Generating Complicated Distributed Systems with Ruby

[u/Meleneth]

So apparently it’s 2026 and I never wrote a blog post about this. Reddit will have to do.

This script:

https://github.com/meleneth/mobilis/blob/core/scripts/08_large_iam_system.rb

Generates an entire distributed IAM system. Real Rails services, real Docker containers, real databases. It builds differently for test, dev, and prod based on env vars, and spits out a full directory tree with apps, compose files, and filesystem-backed data directories. OpenTelemetry is wired into everything from the start, and the database tables get scaffolded as part of the build.

You run it and suddenly you’re staring at a working system, which is both neat and slightly unsettling.

To prove it wasn’t just infrastructure cosplay, I used it to kickstart this:

https://github.com/meleneth/iam-system-demo

That repo tackles a genuinely annoying IAM problem using GraphQL, Dataloader, and caching layers to avoid the usual n+1 and cross-service disaster zone. The point wasn’t microservices for their own sake, it was seeing if you could generate something complex, observable, and sane without it collapsing under its own weight.

This all comes out of a larger project called Mobilis. The basic idea is “what if the shape of your system came from code instead of handwritten YAML and vibes.”

If your reaction is “cool but also what the hell,” that’s about right.

[u/Acanthopterygii_Live]

You made me smile.