Talk at wroclove.rb 2025 by Seth Horsley (with Joel Drapper co-presenting part of the content). Tells the story of migrating Statesert's front end from a MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) to Ruby on Rails: first a painful MongoDB→PostgreSQL data migration, then a front-end migration away from React. Evaluates options for the view layer: default ERB/ActionView (rejected — not modular, template logic coupled to presentation, hard to test, no component boundaries), a custom component system (rejected — too much work to reinvent rendering and reach ViewComponent parity), and ViewComponent (rejected — logic split across .rb + .html files, maintainers perceived as moving away from it). Lands on Phlex: one Ruby file per component, native Ruby syntax, composable, type-safe-capable, easier testing. Introduces Ruby UI, a shadcn/ui-style component library for Phlex (button with primary/secondary variants, select dropdown generator CLI that ejects components into the host app with JS dependencies, animations). Joel Drapper joins on stage to explain Phlex's 'accordion of complexity' for a table component (basic data-driven table → granular atomic-component table → DSL-driven column-based table) and debunks the 'Phlex is 12× faster than ERB' benchmark myth — Phlex does more work per tag but wins dramatically on apps with thousands of partials/components; real-world throughput saturates the network before the CPU. Ends with a (true) story of composing a hotel lockout / sleepover with Joel and Stephen Margheim after a night out in Wrocław — Seth's first-ever conference talk.