engineering directed at your database.

SELECT * FROM posts carries no promise about the order of the returned posts. Yet, every relational database hands them back in some order, and code and tests start depending on that order.

You can't grep for a bug like this, but you can smoke it out by deliberately shuffling the rows of every unordered…

Recorded at Rails World, Marco Roth joins the podcast to discuss the rapidly evolving future of the Rails view layer. Marco explains Herb’s integration into Rails 8.2, how its parser and tooling improve the experience of working with HTML+ERB, and how Herb creates opportunities that weren’t previously possible with traditional Rails templates.

The conversation then turns to ReactionView, Marco’s approach to bringing fine-grained reactivity to Rails applications while allowing developers to continue writing familiar ERB. Marco explains how ReactionView can identify dynamic portions of a template, track dependencies, and update the browser without requiring developers to manually…

When a job fails halfway through, what runs again, and what has already happened?

Suppose a job sends a webhook. The receiving service accepts it. Then the job fails while saving the delivery receipt in your database.

You have configured retry_on for that database error. Rails schedules another attempt. When it runs, the receiving service gets the webhook again.

The retry worked as configured. The first delivery also worked.

The question I start with when reviewing a retry policy is: what could have already happened when the exception fires?

Let’s follow one job through that failure. The behavior below is checked against Rails 8.1.3.

The next attempt starts the job again

Consider this application…

I was in the audience at Rails World 2026 when Aaron Patterson (tenderlove) kicked off the closing keynote. Aaron opened with a well-worn line: “the purpose of a system is what it does.” He wasn’t satisfied with it. The purpose of a system, he argued, is what it does for whoever is observing it.

Hand an old Nokia 3310 to someone who has never seen a cell phone before, and they might use it as a hammer. In that moment, to that person, it is a hammer. What a system does depends on who’s watching.

That distinction has a name in compiler design: The as-if rule.

In this post, we’ll walk through what the as-if rule means for Ruby’s compiler, where Ractors push it right up to its edges, and how…

Joël takes Bike Shed out onto the conference floor at RailsWorld as he interviews programer and streamer Rachael Wright-Munn, aka ChaelCodes.

Rachael talks about her efforts to index all ruby events around the world with RubyEvents.org, how she augments her workflows with years old generators rather than LLMs, the rising cost of tokens and why AI may not always be your best solution to a problem.

—

Keep up to date with all things Ruby conferences, past and future, with Rachael’s index at RubyEvents.org

Read more about the SPIDR approach Rachael mentioned.

Our guest for this episode was Rachael Wright-Munn, connect with her on LinkedIn or check out her website to follow along…

Your host for this episode has…

In September, Gusto attended LDX3 NYC — a conference entirely dedicated to leadership in tech. There were managers, directors, tech leads, and senior engineers. Attendees jumped between the technical and management stage, learning about “Re-engineering the software development playbook” on the management stage one hour and “How to kill the code review” on the technical choices stage the next.

The one thing we had in common: everyone there was invested in learning how to become a better leader.

Because, of course, AI. Everything is changing…

Today we are releasing Hot Cell v1.0, a suite of gems that moves Active Storage’s attachment processing out of your Rails application and into an unprivileged sidecar container with no network, no credentials, and nothing on its filesystem worth stealing. Adopting it is a configuration change, not a code change. It is already running in production at 37signals, in Basecamp, HEY, and Fizzy.

I introduced Hot Cell at Rails World 2026 in a talk titled “Hot Cell: Securing Active Storage in the age of AI.” What follows is basically that talk, written down, plus a couple of things that have changed since then. (If you’d rather watch the video or flip through the slides, go for it.)

Where we are

Direct link to podcast audio file

Zach Holman, founder of Signed, joins me for another 🔥Hotfix🔥. Zach wants more of everything. Let's see what we can do about that.

Write into the show at podcast@searls.co.

Show notes:

• Zach Holman's site
• Signed
• Ride the Walrus
• Things
• Conductor
• DHH's AI crashout keynote at Rails World 2026

RubyLLM 2.0 is the biggest release since 1.0. It starts with tool approval:

class RefundOrder < RubyLLM::Tool
  description "Refunds an order"
  parameter :order_id, description: "ID of the order to refund"
  requires_approval # that's all it takes

  def execute(order_id:, tool_call: nil)
    Refunds.issue(order_id:, idempotency_key: tool_call.id)
  end
end

class SupportAgent < RubyLLM::Agent
  chat_model Chat
  tools RefundOrder
end

chat = SupportAgent.create!
chat.ask "I was charged twice for order 42." # stops before refunding

# later, when the user approves
chat = SupportAgent.find(chat.id)
chat.approve(chat.pending_approvals.first)
chat.complete # issues the refund and answers

T…

In The Browser Half I looked at the part of a Hotwire app where nothing checks anything: the strings that wire Stimulus controllers to each other and to Ruby. A GraphQL server is the opposite case. Its contract is already typed and explicit, and graphql-ruby validates every incoming query against it.

What it doesn't check ahead of time is the other side: whether the Ruby behind each field returns what the field declares. A field declared null: false that comes back nil, or a field with no method behind it, is found when a request reaches it. That's the half Roundhouse can see, because it already infers the types of a Rails app's Ruby without annotations.

Following the schema down

A…

kamal-backup 1.1 adds dump, which downloads one database dump from your backups without running a restore:

bundle exec kamal-backup dump latest -o tmp/app.pgdump

It works with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, and SQLite. Use it to look at production data locally, to give someone a dump to debug against, or to load a backup into a tool that expects a plain dump file. Before 1.1, that meant restoring somewhere first or running restic by hand inside the accessory.

How It Works

dump talks to the backup accessory over SSH, with the same user, port, proxy, and keys Kamal already uses from config/deploy.yml. The accessory reads its own mounted repository config, so your restic credentials never…

For Rails applications, you probably want to serve HTML5, and you only want to support browsers that support HTML5. And even if you must support older browsers, you probably want to make sure your application works for HTML5-compliant browsers.

If you’re using Capybara with the Selenium driver, this will happen automatically if the headless browser is HTML5-compliant. This introduces some overhead, so I try to use the Rack::Test driver if I can get away with it. Unfortunately, when using the Rack::Test driver, Capybara processes the HTML as HTML4. This can hide bugs in your HTML.

For example, when nesting button_to inside a form_for block, the form end tag emitted by button_to will close…

Hifumi generates a complete Rails application from a natural-language prompt. It runs a plain rails new, then a planning model breaks your request into revisions and Claude agents write each one. The prompt steers them toward a default Rails 8 app: Tailwind and Hotwire, the default Gemfile, and sign-in via has_secure_password plus sessions rather than Devise. Each revision has to pass a verify loop before it's committed: bundle check, db:prepare, zeitwerk:check, a smoke test that requests every static GET page, and rails test. What you get at the end is an ordinary Rails repository, yours to keep.

Roundhouse reads a Rails app and compiles it, to Ruby, to native code via Spinel, and to a…

If you write software for a living, you’ve probably been told some version of this lately: the code doesn’t matter anymore. The AI writes it now. Your job is to think like a product manager, or a QA engineer, or a “maker” who describes what they want and lets the machine figure out the rest.

I don’t buy it. You’re a programmer, and that’s a great thing to be.

Things are changing radically and rapidly, but the essence of programming remains. There is still such a thing as a better architecture, a solution that better fits the problem. There is still such a thing as well-modeled and well-factored code. There is still such a thing as a great abstraction, one that gives you leverage and…

In 1997 I wrote UcsLink.Fusion for the University of Geneva. We had hundreds of PCs across the city, Sun and Windows NT servers, and Windows 95 and Linux workstations. Getting a user’s software and settings onto whichever PC they sat down at was a job for login scripts. I wrote a Delphi 2.0 application to do it instead.

UCS stood for Universal Copy System. Fusion read a script that mapped network drives, copied shared software, created shortcuts, connected printers, set environment variables and synchronized the clock. It could include other scripts, test conditions and clean up files left by a previous run. The surviving configuration maps a personal drive, a software drive and a group…

1970 - 2024: BCC Era (Before Claude Code)

Writing software in the “before times” was an iterative process, evolving from punching holes in paper all the way to clacking away on custom, clicky mechanical keyboards.

Through variations of this process, the steps were mostly the same:

1. Understand the problem
2. Come up with a solution
3. Break the solution into parts
4. Write code that solves each part
5. Test that new things work
6. Test that old things still work
7. Repeat as needed

As time went on, patterns emerged. Then those patterns were overused and new patterns took their place. Programming dogma went from “everything can be functional programming” to “nothing can be functional…

In As If I compared two ways of making Campfire fast: compiling the Rails app with Roundhouse, and porting it by hand to Rust, as 37signals did with once-campfire-rust. Both check their output against the running Rails app. Both are, it turns out, ports of the server only.

Campfire's app/javascript is 3,749 lines. Its models are 1,375 and its controllers 1,325, so the JavaScript is larger than both together. Roundhouse copies it into the output byte for byte. The Rust port serves the Rails app's JavaScript too, and shadows exactly three files.

A bug both ports shipped

One of the Rust port's three overrides is base_autocomplete_handler.js, and its OVERRIDES.md says why: the original calls

fe…

Direct link to podcast audio file

Matt Swanson had me back on YAGNI to talk about the fallout from DHH's Rails World keynote and what it means for your weekend. We discuss what happens to the "one-person framework" when agents write the code, how frustrating it is when something is absolutely correct but still misses the point, and how I've accidentally constructed a dark factory with agents building and maintaining my iOS apps.

We also get into what I'd tell developers who are worried about where all this is heading and why World of Warcraft is my dark horse candidate to beat Grand Theft Auto 6 in November.

Appearing on: YAGNI
Published on: 2026-10-02
Original URL: https://share.tr…

Comments? Questions? Suggestion…

Hi, it’s Greg. Let’s explore this week’s changes in the Rails codebase.

The Rails World talk recordings are online
Blazing fast, one week after the event, you can watch all the talks from Rails World on YouTube!

“Autoloading and Reloading” guide community review
The updated “Autoloading and Reloading” guide is ready for community review. Please have a loook and give feedback.

Bump minimum Ruby version to 3.3.5
This commit bumps the minimum Ruby version to 3.3.5 so the WeakKeyMap polyfill can be removed, which would allow using non-Thread/Fiber/etc. as keys, and enable a refactor to prevent iterating over every connection pool.

Remove support for dynamic controller/action in routes
A…

There’s a moment in the early seasons of South Park when Cartman et al find the source of an underwear crisis in their mountain town. It’s the underpants gnomes in their cave. They have a plan.

1. Collect Underpants
2. ???
3. Profit

I’ve been considering David’s opening Rails World keynote and realised that this is the main problem I have with it. Rails World is about “shaping the future of Ruby on Rails”. Instead what we got was opinionmaxxing: a lot of certainty about the destination, but in his own words, not much that was ‘practical’ or ‘prescriptive’ about getting there.

1. The model got good at writing code
2. ???
3. Models write all code, we don’t need to care

There’s a vibration…

Welcome back to my "Hanami, Why?" series. If you missed it, be sure to read Hanami, Why?: Introductions before you start this issue. It is my intent to keep these issues focused on singular subjects whenever possible. However, in today's issue we are going to cover several topics that are too small to warrant their own issue but still important to have for context. As I mentioned, Hanami has a lot of important abstractions, and today we are going to be covering what I consider "system level" abstractions. We have lots to cover, but this context will be important for a further understanding of how Hanami works.

Dependency Injection

Most of the time Ruby is pretty great at telling you what a…

Recorded live from Rails World 2026, Andrew, Chris, David, Jason Charnes, and eventually Andy Croll, unpack the strange mood surrounding this year’s conference. Much of the conversation centers on DHH’s keynote and the increasingly agent-driven future of software development: if AI can write, debug, and even understand the code for us, what happens to the value of frameworks, developer expertise, documentation, and even Ruby itself? They also dig into Hotwire, Active Search, Herb, Active Job Continuations, security concerns around AI-generated software, and what the Ruby community might rally around if the language becomes less central to how developers identify themselves. And because it’s…

Basecamp 5 runs on Puma in cluster mode: one master process with preload_app! and 63 single-threaded workers per host, deployed as a Docker container with Kamal.

We serve Basecamp from several sites. Each site has its own web hosts and a read replica of the database, and writes go to a single primary database in one of them.

On our busiest hosts, each deploy left up to 2,000 requests waiting while the new workers warmed up. We reduced those queues by running signed-in requests through the app in the Puma master, before it forked the workers.

Why 63 single-threaded workers?

Basecamp has always served web requests from processes rather than threads. It ran on Unicorn, which only does…

The next North West Ruby User Group in Manchester, UK is in a fortnight on 15 October at Colony, One Silk Street. Rob Whittaker will take us through one of his hot-takes: VCR does more damage than good, and there are imperfectly better ways to stub your external requests.

Rob Whittaker is Director of Software Development at thoughtbot. He has over two decades of professional web development experience and has worked with Ruby and Rails since 2012. (He’s also the co-organizer of NWRUG!)

We’ll be at the venue for pizza from 6:30pm with the talk starting at 7pm. Afterwards we’ll retire to The Crown & Kettle for a drink. The venue, pizza, and drinks are kindly provided by NWRUG’s sponsors Fat…

I joined Matt Swanson on YAGNI to talk about how I build software now across Fireside, Flipper, and Box Out. Some of it even happens from a camping chair.

Some of the highlights:

I’m Not a Craftsman. I always thought of myself as a craftsman. Bespoke furniture. Samurai. Honor. All that. Then on December 14th I turned on a 20x Claude plan just to try Opus and realized nope, I just love shipping stuff and solving problems. These days I read the data models and the queries because those affect how fast things are for customers. JavaScript and view code? I don’t read it. Does it look right? Is it responsive? What’s my Lighthouse score? Good enough.

Stripping Back. I went through a phase of…

Garrett and I started a podcast. It’s called The Friday Deploy, and the tagline is the whole point: ship on Friday, sleep through the night.

We already do a marketing and business podcast for Fireside, so we figured, let’s go full on dev with this one. Feature flags, deployments, infrastructure, incidents, product decisions, and all the little practices that let you deploy whenever you want without the sweaty armpits. Sometimes it’ll be just me and Garrett, and sometimes we’ll bring on a guest to walk through what they do.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or RSS.

Episode 1: Changing the Wheels While the Car Is Moving

We’re almost exactly two years into owning Fireside, so for the…

Happy to report that in record time, all Rails World 2026 talks are now online.

Find the full playlist here.

While all four keynotes got everyone talking about AI, this year’s talks covered a good balance of what’s new in Rails and how Rails developers are using AI.

The AI-focused talks covered: making codebases agent-friendly, harness engineering, generators, AI pipelines in plain Ruby, agent loops driving Ractor-safety, building MCPs, and rapid deploys with the help of agents.

There were also talks about: Lexxy, Active Search, ONCE, Herb in Rails 8.2 and durable Active Job workflows, plus deep dives into Solid Cable, Hotwire, Kamal, sharding, the RubyGems compact index, and HotCell…

Every month, someone on our team was doing the same thing: pulling data from a handful of systems, assembling it into a document, and writing up a summary before it could go to the client. The work was not complicated. It was just slow, repetitive, and easy to get wrong.

That monthly report was not an isolated case. We’ve built a few internal tools around the same pattern: a repetitive workflow, data sitting in one or more external systems, and a human who needs to stay in the loop at the right moments. Each time we reach for a solution, we face the same question: how much infrastructure does this actually need?

In this post, we will look at the characteristics of a workflow that fit this…

I recently surprised someone by showing you can use any event besides the common click, submit and keydown events. The Stimulus docs list those seven default events and their shorthand equivalents. Enough for most cases. But the data-action descriptor is event->controller#method where you can bind to anything the DOM throws at you: native element events, global document events, even custom dispatched events. All work the same way.

I put together a small demo repo to show a handful of these in action. Lets go over them and maybe you find a way to refactor and simplify one of your Stimulus controllers.

First a few you probably have used before. A <textarea> fires input on every keystroke. The …

Make the case for a big migration, keep it reviewable, and ship it on a live site without pausing everyday work.

Continue Reading

Regular SF Ruby Conference tickets are $450 through September 30. Meet Ruby friends, play The Pier, join small-group conversations, and explore the 2026 program in San Francisco.

Not a single person in the Ruby community has told us they go to conferences for anything other than meeting new people and catching up with old friends. Our community needs that shared warmth and joy more than ever.

But going to a conference alone can be intimidating. You walk into a room full of people you don't know, have no idea whom to talk to, and end up checking your phone between talks. We've all been…

I was in the audience at Rails World 2026 for Jenny Shen’s talk on the RubyGems Compact Index, the last technical talk before the closing keynote. Jenny is a Senior Developer at Shopify and a RubyGems.org maintainer, and she opened by asking the room who had heard of the compact index before. Not many hands went up, which was kind of the point: it’s a piece of infrastructure that handles tens of millions of requests a day, and most Rubyists never think about it.

Every time Bundler resolves your Gemfile, it’s talking to the compact index. In this post, we’ll walk through what the compact index actually is, how RubyGems.org keeps it in sync at scale, and two features Jenny helped ship in…

I mentioned in my Hello, world! post that I built this site using Hanami. This site may seem simple on the surface; it is, after all, just a blog. However, the backend is packed with features that help me day to day. I have built a tool that lets me cross-post to both Bluesky and Mastodon. I have a private journal where I can keep notes throughout the day. There is a custom analytics engine to provide me with insights on how well my blog posts are doing. There is a messaging backend that lets readers reach me through my contact form without cluttering my inbox. I have also built a task manager that syncs with both Linear and GitHub Issues and helps me track what I need to do. Most…

What does the future of Ruby and Rails look like as AI begins to fundamentally change how software gets built?

Recorded at Rails World, David sits down with longtime Rails community member Obie Fernandez to talk about the rapid rise of agentic development and what it means for programmers, teams, and the craft of software engineering. Obie argues that while AI can dramatically accelerate development, the industry is still figuring out how to apply the discipline, constraints, and guardrails necessary to use these tools effectively in production systems.

The conversation explores how software development may be moving to a new level of abstraction—away from carefully crafting…

RubyGems 4.0.22 includes enhancements and bug fixes and Bundler 4.0.22 includes enhancements, bug fixes and documentation.

To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:

gem update --system [--pre]

To update to the latest Bundler you can run:

gem install bundler [--pre]
bundle update --bundler=4.0.22

RubyGems Release Notes

Enhancements:

• Add –source option to gem exec command. Pull request #9765 by Akshay Birajdar
• Keep credentials on redirects only within the same origin. Pull request #9909 by Hiroshi SHIBATA
• Validate the version field in Gem::Installer#verify_spec. Pull request #9890 by Hiroshi SHIBATA
• Installs bundler 4.0.22 as a default gem.

Bug fixes:

• Remove the…

I watched Marco Roth’s talk at Rails World 2026, and it left me excited about where the Rails view layer is headed.

Marco has spent the last couple of years building Herb, an HTML-aware ERB parser that is on its way into Rails 8.2 core, and at Rails World he showed what he is building on top of it: A project called ReActionView.

ReActionView adds real reactivity to your existing .html.erb templates, no Hotwire, no Stimulus, no JavaScript you have to write yourself. That is the part that got me.

Hotwire already does a lot for us, but it still asks you to write a Stimulus controller once the interaction gets specific, and Marco’s demo showed a page that updates itself because the…

Last month the Rails Foundation published something the Ruby on Rails community had not seen before: a leaderboard of coding agents scored on real Rails work. The first Agents on Rails report topped out at 92% in the Accuracy column for the best model tested, which is roughly what you would expect from a field of frontier models. The Rails API recall column tells a different story: it shows the share of runs where the model reached for the Rails API that a task was built around, instead of hand-rolling its own version. In that first report it ran from 8% to 35%, and a follow-up published on September 2 moved the top of the range to 41%.

Those results describe Writebook, the application the…

In January 1998, a classmate and I wrote a game. It was called “Bolongas zBalls”, and it was a Java applet.

You click to start, then move the mouse, without clicking. Touch the dark ball to blow it up, and the next ball turns dark. Clear them all and the next level doubles the number of balls. Touch a plain ball and it spawns another one, so if you’re sloppy, the balls multiply until you lose. Each level has a time limit.

The intro music is the theme song from Capitaine Flam, the French version of the Japanese cartoon Captain Future, which aired on TF1 in 1981. I honestly don’t remember why we used it, nor why the game is called “Bolongas”.

Applets were removed in JDK 26, which is…

In July 1998, the Internet Society held INET ‘98, “The Internet Summit”, at Palexpo in Geneva. The University of Geneva provided about 250 computers for the conference, and I was a student there. I wrote much of the conference network’s website, www.inet98.ch, and the launcher that ran on the public Windows 95 PCs instead of Explorer.

The Inet 98 Launcher was a full-height bar on the left of the screen with a button for each installed application: Internet Explorer, Netscape, PC Pine, Telnet, WS-FTP and Office 95 and 97. I wrote it in Delphi 3. It showed a screen saver when a machine sat idle, reset itself, and could reboot the PC to return it to a clean state.

It also had a…

In this week’s episode of The Bike Shed, Aji and Joël dive into the distrust around the phrase ‘programmer discipline’, why you cannot just rely on willpower, and how Static Analysis tools can help with not crossing boundaries.

From competing priorities and team member changeovers to documentation not being read, things can still fall through the cracks, so having a tool that can check the ones and zeroes that you send into GitHub. So what makes Static Analysis so different to other forms of analysis? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out!

—

Mentioned in this episode:
Joel’s talk at Rails World - ‘Harness Engineering on Rails’
Justin Searle’s Standard.rb talk - …

I’m so happy to share that thoughtbot is our newest silver sponsor!

If you’ve written Ruby for any length of time, thoughtbot has most likely helped you out. Maybe it was a blog post, an episode of The Bike Shed, one of their many open source gems, or one of the lovely humans who work there. They’ve given our community so much for so long.

Now they’re backing Hanakai too. Here’s Rob Whittaker, their director of Software Development based in the UK, on why:

thoughtbot has built web apps and open-source Ruby libraries for over 20 years. We know how much any framework depends on the people who maintain it. Ruby is stronger with a diversity of thoughts, opinions, and approaches. The…

Last week I published What About Rails, a dive into DHH's Rails World keynote. Smarter people than me had interesting things to say about it:

You have the most powerful tool you ever had, you have become a 1000x maker, and you can't think of how to make your stack 10x better?

José Valim poses an excellent question. I tried to find an answer.

The Bottleneck Isn't Gone

They're not gonna be web apps much longer. They're gonna be native applications, because the price of developing those things has gone to damn near zero.

The move to native apps for the frontend and Rust on the backend isn't about any particular technology. It's about cost. DHH isn't the first to make this case.

Back…

I was in the audience at Rails World 2026 for Jorge Manrubia’s talk on Lexxy, a new rich text editor for Action Text. Jorge is a Principal Programmer at 37signals, and if you’ve used Active Record Encryption, you’ve used something he built.

Jorge explained why 37signals built a new editor, what Lexxy adds, and how the work opens Action Text to other editors beyond Trix, the editor that’s shipped with Action Text since day one.

In this post, we’ll walk through why Trix became a maintenance burden, why 37signals picked Meta’s Lexical framework over the more obvious open source contenders, and what Lexxy actually does differently inside Action Text.

The Problem

Trix is built on contented…

Andrew and Chris are back with a packed episode covering everything from Rails World anticipation and Rails 8.2 to security, Ractors, AI-assisted development, and some ambitious new Ruby tooling. They dig into RubyGems recent spam-publishing incident and Trusted Publishing, look at Shopify’s push toward Ractor-safe Rails, and explore Roundhouse, a project experimenting with compiling Rails applications into entirely different target languages. They also talk about using Claude for project planning and open source maintenance, new approaches to AI beyond traditional LLMs, the surprisingly inexpensive architecture behind Turbopuffer, PlanetScale’s new TIN search extension, and Andrew’s move…

Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.

The as-if rule

Aaron Patterson's closing keynote at Rails World was about optimization, and he framed it with a rule language implementers know well. The C++ standard puts it in a footnote: an implementation "is free to disregard any requirement of this International Standard as long as the result is as if the requirement had been obeyed, as far as can be determined from the observable behavior of the program." C has the same idea without the name. The standard describes…

Before GNU Autoconf generated configure scripts, there was a DOS program called Autoconf. It let you keep one CONFIG.SYS and one AUTOEXEC.BAT, then choose among boot configurations by pressing a key.

You did not have to wait for a menu. The PC BIOS kept early keystrokes in its keyboard queue, so you could press a configuration letter before AUTOCONF.SYS had even loaded. When the driver finally ran, it found the key and continued immediately.

I did not write the original. I copied its x86 assembly source by hand from a French computer magazine. It was the first assembly program I had ever seen and the first piece of code I compiled. I spent the next three or four years extending it into my…

Today we are releasing the version 1.0 of Lexxy. Lexxy is a rich text editor for Rails built on Lexical. It already powers Basecamp, Fizzy and many others, and it will become the default editor in Rails. I recently presented it in Rails World (slides, video coming soon). This is the article version of my talk.

Trix hit a wall

Trix has been our editor since 2015, and every Rails app’s editor since Action Text shipped in Rails 6. It’s small and reliable, and it has served millions of people for a decade. But in the last few years our customers kept asking for features like tables or code highlighting, and we kept struggling to deliver them. The reason is the Trix document model.

A Trix…

My father was born and raised in a village called Moldovița, nestled at the feet of the densely forested Carpathian mountains in Romania. One of my favorite tales he used to tell us about his childhood is about the Jewish kids’ football team Maccabi Moldovița. All of the boys dreamed about playing in a football team, but they didn’t even have a real ball. This didn’t stop them though, and they came up with a plan: the Schmoll shoe paste company had a sales promotion: collect 100 shoe paste caps, send them to the factory, and you’ll get a free football! The kids did their best to waste as much shoe paste as they could, which of course led to the indignation of their parents, but finally…

Hello, and welcome to my new website! My name is Aaron and I have been writing software since I was thirteen years old (twenty-seven years ago). I am a senior software engineer at Credit Ninja and have worked for companies like Root Insurance and Zillow. The main focus throughout my career has been backend web development using my primary love language, Ruby. In my spare time, I contribute to the Hanakai organization, working on Hanami, dry-rb, and ROM. Over the last few years, I have also begun to fall in love with Rust and have published a handful of projects. I am from and live in San Antonio, Texas. I have four kids ranging in age from seven to twenty-two.

This will be the fourth(?)…

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again.

I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might just need to replace the battery.

So I went to the local queer makerspace where I’m a member to use the soldering iron and try to do it! I don’t know much about electronics and this post does not contain any…

6 levels of knowledge management maturity in organizations

“Zapomniałem” is Polish for “I forgot”.

On Arkency’s Slack, our main communication channel, it has been used over 1200 times.
And I truly believe I work with exceptionally organized and meticulous people.

That only confirms what I wrote in my previous post: organizations are surprisingly good at forgetting.

That post described how we maintain an organizational knowledge graph with an LLM and event sourcing.
It was about the destination.
This one is about the road that led us there.

Looking back at how we handle knowledge at Arkency, I identified 6 levels of maturity.
I presented them yesterday at Programistok in Białystok,…

What happens to the jobs already in the queue when I rename their class?

The code change looks straightforward: rename the file, update the callers, and fix the tests.

But a job enqueued before the deploy might wait hours or days before a worker picks it up. By then, the old class is gone.

I wanted to follow that job through the rename and work out what the new release still needs to support. Keeping the old class around seems reasonable, but then we need to decide when we can remove it.

Let’s start by removing it.

Suppose we rename FulfillOrderJob to DispatchOrderJob, update every call site, and deploy. New requests now enqueue DispatchOrderJob. A job scheduled by the previous release still…

Introducing Asgard: a Thor-based task runner where tasks live in .loki files

Asgard 0.4.0 was released on September 26, 2026. It is a Ruby task runner: define tasks as methods in a .loki file, declare what each task depends on, and run them with asgard <task>. The command line is handled by Thor, so subcommands, typed options, argument validation, and generated help are all available without extra code.

The part I’d point to first is how dependencies are declared. One depends_on line says which prerequisites run one after another, which run at the same time, and in what order those groups happen. Serial, concurrent, or a mix of both, all in the same line, with no separate job-count flag…

Pencils Down: My Take on DHH’s Rails World 2026 Keynote

This week David Heinemeier Hansson opened Rails World 2026 in Austin, Texas, with a keynote that has had the Ruby community talking ever since. A few days later Matt Solt asked me, “By the way, I’m curious to know your thoughts on David’s keynote.”

I watched it. I agree with him 100%.

My reply to Matt ran longer than he probably expected, and it turned into this post.

What David said

If you haven’t seen it, the opening keynote is on YouTube. The short version: hand-writing code is no longer an economically viable skill for most programmers at most companies. He didn’t pitch that as doom. He pitched it as an inflection point.

He…

Hi, it’s Claudio Baccigalupo with your updates on the Rails codebase.

What a week! Rails World took over Austin with more than a thousand attendees from all over the world. I was able to meet my fellow newsletter editors and to thank the amazing Amanda Perino for another successful conference.

And now… let’s see what changed on main in the last seven days.

Newly released: Rails 8.1.4 and 7.2.4
Take a look at their CHANGELOG (v8.1.4 and v7.2.4) for all the new features.

The Asset Pipeline Guide rewritten
Now with a bigger focus on how a developer would use the asset pipeline and Propshaft: check it out. Then go read the Active Record composite primary keys guide which has also been imp…

New framework default to…

Going Deeper into Ruby with Polished Ruby Programming, Second Edition September 25, 2026 I recently had the opportunity to review Polished Ruby Programming, Second Edition by Jeremy Evans, and the timing was particularly interesting for me. Over the last few months, I have been spending more time going deeper into Ruby and Ruby on Rails, … Continue reading Going Deeper into Ruby with Polished Ruby Programming, Second Edition →

David Heinemeier Hansson is, for better or worse, still in charge of Ruby on Rails. I'd love to stop paying attention to him, but I build applications with Rails, so his actions affect me and my clients. Yesterday, he gave the opening keynote at Rails World 2026, where he laid out his vision for the future of Rails.

Or that's what his talk should have done. His keynote had very little to do with Rails. Here's what he did talk about, and what it means for Rails.

The Gist of It

I have retired from being a professional programmer.

Yes, he said that. No, that doesn't mean he's stepping away from software development. He now styles himself a "maker." He now claims that English is the best…

Have you ever written a type that you appreciated so much you still think about it? Like eating a really good meal, where if you try hard enough, you can still recall the taste in your mouth. I had a mini moment of Rust joy the other day and wanted to share the experience.

TLDR: I turned an enum with N variants into N types. Nothing earth-shattering, but it made my life better.

Specifically, std::path::Component is an enum that you can get from any std::path::Path reference. Where a path can be viewed as an iterator of components. To give you an example /tmp/hello is [Component::RootDir, Component::Normal("tmp"), Component::Normal("hello")]. This enum is very handy for…

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 7.2.4 has been released.

As stated in the maintenance policy, this is the last release of the 7.2.x series.

Security issues and bug fixes will only be provided for the 8.0.x and 8.1.x series.

CHANGES since 7.2.3

To see a summary of changes, please read the release on GitHub:

7.2.4 CHANGELOG To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Cable CHANGELOG
• Action Mailbox CHANGELOG
• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action Text CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Storage CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• R…

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

SHA-256

If you’d like to verify that your gem is the same as the one I’ve uploaded, please use these SHA-256 hashes.

Here are the…

On September 15, 2026, TypeSafe announced Jev, the first of what they call System One models. The launch came with a very low price, a lot of speed claims, and the promise that it “can’t hallucinate”. The obvious first question is whether this is just another Large Language Model (LLM) with a smaller bill.

It isn’t, and the reason is more interesting than the price. In this article, we’ll look at what Jev actually is, what it isn’t, and why that difference matters when you decide where AI belongs in your software.

A quick note on where this comes from: Jev launched in early access. This post is based on a careful reading of TypeSafe’s announcement and documentation, and I’ll point out the…

Hi everyone,

I am happy to announce that Rails 8.1.4 has been released.

CHANGES since 8.1.3

To see a summary of changes, please read the release on GitHub:

8.1.4 CHANGELOG To view the changes for each gem, please read the changelogs on GitHub:

• Action Cable CHANGELOG
• Action Mailbox CHANGELOG
• Action Mailer CHANGELOG
• Action Pack CHANGELOG
• Action Text CHANGELOG
• Action View CHANGELOG
• Active Job CHANGELOG
• Active Model CHANGELOG
• Active Record CHANGELOG
• Active Storage CHANGELOG
• Active Support CHANGELOG
• Railties CHANGELOG

Full listing

To see the full list of changes, check out all the commits on GitHub.

SHA-256

If you’d like to verify that your gem is the same as…

In his Rails World 2026 keynote DHH talks about one-shot apps built almost instantly with an agent as part of Omarchy. His canonical example is Omacalc, a dead simple calculator. It’s a good demo and not a hard problem. Let’s take it further and rewrite a more advanced calculator in Rust that we can also run as an MCP server, so an AI coding agent can outsource arithmetic to it instead of hallucinating a square root.

In 1994 I wrote an expression evaluator for a lab assignment. It grew into Expression Calculator, a shareware Windows app I sold through a company I co-founded, Vestris Inc. In 1997 it got pressed onto a CD-ROM and sold 3,000 copies in Germany under the name Global Calculator.…

This is the last article of a series where I introduce Attractive.js 1.0.0 (in pre-release now).

• Attractive.js 1.0.0: interactive HTML without one line of JavaScript
• Custom Actions in Attractive.js: one interface, from small to big

In this last article I want to highlight how Attractive can be a nice addition and in some cases a complete replacement for Hotwire.

I created a simple message board in Rails. No Stimulus anywhere, nor Turbo Streams. Check it out!

Most of the features of the is build one Attractive extension I intentionaly left out last week; Attract. It serves two purposes:

• intercept form request and send fetch instead (we know that technique!), and:
• work with attract JSON…

One partial, three…

I write a lot, and I use AI a lot. But AI does not write my blog posts. Mostly.

AI is useful for making some of my writing less tedious. Recently, I asked GitHub Copilot CLI to read a few dozen posts from this blog and derive a VOICE.md to assist my writing. The result is now checked into this repo and linked from AGENTS.md, so any AI agent working here gets the same reminder: this blog is authored by me, not by AI and the agent’s job is to help me rather than pretend to be me.

The useful and interesting part of VOICE.md was how it captured my weirdly specific patterns.

• Start with a real story, failure, command, bug, or piece of data.
• Say the opinion early.
• Provide examples, pull…

AI has made implementing and enforcing design systems cheaper than ever. At the cost of speed, this falls through the cracks. But agentic development makes good design system practice non-negotiable. Implement a design system and bring consistency to an existing project.

AI has made implementing and enforcing design systems cheaper than ever. Yet, at the cost of speed, this critical element falls through the cracks. But with agentic development, good design system practice is now non-negotiable. In this post, learn what to do in order to implement a…

Once a team stops trusting leaderboards, the next move is usually to build an evaluation of its own. We’ve argued before that benchmark scores are a poor predictor of production agent performance, and the natural follow-up question is what to measure instead.

Two answers come up almost every time, because they are the two cheapest evals to stand up. The first is a panel of LLM judges: ask several models whether an output is factually supported, and take the majority vote. The second is step-level grading: walk the agent’s trajectory one step at a time, score each step, and blame the first one that looks wrong. Neither needs labeled data, and both can be running by the end of the week.

Thr…