RUG::B

How far can modern HTML and CSS take us? Much further than you might think. And what does this unlock for Ruby web apps? Let's dig in.

The rough idea: I have a plan for a new meetup to connect folks here with Japan

As you know, Japan is the birthplace of Ruby, and it still has a massive, highly active community and corporate ecosystem (as you've probably seen with RubyKaigi!). However, it's often difficult for developers in Japan to connect with the community here due to a lack of networking opportunities and the language barrier (though technology is making that much easier to mitigate nowadays). The goal is to bridge this gap through a remote meetup.

I'm currently planning a small pilot meetup. I would love to get your feedback on this idea, as well as see if anyone might be interested in participating!

RubyLLM 1.x gave Rubyists a beautiful way to work with AI: one delightful DSL across major AI providers, easy Rails integration, a model registry for capabilities and costs, instrumentation, agents, workflows, and RAG.

But once the work moves into production, a new set of problems appears. Calls get expensive fast. Providers have bad days. Answers need provenance. Workflows need to be traced. And sometimes the provider you need speaks more than one protocol, or is not yet supported.

RubyLLM 2.0 is about crossing that line. It adds caching and batch execution to cut costs, model fallbacks so your app can keep answering, citations so users can see where answers came from, and workflow-aware tracing so you can finally understand complex flows. It also separates providers from protocols so multi-protocol providers work natively, and smaller providers can be added with a simple generator.

1.x was a beautiful way to work with AI. 2.0 is how Rubyists build real AI products without giving up any of that beauty.