Pry and byebug paved the way in a lot of ways for this work, but they break in fundamental ways across a range of use cases, such as multithreading, multifiber, or quirk around exception handling. While these are all fixable, so we're the lack of standard quality tooling , which is quietly being addressed by irb and debug gems.

Byebug and pry are pretty much the first gems I add to any gemfile. But like the other comment said, they break in a few ways that this new irb seems not to.

One thing I can think of is multi line statements (on Byebug). Really annoying to test longer method chains. Would love a debugger that supports it out of the box, as the new irb seems to do.

Removing two external dependencies from your project is a nice win. I switched a while back. Get used to "binding.irb" and you'll thank yourself later.