Rediscovering Plain Text
How Rails' markdown rendering feature helps debug LLM issues by providing full text representations of application state.
LLMs love text, and I've found the new Rails feature of rendering markdown incredibly useful for debugging issues with LLMs. I can generate a full text representation of the state, and include that with my question in the prompt to help understand what's going wrong.
This has fundamentally changed how I approach debugging. Instead of trying to describe the problem in words, I can just show the LLM the complete state of the system in a structured text format. It's like having a debugging partner who can read and understand complex state dumps instantly.
For example, I have been building a chat like tool using RubyLLM, and I often want to debug why the chat didn't follow the path I wanted it to go. So I add a .md formatting, and use ERB to fill out the page. I then copy and paste it into OpenCode, and use it to provide a better prompt later on.
For example, I have been building a chat like tool using RubyLLM, and I often want to debug why the chat didn't follow the path I wanted it to go. So I add a .md formatting, and use ERB to fill out the page. I then copy and paste it into OpenCode, and use it to provide a better prompt later on.