@alphabatcher: 540,000 lines of Rails is a brutal way to learn the agent era Garry's List shipped with: > 262,000 lines of app code > …
Summary
A critique of large Rails codebases in the AI agent era, proposing a shift to skill-based development with agents, markdown skills, and TypeScript for deterministic I/O.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 06/02/26, 07:38 PM
540,000 lines of Rails is a brutal way to learn the agent era
Garry’s List shipped with:
262,000 lines of app code 276,000 lines of tests 127 background jobs 33 cron jobs a 1,778-line claim verifier
Then GStack hit 105k GitHub stars
Do not copy the Rails pattern
- Finish the task with an agent
- Say
skillify it - Save the markdown skill
- Keep TypeScript only for deterministic I/O
- Add a unit test for the code
- Add an LLM eval for the skill
- Add an integration test across both
- Add a resolver so the agent loads the skill next time
A Rails feature serves one app
A skill pack can run against the next hackathon, repo, customer inbox, research folder, or QA run
Audit your repo this week
Cut code that only exists to:
re-check model output retry the same model call validate what the model already has context for schedule work because the agent has no reusable procedure preserve a one-off prompt in chat history
Keep the code that touches files, APIs, auth, billing, devices, databases
Move the judgment into markdown Test the markdown Reuse the skill
Similar Articles
I rebuilt a Claude Code–style coding agent from scratch — the whole agent loop is 6 lines. 20 chapters, ~5k lines, no frameworks, runs on local models too
A developer shares a 20-chapter tutorial rebuilding a Claude Code–style coding agent from scratch, showing the entire agent loop in ~6 lines, with support for local models and multiple LLM APIs.
From Rust to Ruby
Developer describes converting a 15,000-line Rust web application to Ruby on Rails using an LLM, finding the Ruby version significantly shorter and evaluating trade-offs in development speed, safety, and testability.
VoltAgent/awesome-agent-skills
Curated GitHub repository offering 1100+ real-world AI agent skills from major dev teams like Anthropic, Google, Stripe, and Vercel, compatible with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other AI coding assistants.
@garrytan: https://x.com/garrytan/status/2061454423034110372
Garry Tan argues that developers are over-engineering with excessive code when using AI agents; instead, they should trust the model and build minimal, instruction-based software, exemplified by his open-source project GStack.
@tom_doerr: Builds agents from 200,000 skills https://github.com/ynulihao/AgentSkillOS…
AgentSkillOS is an open-source framework that enables developers to build AI agents by retrieving and orchestrating pipelines from over 200,000 available skills.