On Rails — Joanna Wang: Code Is Cheap Now; Developers Still Valuable

Joanna Wang, senior software engineer at Sixfold, said on the On Rails podcast that while AI makes code cheap, developers remain valuable because they understand context and make judgment calls. She discussed how Sixfold's homegrown orchestration on state machines and callbacks became brittle, leading the team to adopt Hatchet, and how Rails magic is easier to understand when an AI agent can trace it.

Joanna Wang https://www.linkedin.com/in/tianqi-joanna-wang/ is a senior software engineer at <a href="https://www.sixfold.ai" Sixfold</a , where the team builds AI underwriting tools that help insurance companies gather data and assess risk. She came to Ruby on Rails after working across Java, Go, Python, and Node. Robby and Joanna get into why the homegrown orchestration they built on state machines and callbacks turned brittle, what moving to Hatchet https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet changed, and the tradeoffs of leaning on a gem that is no longer maintained. They also talk about what happened when the team went fully agentic, and why Rails magic is easier to understand when an agent can trace it for you. Links: Listen to this episode https://podcast.rubyonrails.org/2462975/episodes/19597832-aaron-patterson-ractors-jit-compilers-and-rewriting-how-gems-install 43m or subscribe to On Rails https://podcast.rubyonrails.org in your podcast player.