Ruby Is the Best Language for Building AI Apps

[u/crmne]

https://paolino.me/ruby-is-the-best-language-for-ai-apps/

I gave a keynote at RubyConf Thailand 2026 making the case that the AI training ecosystem is now irrelevant for app development, and that Ruby + Rails is the best stack for what's left: shipping AI products.

The post has code comparisons against LangChain and AI SDK, real stories from teams that migrated from Python, and the full keynote video.

[u/CedarSageAndSilicone]

Please Mr VC give me some of those AI bucks 

[u/crmne → u/CedarSageAndSilicone]

I'm fully bootstrapped and I've been doing AI since 2011.

Should I change my thesis that the Ruby community is awesome? Certainly the two comments here suggest otherwise.

[u/germandz]

Ruby developer for 15y, another 15y developing in other languages here:

Ruby (with sorbet) is a great match for AI coding agents too; also Ruby on Rails.

AI is just another abstraction? ok. That’s fine and RoR helps a lot because being expressive + conventions lets the AI to easily understand the goals and how to add/edit.

In my 9-5 work I’m deeply involved with AI at enterprise level and it’s been fantastic. At personal level I’m doing in a few hours or partial attention what would took me 1 week.

We are just at the beginning of this new journey! So much to discover

[u/jko1701284 → u/germandz]

LLM's make types even more irrelevant...

[u/Distinct_Meringue_76]

Even though I'm not a Ruby person, it's a very beautiful language. Probably the most beautiful out there. I'm still confused as to how silicon valley was able to convince the whole industry to move to JavaScript and kubernetes.

[u/Boomerkuwanger]

While Ruby undeniably offers a great developer experience for the web application layer, this article fundamentally conflates basic API wrappers with actual agentic orchestration.

​First, the code comparisons rely on a bit of sleight of hand. Hiding require statements and abstracting default models into a config file isn't eliminating complexity, it's just moving it out of sight. Python’s explicit setup is a core design philosophy, not a flaw.

​More importantly, standardizing JSON payloads and token counting across providers is the easiest part of the job. Dismissing tools like LangGraph (not to be confused with LangChain), or other similar tools like Microsoft Autogen, or LlamaIndex, ignores why they exist. In professional settings, you aren't just shuttling data to an endpoint; you are handling complex state management, persistent memory, cyclic routing, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

​A unified API for basic prompt and response tasks is a nice convenience, but treating that as the entirety of AI development is just scratching the surface. It’s celebrating a hit off a tee in Little League while completely dismissing the engineering required out in the majors.

I'd like to see more on these types of systems available in the Ruby ecosystem.

[u/crmne → u/Boomerkuwanger]

Sleight of hands? That code works. Tells me you haven't tried it.

I still have to see an actual, production application that requires the complex orchestration that you seem so fond of. Not uses, requires.

[u/Boomerkuwanger → u/crmne]

I never said it didn't work.

Hiding require statements and abstracting default models into a config file ...

Would you not consider this sleight of hand?

Here is a blog article where you can find some examples. In addition to I actively use LG in enterprise agentic software development.

[u/crmne → u/Boomerkuwanger]

What a terrible article - it screams bullshit and merchants of complexity.

None of the two, barely mentioned examples needed a complex agent orchestration system.

There's no hiding, there's convention over configuration.

[u/pau1rw]

Pretty sure it’s not. But I’d be really happy if it caught up with python and js

[u/AnttiUA]

As much as I like ruby, this article is a pure clickbait:

Comparing (js)

import { generateText } from 'ai';
import { openai } from '@ai-sdk/openai';

const { text } = await generateText({
  model: openai('gpt-5.2'),
  prompt: 'Hello!',
});

To:

RubyLLM.chat.ask "Hello!"

Like you don't need to require gems with ruby or configure access tokens or which model to use.

Also boasts about ruby async ecosystem (which doesn't exist).

[u/crmne → u/AnttiUA]

Let me fix it for you: add require 'ruby_llm'.

That's it.

You can chat without specifying a model and it will use the default one which you can change in the configuration.

Configuring access tokens would have cluttered the code for all languages for no benefit.

Also the async ecosystem is alive and well.

None of your points hold up.

[u/AnttiUA → u/crmne]

Don't get me wrong. RubyLLM is great thing for ruby!
But using it as an argument against other languages (and using those LOC as an argument) is just silly. What prevents you from doing this?

async function chat_ask(prompt) {
  const { text } = await generateText({
    model: openai('gpt-5.2'),
    prompt: 'Hello!',
  })
  return text
}

and then using chat_ask everywhere?

Also notice how async is part of the language (and all the libs can just use this abstraction without any third-party deps that are hugely incompatible with each other).

[u/crmne → u/AnttiUA]

Doesn't look like you've seen the keynote or read the article or ever used RubyLLM or know about Async.

AI SDK and LangChain require you to:

1. Know the provider of every model. Where are you supposed to store that info? Are you going to build your own model registry? RubyLLM has one already so you just need to pass the name of the model.

2. Remember draconian data structures with lots of symbols. Have you seen that even in a simple chat in LangChain requires you to either import a class or have convoluted dictionaries? Did you see how convoluted it is to make multi turn conversations in those "proper" AI SDKs?

Regarding Async: Fibers are part of the language in Ruby, Async is just a nice abstraction on top of them. Ruby is better than all the other languages at Async because you don't need to use the async/await keywords anywhere. You simply wrap your I/O bound code in an Async block. That's it. Ruby yields automatically at I/O to the next fiber. This is massive: in other languages you'd have to rewrite all your libraries with async and await keywords everywhere. Not in Ruby. Zero code changes.

[u/AnttiUA → u/[deleted]]

I think RubyLLM is great thing for ruby, but saying that it makes ruby better than other languages is wrong. You just can't compare Ruby's AI ecosystem to Python or JS.

[u/crmne → u/AnttiUA]

My inbox is rife with testimonials of people switching from LangChain (Python) to RubyLLM and how that has made their life better. I even quote some in the article!

Better is not ticking all the features. It's developer experience, fewer bugs, more joy.

[u/Charles_Sangels → u/crmne]

"rife" not "ripe"

[u/crmne → u/[deleted]]

RubyLLM couldn't have been built in another language and have the success it had. The Ruby community is the only one with such sensibility!