When Rails 8 shipped, I was enthusiastic about the no-Redis 'Solid' stack and the one-person-framework thesis. Now I've run it in production for six months. Here's the honest retrospective: where it delivered, where the rough edges were, and whether the simplification held up under real load.
I've championed pgvector as the sensible default for vector search. After running it in production, here's what the introductory tutorials leave out: index choice and its trade-offs, the recall-versus-speed dial, keeping embeddings in sync, and the operational realities that only show up at scale.
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.