Happy Wednesday! š
Rails World 2025 took place in Amsterdam this week. I couldnāt make it this year, but Iām excited that Rails World will be in Austin next year. š
Interesting Reads
Nick Schwaderer interviewed Rails World speakers on how AI is shaping the Rails ecosystem. Kinsey Durham-Grace, PaweÅ StrzaÅkowski, 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 (opens in new tab)
Lucian Ghinda put together a comprehensive compilation of all things Rails World 2025 in the latest edition of Short Ruby. If youāre a Ruby developer, you should definitely subscribe.
Short Ruby Newsletter - edition 149 (opens in new tab)
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 (opens in new tab)
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 Rubyās future. They explored why Rails is well-suited for AI-assisted codingāRailsā conventions reduce mistakes for both humans and LLMs. They also discussed spec-first (contracts, types, etc) development. In line with that, I found GitHubās Spec Kit (opens in new tab) really interesting.
The Ruby AI Podcast (opens in new tab)
Fatih Altinok wrote about experimenting with running LLMs locally on macOS. As more companies move away from cloud providers to self-hosting, weāll likely see a rise in local LLM setups. Iāve already switched to using SuperWisper (opens in new tab) with a local model for voice-to-text transcription, and itās been great.
Experimenting with local LLMs on macOS (opens in new tab)
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 (opens in new tab) now makes it simple to output logs in OTel format.
Markdown rendering (opens in new tab) 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 (opens in new tab). Always nice to see new production ready open source Rails apps to learn from.
Shop
I picked up a new magnetic phone tripod stand (opens in new tab). I havenāt used it much yet, but itās definitely better than my old clamp-based one.
Joke
Why did Rails stop playing video games?
Because it was tired of all the controllers.