The Ruby on Rails Podcast

What happens when the tool you rely on disappears? For Eduardo and Camila Souza, the shutdown of Pivotal Tracker became the motivation to build Pivotal Tasker, a Rails-based alternative inspired by the project management workflow they missed. They discuss reconstructing the experience from memory and reference material, adding classic and modern interfaces, and integrating coding agents to help create and work through stories. The conversation expands into their move from consulting toward building products. Eduardo and Camila describe Chamber Builder, an all-in-one platform for chambers of commerce, and a custom sales CRM that brings calling, recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated follow-up suggestions into the browser. Across these projects, they explain how observing real workflows reveals opportunities to replace expensive, fragmented tools with simpler software. AI helps their small team move faster, but they remain firm about reviewing its output and keeping their applications understandable and maintainable without it. They discuss setting technical guardrails, refining generated interfaces, and using Camila’s business background to make software easier for customers to navigate. They also share lessons from getting products into customers’ hands, including offering free data migration, demonstrating redesigned websites with prospective customers’ own public information, and switching to direct outreach when advertising failed to produce results. Along the way, Eduardo describes an internal deployment tool built around Kamal, and the pair reflect on how AI is changing both consulting work and the opportunities available to Rails developers. Links Pivotal Tasker: https://pivotaltasker.com ChamberBuilder: https://chamberbuilder.com/ Unlok Labs: https://unloklabs.com/ Sponsors Ruby Native, by Joe Masilotti: https://rubynative.com/david Judoscale: https://judoscale.com Special thanks to Flagrant for the new logo and header images for the podcast!

JP Camara joins the show to explore background job coordination, real-time collaboration, and the opportunities he sees for Ruby and Rails as AI changes how developers work. First, JP shares the story behind bringing batches to Solid Queue, from an early proposal to the conference conversations and community interest that helped move the feature forward. He explains how batches let developers treat a group of jobs as a unit, track success and failure, and trigger callbacks when processing finishes—making it easier to coordinate workflows that span many background jobs. JP also discusses the implementation challenges behind the feature, including database transactions, jobs deferred until a transaction commits, and reducing the performance overhead of tracking batches. He describes his related work on Mission Control Jobs, which gives developers a visual way to inspect batch progress, investigate failures, and find the jobs involved. The conversation then turns to YRBY, JP’s project for adding real-time collaborative editing to Rails applications. He explains how conflict-free replicated data types, or CRDTs, support Google Docs-style collaboration, and how Ruby bindings to a Rust library let him integrate with Action Cable or AnyCable without requiring a separate Node.js server. He also discusses editor integration, encrypted collaborative text, and his work on allowing AI agents to participate alongside people in shared documents. Finally, JP reflects on how AI helps him maintain momentum on open source projects while balancing a full-time job and family responsibilities. He shares how his team at Wealthbox uses RubyLLM, why its expressive interface makes working with different AI providers more approachable, and why he believes there is still plenty of valuable work ahead for the Ruby and Rails ecosystem. YRBY - https://yrby.dev lexxy-realtime - https://github.com/jpcamara/lexxy-realtime/tree/main RubyLLM - https://rubyllm.com/ Sponsor AppSignal: https://appsignal.com/rubyonrailspodcast

What does it mean to be a software developer when writing code is no longer the central part of the job? Jessica Kerr and Avdi Grimm join David Hill for a conversation about the changing work of software engineering—and how to navigate that change without losing the curiosity, satisfaction, and human connection that drew us to it. They begin by examining why AI-assisted programming differs from AI-generated art and entertainment, including the role of tests and measurable feedback in evaluating software. From there, Jessica and Avdi discuss the challenge to developer identity when tools can handle more of the implementation, and the opportunities that opens for building useful things, exploring neglected projects, and focusing on product decisions. The conversation gets practical with a look at overseeing AI-generated code. Avdi describes his use of specialized reviewer agents and repeated auditing, while Jessica explains how developers can define correctness, provide feedback loops, and get clearer visibility into changes. They also explore why inconsistent code and technical debt create friction for agents, and how token usage and evaluations can help measure the cost of that friction and compare different development approaches. Beyond implementation, David, Jessica, and Avdi discuss using AI as a tutor, expanding into design and product work, and the renewed value of design patterns and domain-driven design as shared vocabulary for communicating with agents. They also consider what developers can learn from people who began coding with AI, rather than assuming how those newcomers will learn. Throughout the episode, one question keeps returning: how can these tools create more time for people? From board games and conferences to conversations about what customers actually need, Jessica and Avdi make the case for using AI to support richer human collaboration—and keeping it from becoming a substitute for it. Sponsor: AppSignal: https://appsignal.com/rubyonrailspodcast

Recorded at Rails World, David sits down with Buzzsprout co-founder and CEO Tom Rossi for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, software development, product thinking, and the changing role of developers. Tom shares his perspective on the rapid pace of change in the software industry and why today's AI transition reminds him of the early days of the internet—only moving much faster. They discuss how AI is already changing development inside Buzzsprout and Higher Pixels, from adding AI-powered features for podcasters to making it dramatically easier to understand, maintain, and extend older Rails applications. But as the cost of building software falls, Tom argues that another skill becomes increasingly important: deciding what is actually worth building. David and Tom discuss the shift from thinking primarily as coders or engineers toward thinking as makers—understanding customers, identifying valuable problems, and choosing work based on the impact it can have rather than simply because it can be done. The conversation also turns to podcast analytics and David's experiments building his own analytics application with AI. They explore the difference between collecting more data and answering genuinely useful questions, why analytics should help creators make better decisions rather than send them down distracting rabbit holes, and how the same principle applies to product development. Ultimately, the conversation asks what developers uniquely contribute in a world where AI can generate increasing amounts of code: judgment, prioritization, customer understanding, and the ability to recognize which problems are actually worth solving. Sponsor Judoscale - https://judoscale.com/

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 wire together Turbo Frames, Turbo Streams, and Stimulus controllers. He also traces these ideas back through StimulusReflex, Hotwire, Stimulus LSP, Turbo LSP, and Prism, explaining how those projects helped make ReactionView possible. David and Marco also discuss what increasingly capable AI coding agents mean for developer tooling. Rather than making tools such as Herb, RuboCop, and Prism less important, Marco argues that agents need strong feedback loops and validation tools to recognize incorrect output and follow established application conventions. Finally, they discuss RubyEvents and the value of making the history of the Ruby community more accessible, from lowering the barrier to open-source contributions to preserving and indexing years of conference talks that can inspire the next generation of Ruby developers. Sponsor Judoscale - https://judoscale.com/

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 every line of source code and toward maintaining precise descriptions of a system's behavior, contracts, constraints, and intent. They discuss code archaeology, non-functional requirements, specification-driven development, regenerative software, and the possibility that generated source code could eventually become a disposable implementation detail. Along the way, Obie connects these ideas back to one of Rails' foundational principles: convention over configuration. In a world where AI gives developers an almost unlimited number of implementation choices, conventions and well-designed guardrails may become more valuable rather than less. The discussion ultimately asks whether the framework developers need for the agentic era might not be a replacement for Rails at all—but an evolution of the ideas Rails has represented for more than twenty years. Sponsor AppSignal: https://appsignal.com/rubyonrailspodcast

David is joined by Javier Cervantes, co-creator of the Ruby User Forum, to discuss the origins of the project and the need for a persistent gathering place for the Ruby community. After returning to Ruby following several years working with other technologies, Javier found an active ecosystem that was nevertheless scattered across newsletters, blogs, Slack communities, Discord servers, social networks, and individual open-source projects. That experience eventually led to the creation of the Ruby User Forum as a place where conversations can happen more slowly, remain searchable, and continue over days or weeks instead of disappearing into a chat history. Javier shares what the forum has learned during its first year, from attracting its first several hundred members to encouraging community-created discussions and inviting open-source maintainers to use the forum as a home for their projects. David and Javier also explore the value of cross-pollination between different corners of the Ruby ecosystem, opportunities to collaborate with meetups, conferences, podcasts, and other community initiatives, and the challenge of growing a young community until it becomes increasingly self-sustaining. The conversation also turns to AI and the importance of maintaining genuine human interaction as developers spend more time working alongside LLMs. Javier discusses what comes next for the Ruby User Forum, how developers and companies can support it, and why the Ruby community should continue creating, experimenting, sharing what they're learning, and occasionally doing something interesting simply because it sounds fun. Sponsor AppSignal: https://appsignal.com/rubyonrailspodcast

Chris Oliver and Collin Jilbert join David for a candid conversation about the changing economics of building products for the Ruby on Rails community in the age of AI. Chris traces the history of GoRails from its beginnings as an attempt to fill the void left by RailsCasts, through to the creation of Hatchbox and Jumpstart, and explains how those products evolved together over more than a decade. But the rapid improvement of AI coding assistants has dramatically changed how developers learn and work. Instead of searching for a tutorial, watching a screencast, and adapting an example to their application, developers can increasingly ask an AI tool to work directly inside their existing codebase. That shift has had a significant impact on GoRails and Jumpstart subscriptions, while at the same time making Chris and Collin dramatically more productive as developers themselves. They discuss using AI to research unfamiliar systems, refactor complex Rails code, prototype features, and build software in minutes that previously might have taken days. Those changes also led to some difficult business decisions. Chris and Collin explain why Hatchbox has become increasingly important to the sustainability of their work, why they decided to raise its per-server pricing, and how they wrestled with balancing the needs of longtime customers against the reality of keeping a small bootstrapped company viable. The conversation also looks beyond the immediate business changes to larger questions facing software development: what happens to developer education when AI can generate context-specific solutions on demand, how junior developers develop judgment when they no longer have to learn everything “the hard way,” and whether AI could ultimately change not just how developers write software, but what kinds of software they are able to create at all.

Jeremy Smith returns to the podcast ahead of Rails World to talk about his upcoming presentation, Practical Hotwire: Turbo and Stimulus on the Ground. Jeremy shares how years of working with Hotwire in real Rails applications led him to identify a dozen recurring problems and pitfalls involving Stimulus, Turbo Drive, Turbo Frames, and Turbo Streams. He also walks through the surprisingly extensive process of turning those lessons into a 30-minute conference talk, including building a dedicated demo application, creating before-and-after examples, recording screencasts, researching edge cases, and using AI tools to help organize and refine the material. They also discuss Jeremy’s decision to structure the talk around a Hot Ones-style progression of increasingly spicy Hotwire problems, the difficulty of deciding what to cut from an overstuffed technical presentation, and what actually makes a conference talk useful and memorable. Finally, Jeremy previews one of the strongest opinions in the talk: that developers should often prefer Turbo Streams over Turbo Frames. He explains how Frames can introduce indirection and limitations as applications grow, why Streams can offer a more flexible approach, and how different Rails teams can arrive at very different—but equally valid—ways of using Hotwire in production. Sponsor - Judoscale

Jim Remsik, founder of Flagrant and organizer of XORuby, joins David to talk about what he’s learned from taking a Ruby conference on the road. XORuby was designed around a simple premise: traditional conferences are valuable, but travel costs, time away from work, and family responsibilities put them out of reach for many developers. Jim explains how XORuby tries to lower those barriers with inexpensive, one-day regional events—and why he measures their success as much by first-time attendees, new speakers, friendships, and community connections as by the financial bottom line. The conversation turns to Flagrant and the rapidly changing role of AI in software development. Jim discusses the company’s decision to invest more heavily in design, the difference between simply having access to AI tools and actually building an effective AI-assisted development workflow, and a recent project where careful preparation helped his team deliver roughly 700 cards in eight weeks. Finally, Jim and David explore the increasingly difficult problem of building local developer communities. With meetups struggling, online communities fragmented across Slack and Discord, and developers finding technical content everywhere, they consider what actually motivates people to leave the house and spend time together—and where XORuby might go next. Sponsor Judoscale - https://judoscale.com/