The post effectively communicated what it needed to. It seemed both written and structured in a way that was optimized for human consumption.
If they used AI to write this and that gave them more time to volunteer their time towards developing this fantastic piece of open source software, then this all seems like a good thing to me.
Let me make sure I am hearing you right.
1) The person you report to asked you to accomplish a discrete task
2) of standing up one of the most common websites on the planet
3) and your response was to begin building your own custom CMS?
I know I am removing the train of thought that led you down this path, but is there anything I just said that is factually false?
Some of the things I like about RubyLLM:
1. the DSL - You can chain methods like ActiveRecord.
2. the Structure - If gives a way to organize agents, tools & prompts
3. the Portability - The costs of AI usage, will one day be an issue for any successful product. Being able to easily test and move from Anthropic to DeepSeek cut my bill down by over 90%. Knowing how easy RubyLLM makes it, ignoring this eventuality feels reckless to me.
4. ActiveRecord Integration - With a simple `bin/rails generate ruby_llm:install
`, you can save each chat to your database.
5. Agent Training - This is a side benefit of the above, but has been a huge unlock for me. Since I have all my chats saved, I will regularly pull down that history and give it to claude code to refine my agent instructions.
The incentives structure is deeply broken in the field of Security Research.
They are the middle management of the FOSS world.
Celebrated for dumping more work on volunteers. The more urgent the work, the more they are celebrated. Acknowledging the realistic impact of issues or the pragmatic implications of an issue are at odds with their incentives.
It's hard not to see them as bottom feeders of the software industry and I wish we would starting treating them like pariah. Submit the PR or STFU.
Remember that Steve Jobs appointed his COO Tim Cook to take over Apple. Not Ives or Cue or Federighi. I've always seen this as an acknowledgment that without Jobs the company would not be able to innovate in the same way.
Having acknowledged that, Apple shifted to the value extraction phase of its business lifecycle.
It sucks.
It like when your favorite band starts selling out, but as publicly traded company, I am not sure it is avoidable.
I've been using apache echarts for a while. It is excellent. As you dig deep, some of the examples and libraries are in Chinese, which can be challenging.
The only real drawback that I've discovered is that it uses canvas to generate the charts. So, when you UI changes to dark mode, you need to reload your charts to update the color scheme ... which in the grand scheme of things is really minor.
A bit off topic, but whenever Rails and templating get brought up, I have to plug my absolute favorite project out there: Phlex https://beta.phlex.fun/. It's like ViewComponents, but swap out the ERB for pure Ruby. It has been a joy to develop with.
With the addition of Phlex::Kit, it has made building out a component library pretty easy too.
RubyUI https://github.com/ruby-ui/ruby_ui does a great job of showing off how to do this.
Sure, if you are building an enterprise application, this likely doesn't make any
sense.
But, if you are building something for a consumer audience. Or if you are trying to differentiate yourself by building something beautiful. Then maybe wrap these 100 lines of code in a very specific class name (.fancyGlassFrostedGlass) and call it day?