Actually, it appears that add_column … does reload column information - when you’re using the development environment. It doesn’t do this in the production environment, though, and if you try to update your new columns using Model.update_attributes you don’t get any messages anywhere to tell you that nothing’s been updated. It all appears to have worked fine.

Personally, I think this behaviour’s even worse than the original - when you develop the migration, it all works, and when you run it in production, it appears to have worked, but hasn’t actually worked!