The Ruby on Rails Podcast

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.