Happy Wednesday! 👋
Rails World 2025 took place in Amsterdam this week. I couldn’t make it this year, but I’m excited that Rails World will be in Austin next year. 🎉
Interesting Reads
Nick Schwaderer interviewed Rails World speakers on how AI is shaping the Rails ecosystem. Kinsey Durham-Grace, Paweł Strzałkowski, Andrew McNamara, and Charlie Lee discussed everything from coding assistants to smart AI agents. Their talks will be available soon on the Ruby on Rails YouTube channel.
All things AI at Rails World 2025
Lucian Ghinda put together a comprehensive compilation of all things Rails World 2025 in the latest edition of Short Ruby. If you’re a Ruby developer, you should definitely subscribe.
Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 149
Thoughtbot released a gem called Top Secret, which filters identifiable information from prompts and replaces them with placeholders before sending them to an LLM. The placeholders are then swapped back into the response. It reminds me of Rails parameter filters.
Introducing Top Secret
The Ruby AI Podcast is a show focused on the intersection of Ruby and AI. In the latest episode, Chad Fowler joined to talk about AI, architecture, and Ruby’s future. They explored why Rails is well-suited for AI-assisted coding—Rails’ conventions reduce mistakes for both humans and LLMs. They also discussed spec-first (contracts, types, etc) development. In line with that, I found GitHub’s Spec Kit really interesting.
The Ruby AI Podcast
Fatih Altinok wrote about experimenting with running LLMs locally on macOS. As more companies move away from cloud providers to self-hosting, we’ll likely see a rise in local LLM setups. I’ve already switched to using SuperWisper with a local model for voice-to-text transcription, and it’s been great.
Experimenting with local LLMs on macOS
Thoughts
Rails World brought a lot of big changes with Rails 8.1, but I was especially happy about some of the smaller touches. Structured logging now makes it simple to output logs in OTel format.
Markdown rendering is now built in, which feels timely since AI tools are increasingly requesting and parsing pages. No need for a custom renderer anymore.
And finally, they open sourced Campfire. Always nice to see new production ready open source Rails apps to learn from.
Shop
I picked up a new magnetic phone tripod stand. I haven’t used it much yet, but it’s definitely better than my old clamp-based one.
Joke
Why did Rails stop playing video games?
Because it was tired of all the controllers.