Remote Ruby Jeff Dickey on Mise, Precompiled Rubies, and much more
Mar 6, 2026
Jeff Dickey, creator of mise and tools for runtime/version management, secrets, and dev daemons. He recounts rewriting the Heroku CLI and why single-binary distribution and sandboxing matter. The chat covers shims vs PATH switching, tasks as a reliable alternative, Rust-first tooling, Pitchfork for dev daemons, fnox for encrypted secrets, and precompiled portable Rubies becoming mise’s default.
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Shims Versus Path Explained
- Version managers use shims or path/env injection; both have trade-offs in reliability and developer expectations.
- Mies implements both approaches plus a shell reload-on-prompt to handle edits and immediate version changes reliably.
Use Tasks For Reliable Environment Loading
- Use Mies tasks instead of relying on shell shims or prompt hooks for reliable scripted environments.
- Tasks are bash scripts with metadata that load the exact Mies environment, making CI and teammate workflows reproducible.
Why Rust For Developer Tools
- Jeff prefers Rust for developer tooling because it yields faster, more reliable shell extensions and better developer experience than Go for him.
- Benchmarks for shell-extension latency and Rust's performance edge drove the choice for Mies' implementation.