Active Job and Background Processing for AI Features in Rails

This is Part 15 of the Ruby for AI series. We just covered ActionCable for real-time features. Now let's talk about the engine behind every serious AI feature: background jobs. AI API calls are slow. Embedding generation takes time. PDF processing blocks threads. You never, ever want your web request sitting there waiting for OpenAI to respond. Background jobs solve this completely. Active Job: The Interface Active Job is Rails' unified API for background processing. It's an abstrac