World 05-26 • May
GitHub Adopts Herb Across 500K Lines of ERB
Joel Hawksley, staff engineer on the github.com Rails monolith, publishes the inside story: Rails core wants Herb to replace Erubi, and GitHub — rendering ERB at the largest scale of any Rails app — was asked to validate the parser.
500,000 lines of ERB across 10,000 files. 2,768 files initially failed Herb parsing. Herb caught markup and Ruby errors erb_lint had missed (~150 mismatched-tag cases alone). Marco Roth's Herb v0.10 shipped the same week — diff engine, dev server, and the foundation for reactive ERB rendering.
May 6, 2026 · hawksley.org
Matz Ships an AI-Built Ruby Compiler
Apr 24, 2026
At RubyKaigi 2026, Matz unveils Spinel — a native Ruby AOT compiler 11.6× faster than MiniRuby on Ruby 4.1. Ruby → AST → C → native binary. A three-year-old idea, implemented in weeks with Claude Code. MIT, 1.5K stars in two weeks.
Read moreStripe: 50M-Line Ruby CI + 288 at Sessions
Apr 9 · Apr 29–May 1, 2026
SF Ruby company (Sinatra + internal framework) bookends April with two big signals. Aditya Anchuri details Stripe's 50-million-line Ruby monolith and Selective Test Execution (~5% of tests per PR). Days later: 288 Sessions launches — Agentic Commerce with Meta/Google, AI-agent wallet, 9,000 attendees at Moscone.
Read the CI postIntercom Launches Fin for Sales
Apr 24, 2026
Fin moves beyond support. New Fin for Sales qualifies leads, books meetings, starts trials; Fin Copilot adds a free tier (10 conversations/month per agent); Fin Insights ships CX Score. Fin growing 350% YoY across 8,000 companies — all on a 2M-line Rails monolith.
Read moreRubyLLM 1.15: Image Editing + Cost Tracking
Carmine Paolino's RubyLLM (≈5M downloads) ships image editing via paint, conversation cost tracking with cache-read/write buckets, and Action Text plain-text extraction so HTML doesn't leak into prompts. Now the de-facto Ruby LangChain.
SF Ruby Meetup, May @ Checkr
Thursday May 21, 5pm, One Montgomery St. Kurt Ude (Checkr) on engineering fraud at enterprise scale, Waldemar Quevedo (Synadia) on building agents in Ruby with DSPy, and Pranav Raj (Chatwoot CEO, YC W21). 116+ RSVPs.
RSVP on LumaRails World 2026: Austin, AI Track, 1,200 Seats
Rails Foundation announces the biggest Rails World yet: Austin, Sep 23–24, 1,200-attendee capacity, dedicated AI / Agentic Systems and Trust & Security tracks. CFP closes May 16. General admission ($699) on sale May 12, 10am CT.
Read announcementBlue Ridge Ruby 2026 in Asheville
Two-day, single-track conference (April 30 - May 1), 21 talks. Agent thread again: "LLM Telemetry as a First-Class Rails Concern," "Instillment of Successful Practices in an Agentic World," a lightning talk on "Teaching Claude Code to Upgrade Rails." Joël Quenneville, Rachael Wright-Munn, Katya Sarmiento, Ifat Ribon on the bill.
See the lineupGusto Joins Ruby Alliance
Ruby Central launches the Ruby Alliance — a coalition of companies investing in long-term Ruby ecosystem health, resilience, and sustainability. SF-based $9.5B Rails unicorn Gusto signs on as the inaugural member (May 11).
Read announcementBlastoff Rails 2026: Save the Date
June 11-12 in Albuquerque, NM. 9 talks, keynotes from Irina Nazarova (Evil Martians) and Kieran Klaassen. Topics: "How to Become a Famous Ruby/Rails Agentic Developer," "Why We're Still Training Rails Developers in an Age of AI," "Fewer Tests, More Confidence."
See speakers