Hacktoberfest 2025: Our Team’s Open Source Contributions in AI and Technical Debt Management

At OmbuLabs, open source has always been at the core of our values. This year, for Hacktoberfest 2025, our team took the opportunity to give back to the communities that power our daily work, from Ruby developers tackling technical debt to those building the next generation of AI tools. Throughout October, we dedicated focused internal time to open source contributions. Our goal was twofold:

1. Strengthen and maintain the tools that power our work at FastRuby.io, helping teams manage technical debt and improve code quality.
2. Advance Ruby’s presence in artificial intelligence, contributing to libraries and frameworks that integrate Ruby with modern AI technologies. By aligning Hacktoberfest participation with our mission to give back, we turned this month into an opportunity for growth, learning, and meaningful community impact.

The Projects and Focus Areas

We organized our work around our two brands, FastRuby.io opens a new window and OmbuLabs.ai opens a new window , each representing a distinct but complementary area of our expertise. Unlike in past years, we didn’t split into separate smaller teams. Instead, our developers collaborated across projects, sharing ideas and pairing up to merge dozens of pull requests. This approach fostered deeper collaboration and allowed us to make broader contributions across multiple repositories.

FastRuby.io: Tackling Technical Debt

For the first three weeks of October, our attention was centered on our projects that improve code quality, maintainability, and technical debt management. Our team contributed to several open source tools that are widely used in the Ruby community:

• RailsBump.org opens a new window : A tool to check your Ruby gems for compatibility with all Rails minor versions.
• RubyCritic opens a new window : A static analysis tool that visualizes code quality metrics.
• Skunk opens a new window : A gem that gives another metric to help developers identify code that would benefit from refactoring.
• next_rails opens a new window : A gem that assists with Rails upgrades by identifying compatibility issues.
• reek opens a new window : A classic Ruby tool for detecting code smells.
• ruby_or_rails opens a new window : A Discord bot that shares puzzles about different Ruby and Rails methods.
• benchmark-fyi opens a new window : A project to share benchmark-ips data for all your benchmarks.

OmbuLabs.ai: AI Meets Ruby

In the final week of Hacktoberfest, we turned our focus to the AI side of our work at OmbuLabs.ai. With the growing interest in integrating Ruby applications with large language models (LLMs), our team explored and contributed to tools that bridge the gap between Ruby and AI frameworks. We decided to focus our contributions on the following projects:

• Active Agent opens a new window : A framework to allow Rails applications to incorporate agents.
• DSPy.rb opens a new window : A Ruby port of Stanford’s DSPy library opens a new window for programmatic prompting.
• langchain.rb opens a new window : A Ruby port of the popular LangChain framework, designed for building powerful applications on top of LLMs.

These projects reflect our commitment to making Ruby a first-class citizen in the world of AI, empowering developers to experiment, prototype, and build intelligent systems without leaving the Ruby ecosystem.

Our Contributions

We were able to contribute a lot this Hacktoberfest, especially in our FastRuby.io projects. Here’s what we were able to ship this October.

RubyCritic

Julio opens a new window and I focused on removing parser warnings in Ruby 3.4 and above.

• PR #539 opens a new window : Updated RubyCritic to support the new Prism parser in Ruby 3.4 and above.

Skunk

Henrique opens a new window , Juan opens a new window , and Francois opens a new window contributed to Skunk in multiple ways, including adding Ruby 3.4 support, adding HTML report generation, and refactoring Skunk’s analysis code.

• PR #124 opens a new window : Added Ruby 3.4 CI compatibility and gem updates.
• PR #123 opens a new window : Introduced HTML report generation, improved JSON output structure, and added a new configuration class for format selection.
• PR #127 opens a new window : Refactored the analysis layer to centralize Skunk attributes within RubyCritic’s module collection, simplifying the architecture and improving maintainability.

ruby_or_rails

Fiona opens a new window , Juan opens a new window , Francois opens a new window , Mateus opens a new window , Julio opens a new window and Rishi opens a new window made numerous usability and UI improvements to our community puzzle bot:

• PR #35 opens a new window : Added the ability to update puzzles directly from the admin table.
• PR #38 opens a new window : Used simple_format to preserve line breaks and improve puzzle readability.
• PR #40 opens a new window : Added validations to the Puzzle model.
• PR #34 opens a new window : Displayed “Sent” dates in a readable format.
• PR #37 opens a new window : Fixed validation issues when seeding data.
• PR #44 opens a new window : Improved the edit modal for better text area usability.
• PR #46 opens a new window : Displayed the total count of puzzles in each table.

Together, these changes made the bot easier to use, maintain, and contribute to, both for our internal team and for the Ruby community at large.

Benchmark.fyi

Ariel opens a new window upgraded Rails and refactored code to make it adhere to Rails conventions:

• PR #16 opens a new window : Updated the platform to make Rails 7.1 the current version.
• PR #15 opens a new window : Refactored models and controllers to follow Rails conventions, including strong parameters, validations, and better JSON handling.

RailsBump

Mateus opens a new window and Julio opens a new window upgraded the application and enhanced the UI:

• PR #126 opens a new window : Upgraded the app to Rails 8.0 and removed Yarn for a cleaner, dependency-free setup.
• PR #125 opens a new window : Enhanced the compatibility data table, adding richer metadata to the rake task for better tracking.
• PR #128 opens a new window : Improved the UI for large tables with horizontal scroll support and fixed CI package installation issues.

Dspy.rb

Francois opens a new window improved the modularity and reduced core gem dependencies.

• PR #178 opens a new window : Extracted OpenAI adapter to dspy-openai gem.

Looking Ahead

Hacktoberfest isn’t just about open source contributions; it’s about strengthening the ecosystem we all rely on. This year’s efforts reinforced our belief that investing in open source pays dividends not just for the community, but also for our own growth as developers and teams.

We’re proud of what we accomplished and excited to continue maintaining and improving the tools that make our work possible, whether that’s helping teams upgrade legacy Rails applications or pioneering the next generation of AI integrations in Ruby.