🌀 ask-rb

A Ruby ecosystem for building with LLMs.

ask-rb is a suite of Ruby gems for building any kind of LLM-powered application — coding assistants, chatbots, batch processors, desktop apps, RAG pipelines, and automated workflows.

Every output in these docs is real. The # => results in the code examples are the exact outputs from running the examples against the ask-rb gems — and, for the live-LLM examples, against real models. Run rake docs:generate in the ask-docs repo and the examples re-execute to produce the same results.

gem "ask-core"
gem "ask-llm-providers"
gem "ask-tools"
gem "ask-agent"
gem "ask-rag"     # RAG pipeline (loaders, splitters, vector stores)

What you’ll find here

Section	What’s covered
Getting Started	Your first agent, Rails integration, core concepts
Core Components	LLM providers, tools, sandboxes, agent loop, skills, schema, auth, RAG pipeline
Rails Integration	Setup, database tools, persistence, error services
Service Contexts	GitHub, Slack, Notion, Linear, Sentry, Honeybadger
Production	Observability, monitoring, tracing, evaluation
Extending	Custom tools, providers, agents, services, skills
Reference	Gem index, API docs, design philosophy

Design philosophy

1. Providers own their protocols. No shared abstraction layer. Each provider gem knows its own wire format, auth, and streaming.
2. Conversation, tools, and streaming are one thing. Always used together, shipped in the same gem.
3. Schema is the only shared primitive. JSON Schema has zero LLM dependencies and stands alone.
4. Auth lives with the provider. Each provider knows how to authenticate.
5. Tools are separate from the agent loop. Tool definitions are useful without an agent — batch scripts, REPLs, CI pipelines.
6. Everything has a programmatic API. Every gem can be used from Ruby code directly, not just through a CLI.
7. Extensions are first-class. Third-party code can hook into every lifecycle event.
8. No required database. In-memory is the default. ActiveRecord is an optional adapter.

Ready to build?

Jump to Getting Started. You’ll need Ruby 3.2+ and an API key for your provider of choice (or just Ollama, no key required).