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15+ years of Rails. Recently focused on integrating LLMs without turning a clean codebase into a science experiment. I’ve spent most of the last two decades writing Ruby on Rails — from early-stage startups to SurveyMonkey. I like the unglamorous parts: the background job that has to be idempotent, the integration that can’t drop a record, the migration that runs against a live database without anyone noticing. For the last couple of years I’ve been consulting and taking freelance Rails work, experimenting with the latest agentic-AI frameworks, and building my own developer tooling. The throughline: putting AI and LLMs into Rails applications in a way that survives contact with production. Most “add AI to your app” advice stops at the happy-path API call — the interesting problems start right after: timeouts, retries, rate limits, cost, and keeping a slow model off your web request path.

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What I do

  • Rails, at depth. Rails across many versions, including 7 and 8. PostgreSQL, Redis, background processing, RESTful APIs, and the service-object discipline that keeps a large app from collapsing under its own weight.
  • AI integration that doesn’t rot. Calling LLMs from app code, experimenting with agentic frameworks and RAG, and building my own tooling — while isolating that work behind background jobs with sane timeouts, retries, and rate limiting so the rest of the app stays fast and predictable.
  • Production judgment. Testing and CI, encryption and PII handling, and knowing when not to reach for the clever option.
Adding AI to a Rails app the right way — a runnable reference implementation: Rails 8 calling an LLM service through a service object with retries, timeouts, auth, and rate limiting, plus a background-job example for moving the slow call off the request path — all wired up with Docker Compose. Runs locally in mock mode (no GPU or API key needed). Code on GitHub.

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Right now

I’m currently consulting and taking freelance Rails work, and I’m open to a senior Rails role where AI is part of the product — somewhere I can bring 15 years of Rails judgment to LLM-backed features. Remote. Get in touch → · me@bobbysantiago.com · GitHub @bullrico