Episode 548: MCP + Generators with Andy Andrea and Rachael Wright-Munn

Sometimes the best conference conversations start with a weird idea.

Rachael Wright-Munn and Andy Andrea join me to revisit a moment at RubyConf when Andy's experiment with schemas and MCP tools collided with a problem Rachel had been trying to solve for Ruby Events: how to make Rails generators easily accessible to AI.

What started as an excited post-talk conversation quickly became an in-person pair programming session, and eventually working MCP tooling that Rachel now uses to maintain Ruby Events. The result has reduced some event updates from more than an hour of manual work to roughly 10–15 minutes.

They dig into how MCP tools work, why wrapping deterministic Rails generators can make AI workflows more reliable, and the tradeoffs between MCP, CLIs, skills, and letting models manipulate files directly. The conversation expands into harness engineering, metaprogramming, Git worktrees, dev containers, tool calling, and the strange reality that even developers deeply immersed in AI still feel like they're constantly trying to catch up.

It's a conversation about Ruby, AI, developer tooling—and the kind of serendipitous collaboration that still makes getting together at Ruby conferences so valuable.

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