[urbanautomaton]

I totally agree. And this is before we even consider what ubiquitous autoloading encourages us to do to our code in terms of coupling. Our classes are available everywhere, so the tendency to create many hard dependencies on a wide range of classes is very strong. Want to run a SQL query right in a view? Nothing stopping you. Want to instantiate a controller in a model so you can get at the path helpers? I will hunt you-- er, sorry, I mean, "nothing stopping you" (except your pride).

Like you, I find it very hard to rubbish the auto-reloading, but even this encourages bad habits, I think. Rather than write tests for the behaviour we just implemented, or the bug we just fixed, we hit F5. Didn't work? Change something, hit F5. This at least isn't really Rails' fault; it's our job as programmers to do the professional thing. But it does act as something of a siren call to the rocks of cowboy programming. And like you say, there are other, more insidious issues with divergent dev/production environments.