Every morning, I see the same thing on my Twitter feed or the GitHub Trending page. A new Ruby gem is released that promises to "revolutionize" how we handle state, or a new "minimalist" alternative to a standard Rails tool that has 500 stars in its first week.
As developers, we love new things. We love "cleaner" syntax and smaller dependencies. But after building and maintaining Rails apps for years, I’ve stopped chasing the hype.
In 2026, my Gemfile is intentionally boring. I prefer gems that have been around for a decade over the latest shiny trends. Here is why boring tech is actually a solo developer's greatest competitive advantage.
1. The "Abandoned Gem" Trap
When you use a brand-new gem that just trended on GitHub, you are taking a massive risk.
The maintainer might be excited today, but what happens in six months when they get a new job or lose interest in the project? If that gem breaks when Rails 8.1 comes out, you are the one who has to fix the source code or find a way to migrate away from it.
"Boring" gems like Devise, Sidekiq, or Kaminari have survived multiple Rails version upgrades. They have a team of maintainers and a massive community ensuring they don't die. For a solo developer, "stability" is a feature that is more important than "cool syntax."
2. AI and Documentation Edge
In the era of Vibe Coding and AI assistants like Cursor or ChatGPT, boring gems have a huge advantage: Training Data.
AI models have read millions of lines of code involving the "standard" gems.
- If I ask an AI to "Add a password reset flow using Devise," it gets it right 100% of the time.
- If I use a shiny new auth library released three months ago, the AI will hallucinate and give me broken code because it hasn't seen enough examples yet.
By using the most popular gems, you make your AI assistant 10x more effective. You can find the answer to any bug on StackOverflow in 30 seconds. With shiny new gems, you are the one writing the first StackOverflow question.
3. The "Standard" Rails Way (Omakase)
Rails is built on the idea of Convention over Configuration. When you stick to the "Boring" defaults, your app stays standard.
If I hire a freelancer or bring in a partner to help me with a project, they already know how Devise works. They already know how to check a Sidekiq queue. If I have replaced every standard tool with a "shiny" alternative, I have to spend three days teaching them my unique, custom stack.
4. Don't Waste Your "Innovation Tokens"
There is a great concept in engineering called Innovation Tokens. You only get a few of them for each project.
If you spend your tokens on a "revolutionary new way to handle database IDs" and a "bleeding-edge frontend reactive library," you have no tokens left to spend on the Actual Business Logic that makes your app unique.
I save my innovation for the features that my customers pay for. I don't want to innovate on "how to upload a file" or "how to paginate a list." I want those things to be as boring and invisible as possible.
Summary: My "Boring" Checklist
Before I add a new gem to my project, I check three things:
- Age: Has it been maintained for at least 2 or 3 years?
- Usage: Does it have millions of downloads on RubyGems?
- Recent Activity: Was there a commit or a release in the last 6 months?
If the answer to any of these is "No," I usually stick to the standard Rails default, even if the new gem looks "fancier."
Boring gems allow you to focus on shipping products instead of fixing your tools. In the world of indie hacking, the developer who ships the most wins - and boring tech helps you ship.
