&quot;makes it easy to install 1,000 gems into your project without a single line of configuration, is exactly why it’s hard to debug&quot;.<p>This &quot;let someone else do the work, get it from a gem&quot; mindset is what kills long lived projects. It has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with experience.<p>You don&#x27;t need 1000 gems. Managing anything more than core dependancies in a project can easily create exponential bugs and consume all your resources to fix. Remember left-pad?<p>This is true in any language and ecosystem and has nothing to do with rails&#x2F;gems&#x2F;ruby. The same is with Python, JS, PHP.<p>Senior&#x2F;Lead devs need to carefully curate what a projects foundation <i>is</i>. A strong, well designed foundation means you have something solid to build on. If you don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s in your deps, haven&#x27;t read their code, see how often it&#x27;s updated and how many people <i>actively</i> use it, and can say you are using <i>80% or more of the code in it</i> then don&#x27;t use it.<p>Writing your own code is often the best route since it fixes your exact use case, no matter the language, libraries or frameworks being used.