I'm building something that is only pointed at Claude, and I don't anticipate moving away from the Anthropic ecosystem. Does RubyLLM offer me an advantage over directly using Anthropic's Ruby SDK?
To put it differently, is this more like choosing between Fog and aws-sdk-s3, or choosing between Active Storage and aws-sdk-s3?
Plus, too many companies don't spend their money in a logical fashion. As a manager, you can direct your $200,000/year engineer in any way you want, but try to spend any amount of money on a new SaaS product and procurement might huffily demand hours of your time and weeks of delay to authorize even $40/month, let alone $400/month.
That said, I think the path Brandur is describing is well-trodden and proven out by projects like Sidekiq.
It’s a project of the non-profit Open Transit Software Foundation that we’re using to fund our other initiatives, like bringing real-time transit information to billions of people around the world.
Since last month, I've added a layer of polish to the product, added support for deploying a SMS and phone gateway to realtime transit information, and built out the marketing website to include solutions pages for higher education, SMS, and more.
All of this depends on a bunch of really cool open source projects we’re building, like Maglev, a Golang server that can power realtime transit apps. Maglev is already being used in production, and you can set up a local install in about 15 minutes: https://opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org/2026/04/setting-up...
The other OSS projects we have include: building data products, iOS and Android apps, web apps, a Pebble watch app(!), and too many others to list. See them all here: https://github.com/onebusaway/
Swift/iOS: An app that helps me track how much time I spend in the five heart rate zones, so that I can better focus my workouts. I'm working on version 2 right now, which will take advantage of some new features in iOS 27 and has an all new UI. https://www.zone2.app
Democracy and transit enthusiast. My day job involves healthcare technology.
OneBusAway: http://onebusaway.org
Email: [email protected]
GitHub: http://github.com/aaronbrethorst
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/brethorsting.com
Photography: http://www.aaronbrethorstphotography.com
Blog: Photography: http://brethorsting.com