Welcome to another issue of the Newsletter!
This month feels a bit slower than usual. It seems the debates around whether to use types in Ruby have settled. The sides have been chosen, and the community is now channeling its energy into building solid tools instead of arguing on social media. The focus has shifted from “why” to “how,” and the tooling ecosystem is maturing nicely.
A standout release this month comes from Shopify with rubydex 0.2.3. It is a new, high-performance static analysis engine designed to power type checkers, linters, and language servers. With both Ruby and Rust APIs, it is a big step forward for code indexing and type analysis. You can read more about the vision behind it on the Rails at Scale blog.
If you are looking to improve your codebase documentation, especially to give AI agents more context, docscribe is an excellent tool that analyzes your AST to generate YARD-style comments. It was just updated to version 1.3.1, which brings much needed RBS types inference consistency to the table.
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We are also seeing a trend of tools being rewritten or optimized for speed. sentinel-rb 0.4.2 is a great example. It is an inline RBS parser rewritten in Rust for better performance. Meanwhile, the generators and linters keep getting sharper. rbs-inline 0.14.0 and rubocop-rbs_inline 1.5.4 both shipped updates, along with rbs-siggen 0.2.1 and rbs_activesupport 1.7.1.
The Sorbet side of the fence has been active as well. We saw updates to grape_sorbet 0.1.2 for API signatures, ruby-enhance_module 0.2.0, and ruby-shale-builder 0.10.0. IDE support continues to improve with vscode-sorbetto 0.3.36. And for those who love Rust paradigms, Olivier Bellone’s R gem brings Rust’s Result type to Ruby using Sorbet.
AI heavily influences our workflows, and the community is actively looking for solutions in that field. claude-ruby-plugins offers fresh Claude Code skills specifically tailored for writing RBS.
For some deeper learning, check out the fresh Rails World 2026 presentation Types as Policy by Andrew Gauger. And since useful materials on static typing are rare, I also want to share a recent video on Ruby static typing. It is in Russian, but if you speak the language, it is definitely worth a watch.
Thanks for reading, and see you next month. ✍️
Your faithful static typing guy ✍️
Your essential Static Typing toolset
rbs
official Ruby Signature solution from the Ruby team
repo
rbs-inline
extension to rbs lets you write signatures in line with your code
repo
steep
type checker for the Ruby signatures
repo
sorbet
type signature and type checking solution designed by Stripe
repo
ruby-lsp
essential toolset and extension, which helps with Ruby development in the VS Code
repo
steep VS Code extension
steep integration with the IDE
repo
rbs syntax VS Code extension
ease the work with RBS signature files
repo
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“Let's do TDD - type-driven development”
You can find all the previous issues of the newsletter in my archive.
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Cheers,
