RubyLLM: A Ruby framework for all major AI providers

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ddoener about 5 hours ago 37 commentsRead Article on rubyllm.com

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Discussion Sentiment

91% Positive

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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mark_l_watson•4 minutes ago

I spent a lot of time with RubyLLM a few months ago. Very nicely designed and implemented. I have my own LLM clients written in various Lisp languages and I thought about appropriating some of the design of RubyLLM. Imitation is flattery.

mogox•12 minutes ago

RubyLLM is awesome! I use it on side projects. So interesting how questions and comments from last year SF Ruby conf, https://youtu.be/y535u1EWqAg?si=rbyv52T035apKwQk are already features shipped in the ecosystem.

swe_dima•about 4 hours ago

I found Ruby LLM to be surprisingly good - in terms of usability it's close to Vercel's AI framework.

It tries to strike a balance between working out of the box and being flexible... which has its challenges, still nice overall.

One big real-life pain I experienced is that caches don't always work, e.g. for xAI, since it only supports completions API and thought signatures are returned wrong.

earcar•about 4 hours ago

Thank you!

Responses API is now implemented and it's coming in RubyLLM 2.0

https://github.com/crmne/ruby_llm/blob/main/lib/ruby_llm/pro...

techscruggs•about 4 hours ago

Do you have any details published around 2.0? Would love to learn more.

earcar•about 4 hours ago

Not yet. I'll do a series of blog posts and tweets in the next weeks.

obiefernandez•about 3 hours ago

I have an open source gem called Raix that builds on top of RubyLLM's abstractions and is quite popular. https://github.com/OlympiaAI/raix

MitziMoto•about 1 hour ago

We use and love RubyLLM! A wonderful and easy to use framework.

Agreed with another commenter on the frustration with the responses API not being naively supported; that seems like a huge miss. There is a connector from another dev, but it's buggy and not as high quality as the main gem.

Really looking forward to future development and especially 2.0!

Edit: Just saw that responses API is now native? I will definitely check that out.

earcar•44 minutes ago

Thank you!

Since a few mentioned Responses API: the reason why it wasn't implemented in 1.x is because RubyLLM 1.x effectively assumes a 1:1 mapping between provider and protocol. That assumption no longer holds since OpenAI has 2 protocols with different capabilities, and to access all VertexAI models we need to support a bunch under that single provider.

Therefore, a major refactoring to split Protocols and from Providers was needed, as well as a way to route different models to different Protocols under the same Provider, transparently.

That's one of the many things that's gonna ship with RubyLLM 2.0.

If you're curious: https://github.com/crmne/ruby_llm/commit/d398354da493570b050... https://github.com/crmne/ruby_llm/commit/0875ce2dfeae9d28a3a...

Finbarr•about 4 hours ago

RubyLLM is very easy to use. Made extensive use of it for a project last year. Drawbacks are it was difficult to instrument for true trace observability and it has a pattern where retries will delete the underlying models so the history you see is clean but not necessarily great for seeing exactly what the sequence of API calls was.

earcar•about 4 hours ago

Glad you like it.

Rails-style instrumentation landed in 1.16.0.

https://rubyllm.com/instrumentation/

rohitpaulk•about 2 hours ago

We use RubyLLM in production too, the most elegant library in this space I've seen so far.

I also liked how they run the issue tracker. If you select "Feature Request", it makes you explain how you explored workarounds, why you believe it belongs in RubyLLM etc to prevent scope creep.

digitaltrees•about 2 hours ago

We use this in production for a few apps. Great project.

zhisme•about 4 hours ago

thank you for bringing ruby into AI community and your open-source work. Great language must be explored and get more attention :)

earcar•about 4 hours ago

Thank you!

I love how MINASWAN Hacker News is when talking about Ruby!

themcgruff•about 3 hours ago

I built a similar Ruby based agent development kit that has a different focus and feature set:

https://github.com/tweibley/legate

aniokono•about 1 hour ago

I haven't tried it but it looks promising.

fragkakis•about 4 hours ago

I have created an open source chatgpt clone with rubyllm, check it out here: https://www.railschat.org/

reg_dunlop•41 minutes ago

tried it and got this:

> Error: You exceeded your current quota, please check your plan and billing details. For more information on this error, head to: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/rate-limits. To monitor your current usage, head to: https://ai.dev/rate-limit. * Quota exceeded for metric: generativelanguage.googleapis.com/generate_content_free_tier_requests, limit: 20, model: gemini-2.5-flash Please retry in 41.543129369s.

mosselman•about 4 hours ago

It is quite nice, but not as nice as you'd want. You still have to set platform specifics when running completions when you want to tune things like temperature, effort, max tokens, etc.

earcar•about 4 hours ago

RubyLLM author here.

I'm not sure where you got that.

`chat.with_temperature(0.2)`

https://rubyllm.com/chat/#controlling-response-behavior

`chat.with_thinking(effort: :high, budget: 8000)`

https://rubyllm.com/thinking/#controlling-extended-thinking

Max tokens is the only one of your list that require provider specific params:

https://rubyllm.com/chat/#provider-specific-parameters

I'm one guy doing it for free. Happy to see your contribution!

realty_geek•35 minutes ago

Well put!!!

You work your arse off for free and the guy who made the disparaging comment didn't even bother to research to see if he had the details right.

Hat's off to you Carmine for all your work. Many people really do appreciate it.

mosselman•about 4 hours ago

Hi! Valid challenge, I am probably misremembering. We were playing with various 'one-interface to all providers' solutions and I might have mixed up RubyLLM there. Sorry for that.

I will have a deep dive into which things I felt we needed to adapt per provider.

I didn't mean to imply that you have to solve all of our wants of course.

One thing we did do was monkey-patch the spot where tool_calls are performed by RubyLLM. We had our own mechanism for that and were able to skip RubyLLM's and still extract the tool calls and run them through our own tool harness. That all worked beautifully. I don't know if that type of stuff is something you want PRs on or that you want to keep steering towards the route that does everything within RubyLLM classes. Happy to contribute some of that.

earcar•about 3 hours ago

Interesting! What were you guys trying to achieve by running them in your own tool harness?

techscruggs•about 4 hours ago

And thank you! It is absolutely awesome and a true joy to work with.

hit8run•about 2 hours ago

Using RubyLLM in production for https://usetix.io It drives our event chat agent that is enhanced with toolcalls etc. Super happy with it.

bitedeck•about 4 hours ago

Thank you

EGreg•about 4 hours ago

In case you're using PHP or Node.js, we've made a similar toolkit free and open source on github: https://github.com/Qbix/AI/tree/main/classes/AI

meerita•about 2 hours ago

"What is the best language in the world (say ruby)" ;)

notpachet•about 3 hours ago

Why would anyone still build in dynamically typed languages in 2026? Why relinquish the crystal clear signals that static typing is able to provide to the LLM?

MitziMoto•about 1 hour ago

You static typed evangelists have lost your damn minds. You seem to have completely misunderstood what this library even is because you have some primal urge to boast static typing at every chance.

You can build high quality software with dynamically typed languages, and Ruby is an absolute dream to read and write.

lackoftactics•about 1 hour ago

Even as rails dev, I am seeing that you might be right. It’s really hard to find specific pros nowadays that Ruby brings to the table. All that talk about conventions over configurations and vast presence of Rails in weights is fun, but if writing speed isn’t an issue anymore, then Ruby on Rails has serious problems with larger codebases

cutler•about 1 hour ago

Codebases like Stripe?

taylorlapeyre•about 3 hours ago

Well, LLMs have an obscene amount of context built into their weights about Ruby on Rails, and can work within it extremely quickly.

jimbokun•about 3 hours ago

This is not a tool for using LLMs to write Ruby code.

arbirk•about 1 hour ago

I have been a fan of Ruby for many years, but in this fast paced era the Ruby ecosystem always struggled with the dependency versioning. Gems I relied on were never available or compatible with the rest of the ecosystem.