The Ruby on Rails Podcast

Jessica Kerr and Avdi Grimm join me to explore how AI is changing developer identity, shifting engineering work toward defining outcomes, guiding agents, and building effective feedback loops. We discuss practical approaches to code review, technical debt, and measuring agent performance, alongside the importance of learning, shared design vocabulary, and making more room for human connection.

Buzzsprout co-founder and CEO Tom Rossi joins me at Rails World to discuss AI, the rapidly changing role of software developers, and why identifying the right problems to solve is becoming more important than simply writing code. We explore how AI is changing software development at Buzzsprout, what it means to think like a maker instead of just a coder, and why great products depend on understanding what actually creates value for customers.

Marco Roth joins the show at Rails World to discuss Herb’s arrival in Rails 8.2 and how it lays the foundation for a more powerful Rails view layer. We talk about ReactionView, explore bringing fine-grained reactivity to existing ERB templates, and explain why better developer tooling may become even more important in an era of AI-generated code.

Recorded at Rails World, David sits down with Obie Fernandez to discuss how AI and agentic development are changing the nature of software engineering, and why Rails may be uniquely suited for what comes next. They explore convention over configuration, the need for better guardrails around AI-generated code, and how the craft of programming may be moving from writing source code to defining the higher-level constraints that shape it.

Javier Cervantes, co-creator of the Ruby User Forum, joins me to discuss the limitations of Slack, Discord, and fragmented social media, the importance of connecting developers and open-source maintainers, and why talking with other people still matters in an increasingly AI-driven world.