Justin Bowen is the creator of Active Agent. With 17 years of experience building with Ruby and Rails, he’s on a mission to bring his favorite language and framework into the future of AI development, ensuring they remain a top choice for developers creating AI-driven products.

Over the past decade, Justin has developed AI solutions across a variety of industries and technologies. He’s partnered with Stanford Healthcare on computer vision for operating rooms, built AI tools for monitoring cow health in dairy barns, and helped large Rails monoliths implement new features with LLMs. Frustrated by the lack of AI tools for Rails and the constant need to build custom infrastructure, Justin created Active Agent to make AI development faster and tons of fun.

You can follow Justin on LinkedIn.

Kieran is a Ruby developer and AI builder passionate about bridging Rails with modern AI workflows. With years of experience creating AI-powered products, he is the creator of Leva, a Ruby gem for evaluating LLM performance, and founder of Cora, an AI-powered inbox management tool. His work emphasizes practical, developer-friendly solutions for integrating AI into Rails applications, while encouraging experimentation and community-driven growth in the Ruby ecosystem.

Obie Fernandez is a Principal Engineer on Shopify’s Augmented Engineering team and a 20-year Ruby luminary. Author of the best-selling “The Rails Way” series and the recent “Patterns of Application Development Using AI,” he has founded multiple tech companies (Hashrocket, Olympia), edited Addison-Wesley’s Professional Ruby Series, and now spearheads open-source AI libraries such as Raix and Roast. Beyond code, Obie is an electronic music producer and touring DJ, bringing the same creative energy to both beats and software.

Scott Werner is the CEO and co-founder of Sublayer, an open-source Ruby AI-agent framework that turns your codebase into the prompt.  Previously he was CTO and co-founder of Sayspring, the voice-app prototyping tool acquired by Adobe in 2018, where he led the team behind Adobe Podcast. A Rubyist for 10 + years, he has built high-velocity product teams from early startups to Adobe, always focused on developer experience.  Scott shares experiments in agent-oriented programming, “vibe-coding,” and the post-LLM future of work in his Substack newsletter Works on My Machine and on stages such as ELC and Artificial Ruby. 

When he’s not shipping Sublayer releases he’s prototyping AI side-projects—like the Markdown-to-web gem “Monkey’s Paw”—or evangelizing metaprogramming as a super-power, not a foot-gun.