Longreads from the Rocketship

Ruby on Rails 8 continues the rails framework’s steady evolution toward performance, stability, and long-term maintainability. Rather than introducing disruptive changes, this rails version focuses on refining how Rails applications behave in production, how teams build and ship features, and how risk is managed as systems grow.

For product teams running a rails application in real-world environments, these updates matter. They influence response times, deployment reliability, development velocity, and operational costs. 

Rails 8 reflects a framework designed not just for speed of development, but for sustained, production-grade use across complex web application architectures.

Traditional keyword search is fundamentally limited—it can only match exact words or their basic variations. Search for "customer pain points" and you'll miss documents titled "User Frustrations" or "Client Challenges," even though they're semantically identical. This limitation becomes critical when managing large document repositories where users need to find information based on meaning, not memorized keywords. The solution is semantic search using vector embeddings, which represent text as mathematical vectors that capture conceptual similarity. In previous articles, we explored how ruby_llm simplifies working with AI providers for function calling and resilient architectures. Now we'll leverage ruby_llm's embedding capabilities to build semantic search with PostgreSQL's pgvector extension—creating a system that finds "churn analysis" when users search for "why customers leave."

Modern product teams want the best of both worlds: the speed of web development and the polish of native mobile apps. Hotwire Native bridges that gap. For Rails developers, it means you can build mobile experiences powered by your existing backend, without the heavy lift of maintaining a separate codebase.

APIs sit at the center of modern digital products. Every mobile interaction, dashboard update, and system integration depends on a reliable backend layer that moves data between systems with precision and consistency. As products grow more connected and more distributed, the quality of the API often determines how quickly a business can adapt.

This shift toward API driven architectures has changed how teams build software. Backend systems are no longer tied to a single interface. They are expected to support web applications, mobile clients, internal tools, and external partners, often all at once. 

Ruby on Rails supports this model directly through its API focused capabilities within the broader rails framework.

Two years ago, I wrote the JetRockets Manifesto to explain how we think about partnerships, delivery, and responsibility. At the time, it felt important to put words around something that had already been true for us for years: that successful software is not the result of transactions, tools, or speed alone, but of trust, judgment, and shared ownership.

Since then, the world has changed. Or at least, the tools have.

AI is now woven into nearly every part of software development. Code can be generated in minutes. Documentation can be drafted instantly. Project artifacts that once took days can now be created immediately. Pretending this isn’t happening, or choosing to opt out, would be irresponsible.

We don’t.