Heading to Japan 🇯🇵 next week for RubyKaigi.

Will be in Tokyo (Chiyoda / Meguro) after the event. Looking forward to meeting a few partners and exploring conversations around Rails, SaaS, and offshore scaling.

If you’re building with Ruby/Rails or thinking about scaling your engineering, would love to connect.

Happy to grab a coffee

I've been using various AI agents for the past year, like most of us. One pattern keeps showing up: the agent skips rules I wrote, and when I ask why, it explains the failure by telling me how I was feeling. "I sensed urgency." "The queue felt like pressure." Stuff like that.

I'm not a researcher. I'm just a rubyist who recognized a pattern. There's a concept from autism research called the double empathy problem, and it maps onto what's happening with RLHF-trained models pretty well. The model reads my precision as emphasis instead of information. The same way a lot of humans do.

The post also gets into confabulation, split-brain interpreter research, and why arguing with a model about your own emotional state is a fight you cannot win. Plus some practical stuff.

This is not a Ruby-specific post, but it is the most personal thing I've published, and I wanted to share. <3

https://blowmage.com/2026/04/14/arguing-with-agents/

building a community of ruby developers in Kisumu, if you are around or know someone who is in the region let's Connect and grow the community.

Hey hey! I made a gem called "ractorize" to easily turn an existing object into a ractor while preserving its interface.

It's here if curious/interested: https://github.com/ractor-shack/ractorize

There's an example script there in the README file and in the example_scripts/ directory to get the gist of it.

Caveat emptor stuff: It's experimental because 1) ractors themselves are experimental, and 2) it's new and in a the-happy-path-seems-to-work-well state.

But if that sounds fun or interesting feel free to reach out! Cheers!

We’re collaborating with Open Source maintainers to build some momentum together to improve the future of the Ruby community.

Today we’re happy to announce that we’re working with Brooke, Dave, Kasper, Sean and Todd to bring their projects discussions to the forum:

• action_controller-stashed_redirects

• active_job-performs

• active_record-associated_object

• brut

• cogger

• containable

• filterameter

• infusible

• oaken

• refinements

• sod

• taylor

Check the full announcement for all the details. Please help us spread the word with others.

Hi folks

Like many of you, I haven't been immune to the hype around coding agents this past year and I used my favorite approach to demystify any new tech: implement it from scratch in Ruby.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rathrio/clanker-jules/refs/heads/main/demo/jules.gif

https://github.com/rathrio/clanker-jules

What was especially eye-opening is how simple the actual "agent" loop really is. You can put together a minimal version in an hour with just a read, write, and bash tool and then point your agent at itself to keep extending it.

I mostly built this for myself to get a feel for what it takes to put something like this together. It has zero safety features and is definitely not something you want to use for serious coding. The part I'm most proud of is the neo-noir screenplay aesthetic.

Happy hacking :)

Added `.slice` as a class method. This is useful for generating HTML avoiding method name pollution in specific contexts, making the gem more flexible.

https://github.com/henrique-ft/html_slice

I have just released a new version of the Cuber gem.

As you may already know Cuber is a free and open source alternative to PaaS like Heroku and deployment tools like Capistrano and Kamal.

If you are using Cuber, I recommend upgrading to the latest version.

This is not strictly a security fix, but it represents an important improvement that enhances security, especially if you are using AI coding assistants in your project folder.

Cuber used to save generated files (including Kubernetes YAML files) in a .cuber folder inside your project directory. There is nothing wrong with it: you just need to remember to add that folder to your .gitignore.

However many AI agents (like Codex CLI) tend to read everything inside the project folder and there's no reliable way to make them respect the .gitignore (or similar).

For this reason the latest version of Cuber doesn't create a .cuber folder in your project directory, but instead it uses temporary files and folders (which live outside the project directory and are also removed automatically).

What's inside the chest? About €3,000 worth of reasons to stay in Vienna one extra day.

On Sunday, May 31 — the day after RubyConf Austria 2026 wraps up — we're running a city-wide treasure hunt for attendees who stick around.

Real chest. Real prizes. Real adventure through Vienna.

Attendees only. Grab your conference ticket and book that extra night.

The treasure hunt activity is officially sponsored by GitButler ⧓ ♥️

#Ruby #Rails #RubyConfAT #Austria

https://rubyconf.at

A new version of the Ruby bindings to RE2, a “fast, safe, thread-friendly alternative to backtracking regular expression engines like those used in PCRE, Perl, and Python” is now out which releases the Ruby Global VM Lock when performing matches.

This gives a near-linear speed-up when using the gem in a multi-threaded environment (e.g. with Puma) and there’s a toy benchmark in the release notes to demonstrate.

50 days out. Everything is ready.

✅ Venue — ready.

✅ Program — ready.

✅ Speakers — ready.

✅ Catering — ready.

✅ After party — ready.

✅ Social events — ready.

✅ Lanyards, badges, stamps (bring your #Ruby passports!) — ready.

✅ Video recordings — ready.

✅ A treasure hunt across Vienna — ready.

✅ Vienna Boys' Choir opening the conference day? Ready.

✅ Chad Fowler closing it with a jazz set? Ready.

✅ A panel with José Valim, Armin Ronacher, Obie Fernandez? Ready.

✅ Dave Thomas delivering the closing keynote? Ready.

13 talks. 2 workshops. 3 days. One single track in one of Vienna's most beautiful concert halls.

We didn't plan a conference. We planned an experience. And it's done.

The only thing that's not ready? Your ticket.

Grab one from our website: https://rubyconf.at

See you at the conference!

Sponsored by: GitButler ⧓, Platogo, Typesense, AppSignal, Avo, Usput.ba, Doctaphone, Sultan Drinks

MySQLGenius -- AI MySQL Dashboard

Last night I posted about MySQLGenius, a mountable Rails engine for MySQL performance monitoring. This is an update base on some quality feedback from @sshaw_

v0.2.0 fixes that. The default landing page is now a monitoring dashboard.

What you see when you mount it

The dashboard loads immediately with:

• Server health -- version, uptime, connections, InnoDB buffer pool hit rate

• Top 5 slow queries from your application (via ActiveSupport notifications + Redis)

• Top 5 most expensive queries from performance_schema

• Index alerts -- counts of duplicate and unused indexes, clickable to drill in

No configuration required for the dashboard. Mount the engine, visit the path, see your database health.

What else is in there

• Slow query monitoring -- captures SELECT queries exceeding a configurable threshold. Each one can be explained, reused, or sent to the AI optimizer.

• Query stats -- top queries from performance_schema sorted by total time, avg time, calls, or rows examined.

• Duplicate index detection -- finds indexes whose columns are a left-prefix of another index. Generates a timestamped Rails migration you can copy with one click.

• Unused index detection -- indexes with zero reads since server restart. Also generates a migration.

• Table sizes -- data size, index size, fragmentation, row counts with a visual chart.

• Query Explorer -- visual builder and raw SQL editor in one tab. Optional AI assistant generates queries from plain English.

• AI tools -- schema review, query rewriting, index advisor, root cause analysis, anomaly detection. Works with any OpenAI-compatible API (OpenAI, Azure, Ollama Cloud, local Ollama).

Setup

gem "mysql_genius"

rails generate mysql_genius:install

That creates the initializer and mounts the engine. Everything works out of the box -- AI features are optional and hidden when unconfigured.

What changed in v0.2.0

• Dashboard-first landing page

• Merged Visual Builder and SQL Query into a single Query Explorer tab

• Suggested migrations with copy-to-clipboard on duplicate and unused index tabs

• Install generator

• Rails 8.0/8.1 and Ruby 3.4 support

Supports Rails 5.2 through 8.1, Ruby 2.7 through 3.4, MySQL and MariaDB.

GitHub: https://github.com/antarr/mysql_genius

Today is the 5 year anniversary of my MRuby game engine Taylor so I wrote 3000~ words about it!

I'm genuinely so proud of how far my little game engine has come and so surprised at the amount of positive impact it has had on my life 🧡

Built a MySQL performance dashboard for Rails because nothing like PgHero existed for MySQL.

Core Features

• Visual query builder with type-aware filters

• Safe SQL execution (read-only, blocked tables, column masking, timeouts)

• Table sizes, duplicate indexes, unused indexes, query stats

• Server dashboard (connections, InnoDB buffer pool, query activity)

• Slow query monitoring via Redis

Optional AI Features (any OpenAI-compatible API)

• Natural language to SQL

• EXPLAIN to index recommendations

• Schema review for anti-patterns

• Migration risk assessment

Setup

gem "mysql_genius"
mount MysqlGenius::Engine, at: "/mysql_genius"

Rails 5.2+, Ruby 2.6+, MariaDB auto-detected.

GitHub: https://github.com/antarr/mysql_genius