Writing code got cheap. Being responsible for it didn't. (What shipping an AI-generated gem taught me)
This title could be clearer and more informative.Try out Clickbait Shieldfor free (5 uses left this month).
A developer shares a candid account of shipping a Ruby gem (llm_cost_tracker) that was almost entirely AI-generated, only to receive public feedback exposing hallucinated, nonsensical code — like runtime checks guarding against the absence of hard dependencies. The key lesson: AI made writing code cheap, but responsibility for that code remains entirely with the developer. The author now reviews every AI-generated diff as critically as a coworker's PR and won't commit anything they can't explain. The gem itself tracks LLM API spend by feature/tenant in Rails apps using Postgres or MySQL, with no proxy or extra datastores required. Early adopters with real Rails apps are invited to test it.
