The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.
Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.
Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.
I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:
raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ...
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.
I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient.
Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.
I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
https://github.com/ruby/rbs