Templates Over Gems: Building My Own Rails Playbook

I started building out a templates folder to solve a problem I kept running into: doing the same setup work over and over again across different apps.

Instead of pulling in gems for everything, I am documenting repeatable patterns as templates. Controllers, services, integrations, setup steps, all of it. The idea is simple. If I have done it once, I should not have to think about it again.

This is not a replacement for gems. It is more like a personal framework that sits on top of Rails. Each template captures how I actually build things, not how a gem author thinks I should build things.

The real advantage shows up when paired with AI. Instead of starting from scratch or trying to retrofit generic solutions, I can reference a template and generate something that already matches my architecture, naming, and patterns.

It also forces me to understand what I am building. No black boxes. If something breaks, I know exactly where to look because I wrote the pattern.

Yes, it is technically reinventing the wheel. That is the point. I am building the wheel once, documenting it, and then reusing it everywhere with full control.

Long term, this becomes a library of proven implementations that scale with me instead of fighting me.