intercooler just gives you finer grained control over your ajax requests, which makes it easier to implement stuff like active search, etc.

turbolinks is great if you just want a faster pure web-app.

I've used both successfully independently and in tandem.

That's interesting! I do some ajax with the js.erb files, but I honestly find that it's pretty messy & gross. Maybe I could eliminate those .js.erb files with intercooler.js (or clean them up).

Do you find that intercooler lets you avoid using .js.erb files altogether?