[netghost]

A long while back I wrote a bunch of articles covering some of the standard library: https://snakeshands.com/series/ruby_standard_library/

Ruby, and Ruby on Rails is a treasure trove of little handy bits you can use if you just know where to look. I really miss some aspects of ruby (I just don't have a chance to use it these days).

[dmix]

I'm worried LLMs will make people ignore what's already there and auto generate useless functions instead of using what's there in Ruby/Rails. I've been using Rails for almost 20yrs (on and off) and I can't count the number of times I did something only to find out it was either natively supported in a recent version... or at least a new best practice in modern Rails.

You find the same thing with JS to an even higher degree, but there's always 10 options in NPM and they all need to be updated every year otherwise the other 20+ packages you depend on can't be upgraded. There's a stark contrast in maintenance overhead and DX between frontend and server side.

Even the rails JS libraries are very stable. Hotwire's Stimulus hasn't had a release since 2023 and it always works just fine. https://github.com/hotwired/stimulus/releases

[pxc]

> I'm worried LLMs will make people ignore what's already there and auto generate useless functions instead of using what's there in Ruby/Rails.

I think you're probably right. But fwiw, as a non-Rubyist who values good style and is recently working in a one-off Ruby codebase, I've found it easy to use LLMs to write Ruby code that is idiomatic and leverages built-ins well. I use ChatGPT 5 Thinking for this, and I don't let it generate any code that I use directly. I ask it about ways to do things, including stuff built-in to the stdlib, and sometimes have it generate 3 or 4 implementations. Then I compare them, consult the language docs or stdlib API docs or the pickaxe book, and choose what seems the most stylish or composable. I then write it out by hand, bearing in mind what I just learned, and see what Rubocop has to say about its style.

I wouldn't say LLMs have been essential in this, but they've been pretty convenient. Because Ruby has relatively a lot of special syntax, it's also nice to be able to inquire directly about the meaning of some syntax in a bit of generated code-- especially when it involves characters that are (for some reason) ungoogleable, like an ampersand.

I think people who use LLMs to generate code and people that embrace agentic coding AIs and "vibe coding" will absolutely fall into the pattern you describe. But RTFMers and developers who care about craftsmanship will probably use LLMs as another discovery mechanisms for the stdlib, popular Gems, and popular style conventions.