Introduction
Hello there, my name is Dmytro. I'm a Ruby on Rails engineer and want to share my thoughts about my experience with Rails and praise the Ruby community.
I hope this series of posts will inspire people who are thinking about which technology to choose for building a career in IT, and if at least one person picks Ruby — my goal will be achieved.
But there is another reason I think Rails deserves attention today.
We are entering an era where LLMs and AI coding agents are changing how software is built. AI tools can now help developers generate code, write tests, explore APIs, refactor existing code and implement relatively well-defined features much faster.
And I believe this makes Ruby on Rails even more interesting for solo developers and small teams.
Rails was designed around conventions, sensible defaults and a complete application stack. Those properties were already valuable when developers wrote every line of code themselves. With AI coding tools, they become even more useful because predictable, conventional code is easier for both humans and coding agents to understand and modify.
If you are an experienced Rails developer, you probably already know many of these things. If you have something to add, please do it in the comments.
Why do I need it? First, I want to structure my knowledge. Secondly, I believe that something great becomes even better when shared with others. Plus, I genuinely enjoy working with Ruby.
The Community
When you ask anyone who works with Ruby why they like it, I bet most will mention the community.
It's truly special: active, highly supportive, and incredibly welcoming.
So, don't hesitate to start!
If you face some problems, there are probably already blog posts, documentation, or questions on Stack Overflow .
But in general, one of the best places to start is the Ruby on Rails Guides , where you can find comprehensive documentation for the framework.
The longevity of the Rails ecosystem is also important. Rails has been around for more than 20 years, which means there is an enormous amount of existing documentation, open-source code, tutorials, discussions, gems and real-world applications to learn from.
That becomes particularly interesting in the age of AI.
It's a Full-Stack Framework
Rails provides what you need to build a complete web application.
As a Ruby on Rails developer, you can work on the entire development process yourself — from the user interface and business logic to databases, background jobs, emails, APIs and deployment.
This is particularly valuable for solo developers.
Instead of building a stack by combining many different frameworks and services, you can start with one coherent application architecture and introduce additional technologies only when you actually need them.
Rails' guiding principle of Convention over Configuration plays an important role here.
Convention Over Configuration
The key idea is that Rails tries to make many common decisions for the developer.
By following these conventions, developers can avoid much of the repetitive configuration work and focus on more important, unique aspects of their application.
This also leads to cleaner and more maintainable code.
If you want to share your code with another developer, or look for a solution to a problem on the internet, there is a good chance that another Rails developer will immediately understand where things are and how the application is structured.
You don't need to invent your own architecture for every project.
And this characteristic has become even more valuable with LLM-based coding tools.
Rails in the Age of LLMs and AI Coding Agents
Large language models have changed how software can be developed. AI coding tools can help developers generate code, write tests, refactor existing code, explain unfamiliar codebases and implement relatively well-defined features.
GitHub's research on Copilot, for example, found that developers in one controlled experiment completed a coding task 55% faster when using Copilot.
This research was not specific to Ruby on Rails, so the result should not be interpreted as proof that every Rails project becomes 55% faster. However, it is a useful indication of the broader productivity potential of AI-assisted software development.
Read the GitHub research on Copilot's impact on developer productivity →
The interesting question is therefore not simply:
Can AI write code?
It clearly can.
The more interesting question is:
Which technologies make AI-generated code easier to understand, review, integrate and maintain?
This is where I think Rails has an interesting advantage.
The official Rails AI page describes Rails as built for AI and highlights several characteristics that make the framework particularly suitable for AI-assisted development, including convention over configuration, token efficiency and the large amount of public Rails code available to learn from.
The Rails Foundation also describes Rails as "The One Person Framework", which is particularly relevant when thinking about solo developers building products with the help of modern AI tools.
The Rails community is also actively testing how well modern AI coding agents perform with Rails applications. The Rails Foundation has created Agents on Rails , a benchmark designed to evaluate AI coding agents against real Rails applications and development tasks.
This doesn't mean that AI can replace an experienced developer. Quite the opposite.
The developer still needs to understand the product, architecture, security, data model, business requirements and trade-offs — and, importantly, review what the AI produces.
But if AI can take care of more of the mechanical implementation, the developer can spend more time on the parts that actually require engineering judgment.
Why Rails and AI Work Well Together
A conventional Rails application usually has familiar concepts and predictable structures:
app/modelsapp/controllersapp/viewsapp/jobsapp/mailersdb/migratetestorspec
When an AI coding agent encounters a conventional Rails project, it doesn't have to discover an entirely custom architecture before making a relatively simple change.
This is one of the reasons I find the combination of Rails and AI coding agents particularly interesting.
Rails provides the structure.
AI reduces the amount of mechanical work.
The developer provides the product thinking and engineering judgment.
Development Speed
Since a lot of things are already configured by default and there is a huge ecosystem of open-source solutions available through RubyGems , you can quickly integrate existing solutions and bring ideas into an application.
This makes Rails particularly attractive for startups, MVPs and independent developers.
You can go from an idea to a working application without assembling a completely different technology for every part of the product.
AI coding agents can further reduce the amount of repetitive implementation work involved in this process.
For a solo developer, this can be a very powerful combination: Rails provides a coherent foundation while AI helps accelerate the implementation.
Why This Can Be Economically Attractive
Speed is not only a technical advantage.
For a startup or small business, development time is money.
If a developer can validate an idea in weeks rather than months, the business can learn earlier whether the product is worth continuing.
If a small team can maintain a product without introducing unnecessary infrastructure and complexity, operating costs can also remain lower.
This doesn't mean that Rails is automatically the cheapest technology for every project. Technology choices depend on the product, team, existing infrastructure and requirements.
But for a typical web product — especially an MVP or SaaS application — Rails offers a compelling combination of:
- fast development;
- a mature ecosystem;
- a full-stack framework;
- relatively small amounts of boilerplate;
- strong conventions;
- a large amount of existing knowledge and code;
- increasingly capable AI coding tools.
For a solo developer, that combination is hard to ignore.
Scaffolding
The built-in scaffolding feature can automatically create basic code templates.
There are a lot of "blog in 15 minutes" videos where you can see how it works.
The original Rails demo from 2005 became famous for demonstrating just how quickly Rails could turn an idea into a working application.
Rails is now more than 20 years old, but the underlying idea is still relevant: reduce the amount of code developers need to write themselves.
David Heinemeier Hansson has continued demonstrating how quickly a Rails application can be taken from a fresh environment to a working application.
The Rails Foundation's Rails World 2025 recap highlights a keynote where DHH launched a fresh Rails application in under six minutes.
Is Ruby on Rails Dead?
Nope!
Companies such as Shopify and GitHub are proof that Rails can power large and important products.
But joking aside, the question is worth asking.
Technology ecosystems change, and no framework is guaranteed to remain relevant forever.
What I find interesting about Rails today is that the framework continues to evolve while retaining the principles that made it productive in the first place.
Rails is not trying to compete with every new technology by adding complexity. Instead, it continues to focus on making common product development tasks straightforward.
And the current interest in AI does not appear to be pushing Rails into irrelevance. Quite the opposite: the Rails community is actively exploring how coding agents, MCP and LLM-based development can work with the framework.
The Rails Foundation has even started dedicated work on benchmarking AI agents against Rails applications, which is a good indication that Rails + AI is becoming a serious area of development rather than just a trend discussed by individual developers.
Not Only Rails
While Rails is fantastic, it's built on the Ruby language.
So, as you can guess, Ruby has the power to make the development process enjoyable and efficient.
And Ruby isn't limited to web applications!
Here are a few other areas where Ruby shines:
- There are games written in Ruby . Check out tutorials like building Tetris .
- Desktop applications and GUI development .
- Data analysis .
- And more!
Rails + AI Is Not About Replacing Developers
There is one important caveat.
I don't think the future of software development is "AI writes everything and developers disappear."
Writing code has never been the only job of a software engineer.
Understanding a product, talking to users, designing a data model, making architectural decisions, evaluating trade-offs, debugging production issues and taking responsibility for the final result are still important engineering activities.
AI can make implementation faster.
It doesn't automatically make the resulting product correct.
That's why I see AI coding agents as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for engineering experience.
And this is exactly why I believe Rails is such an interesting technology for solo developers today.
A developer who understands Rails, understands the product, and knows how to use AI effectively can potentially cover much more ground than a developer who simply writes code manually.
Need Help With an Existing Rails Application?
If you are already running a Ruby on Rails application, the problem may not be building something new.
You might need help understanding an existing codebase, planning a Rails upgrade, dealing with technical debt, updating dependencies, or addressing security vulnerabilities in outdated gems.
I also provide Ruby on Rails consulting and application support, including technical analysis, legacy Rails application support, dependency updates, CVE-related fixes and Rails upgrades.
If you have an existing Rails application and need an experienced second opinion, feel free to get in touch with me about Rails consulting .
Conclusion
Ruby on Rails has always been about making web development productive.
Convention over Configuration, a mature ecosystem, a complete application stack and a strong community make it possible for a single developer to build surprisingly sophisticated products.
LLMs and AI coding agents add another layer to this.
They can reduce repetitive implementation work and allow developers to move faster. Rails' predictable structure and conventions make it particularly interesting in this new environment.
So if you're a solo developer thinking about what technology to use for your next product, I wouldn't dismiss Ruby because it is "old".
Quite the opposite.
Rails is old enough to have a huge ecosystem, mature enough to be trusted in production, and modern enough to take advantage of the AI-assisted development era.
For me, that makes Ruby on Rails one of the most interesting choices for building products as a solo developer today.
Stay tuned! In my upcoming posts, I'll share essential knowledge and effective approaches. Make sure to bookmark it!