Rails Meetup Kathmandu - Feb 2026
I gave a talk today at the Rails Kathmandu meetup. Ruby version of Thorsten Ball's seminal blog ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent and just how simple it is to do it with Rails.
Update Feb 28: Please read Thorsten's blog first. Now that I had some time to reflect, my slides and me walking the attendees through the code in the slide didn't help as much as I hoped with the understanding and realization that I hoped to pass on, along with my excitement for all of this. I may not have been the best speaker to walk someone through this journey.
The talk was meant to show you how easy it was to create read, list and edit/write capabilities in an agent, and how simple an agent was (less than 100 lines of ruby code - LLM, tools and a loop). And when all was said and done, the demo of the agent in rails adding bash tool to its own codebase using the coding agent itself would result in what is basically pi coding agent https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages/coding-agent.
If you install Mario's pi coding agent from npm right now, those 4 tools are all you get and it works amazingly well. There is beauty in this simplicity.
I hoped that, by showing you basically built a coding agent almost as capable as pi, in rails in about 200 lines of code that runs in background jobs and streams result to a frontend built from rails scaffold of the two models we add, and scale as much as you want, would get people thinking, but I'm not entirely sure I managed to do that.
That is why, please read Thorsten's blog and then make the agent in rails app yourself, the primitives will jump out at you and the pieces will start to click. If you like, go read the pi coding agent's code after that and you'll have a lot of "huh" and "duh" moments. I know I had many.
I really only was at the meetup to gush how simple building a coding agent was with ruby & rails, and that we should look into the internals of the systems and primitives that have changed our industry and profession so drastically in a matter of few months and understand them. That is how we change something from known unknowns to known knowns.
And if you're reading this right now, you owe it to yourself to spend some time on those blog and repo from people in the trenches. I am only a messenger. I build SaaS for living. I am, at the same time, very far from the trenches they are in and spend 16 hours a day walking along the path that they have already dug. I know little and so I am learning.
Talk Slides: rails-meetup-ktm-feb-2026.saugatkhadka.com ↗
If you were there and I confused you, please read this blog. If I didn't and it got you thinking, then you should absolutely read it. And if you didn't make it to the meetup (please come to the next one, it's nice I swear), it is very very important that you read that blog.
It has shaped the last 10 months of my life and continues to do more over time. I was there at the meetup to gush about that ngl. So I urge you to sit down with that blog for the next 20 minutes and let Thorsten walk you through writing your very own coding agent, and let it open your mind to new ideas.
And when all is done and you have your agent, please read The Coding agent is dead. Let it open you to the full array of possibilities out there right now and go build amazing stuff!