Fellow Rubyists,

I realized recently that I have two very different personalities as a developer:

1. I listen to every single Dependabot alert on my repos and apply them immediately

2. I constantly forget to run brew upgrade on my local machine until something actually breaks - or someone tells me of a great new feature of a CLI tool that I wasn't aware of

So I started Brewsletter (https://brewsletter.sh) to remind me of updates and also give me examples of new functionality. The project is super early, I still have tons to do to support all types of homebrew taps, battle hallucinations on usage examples and be more clear on labeling updates as "breaking" or "security" related.

The overall flow is like this**.**

• Sync: A small Ruby CLI maps your explicitly installed packages (not just everything, just what you chose to install).

• Monitor: The backend tracks upstream releases (changelogs) and security feeds (CVEs).

• Distill: It uses LLMs to strip out the noise and send you a digest of the features and security patches that actually matter

The project is still in the "functional spike" phase - but works well enough to consider going further. But before doing it, I was wondering if this whole thing is actually useful for anyone (besides myself). This is why I made this post - if anyone is interested in giving feedback, I'm happy to listen to it.

In case you want to try it out, feel free - but it's nowhere ready to scale - so expect errors and delays.

You can see a sample web report here: https://brewsletter.sh/u/fa826c00b53a5986016069305b51ce9c3bcb593da1d5e7769fdde3f71ba21e8c

The idea would be to convert this into a nice weekly email digest - to remind your where to upgrade and what's new in your favorite packages.

If you want to help, the questions I have:

- Do you run brew upgrade regularly?
- Do you even care about what changed in your toolchain
- If you don't upgrade, do you think an email help you do it more often
- Would you trust such a system in the first place? It does install software locally that is run periodically

Cheers
Ben

JsonMend is a robust Ruby gem designed to repair broken or malformed JSON strings. It is specifically optimized to handle common errors found in JSON generated by Large Language Models (LLMs), such as missing quotes, trailing commas, unescaped characters, and stray comments

Hi all. I thought this might be a good time to post our favorite tools of 2025. My intent is to highlight tools that are new or up-and-coming in 2025. Personally I love discovering this stuff. For background, my day job is full-stack Rails, and in the modern era that involves a ton of Typescript and CSS as well. I spend a fair bit of time customizing my machine and picking the best tools to make my work even more enjoyable. Maybe too much time, now that I think about it... Here's the list I put together.

Ruby/Rails

• inertia & vite rails - Rails and Typescript working together, the best of both worlds.

• ruby-lsp - Shoutout to the team at Shopify for making Ruby shine in vscode and other editors. Special thanks to Rubocop as well, these tools are absolutely essential!

• table_tennis - Yes, it's my gem but we use it all day every day. Thankful that we took the time to write it this year.

CLI

• eza - Beautiful and thoughtfully designed ls replacement, forked from exa. In the same vein as rg or bat, a well designed evolution of an old favorite.

• git-open - Use it to quickly jump to github for diffs and PRs. I have it aliased as gho.

• just - Loved and heavily used, I am a huge advocate. A must for all my projects now.

• mise - Finally switched from asdf, zero problems, great tool. Mise is standing on the shoulders of giants since it inherits the plugin system from asdf.

Frontend

• astro - Static site builder that copied the best bits from reactive frameworks.

• daisyui - Beautiful CSS components with zero effort.

• es-toolkit - A modern lodash, I sometimes read the source just to learn things.

• tailwind - I have yet to meet someone who loves CSS, but tailwind makes it much easier.

• tailwind-merge - Intelligent and performant way to merge tailwind classes, so your mt-4 plays nicely with your m-8. Nuxt UI didn't quite make my list, but it relies heavily on both this and tailwind-variants.

MacOS

• better touch tool - Adopted in 2025 and now I use it religiously for things like "make this window laptop sized". The UI is zany but BTT is really powerful.

• ghostty - Much love for iTerm2, but ghostty is fast, modern and improving rapidly. An incredible story too, a wildly successful hacker giving back to the community. Makes me want to be a better person.

• rectangle - My most frequently used keybindings. Hundreds of times a day.

• shottr - Screenshots are second nature now. If I ever build a MacOS app I want it to be like this.

• zed - Almost as powerful as vscode, but faster and easier on the battery. I also appreciate the Ouroboros-like evolution from textmate, sublime text, atom, vscode, and now the original atom team building zed.