Rails 8 is coming with a quietly radical idea: you might not need Redis anymore. Solid Queue and Solid Cache move background jobs and caching into your database, collapsing the standard Rails production stack. A look at what the Solid libraries do, why 'just use Postgres' keeps winning, and when the old answer still applies.
Once your semantic search outgrows a toy dataset, the question arrives: stay with pgvector in Postgres, or move to a dedicated vector database like Pinecone, Qdrant, or Weaviate? A deep-dive on what actually changes at scale, what you give up by leaving Postgres, and how to decide without over-engineering.
Open-weight models like Llama 2 and Mistral mean you can now run a capable LLM on your own infrastructure instead of calling someone's API. A look at why you'd want to — privacy, cost, control — what it actually costs you in ops, and the honest question of whether you should.