Real-World Ruby AI: Practical Systems That Work

In this episode of the Ruby AI Podcast, co-hosts Joe Leo and Valentino Stoll, alongside guest Amanda Bizzinotto from Ombu Labs, delve into the ongoing controversy within the Ruby community involving Ruby Central, Shopify, and Bundler/Ruby Gems. While both Valentino and Amanda share their perspectives on the situation, the conversation swiftly transitions into Amanda's journey and current work in AI and machine learning at Ombu Labs. The episode highlights various AI initiatives, including the creation of an AI bot to streamline internal processes, automated Rails upgrade roadmaps, and multi-agent architectures aimed at enhancing efficiency in Rails projects. Amanda also discusses the challenges of integrating AI in consultancy services and shares some insights on the tools and strategies used at Ombu Labs. The podcast concludes with exciting updates about Amanda's recent work, Joe's announcements on upcoming projects including Phoenix's public release, and Valentino's discovery of a new user interface for Claude Swarm.

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

00:26 Ruby Community Controversy

04:37 Amanda's AI Journey

08:45 AI in Business and Consultancy

16:24 AI-Powered Tools and Applications

23:09 Managing Knowledge Base Updates

24:42 Prompting Strategies and Agentic Workflows

26:02 Understanding Workflows vs. Agents

28:37 Observability in AI Systems

29:06 Advanced Prompting Techniques

31:08 Multi-Agent Architectures

34:32 Ruby AI Gems and Libraries

37:09 Exciting Announcements and Future Plans

41:44 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Mentioned In The Show:

• AI for Rails upgrades: FastRuby automated roadmap
• PGVector and Neighbor gem
• Guardrails.ai for hallucination control (https://www.guardrailsai.com)
• Microsoft Presidio for PII stripping
• Observability with LangFuse (https://www.langfuse.com)
• Prompting engineering techniques
• Chain-of-Thought, ReAct pattern article 
• ActiveAgent
• LangChain.rb
• DSPy.rb
• Phoenix AI upgrade assistant public beta Oct 15 event
• Ombu Labs roadmap tool live now
• Swarm UI for Claude Swarm by Parruda 
• Ombu Labs – https://ombulabs.com
• Artificial Ruby NYC meetup – https://artificialruby.ai
• Shopify Claude Swarm project – https://github.com/shopify/claude-swarm