Writing code got cheap. Being responsible for it didn't. (What shipping an AI-generated gem taught me)
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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.
Table of contents
The confessionThe idea was fine. I wasn't.What I changed, and what I didn'tThe lesson: writing code got cheap, so the job movedWhere it honestly standsSort: