My husband and I recently leased a new car, a Hyundai IONIQ. This is my first time driving a fully electric vehicle and also my first time in a car with such a gigantic touchscreen dashboard display. It feels futuristic, a far cry from my 2010 Ford Taurus. A few months into driving it, I encountered...

AI in Focus is our ongoing livestream where we get hands on leveraging AI in real product development. In this episode, Chad flew solo and picked up a thread from our previous episode Claude Code skills for FDA-style documentation. We had touched on the idea of using Claude skills for code quality a...

Recently, we released Roux, a set of native CSS styles and architecture opinions. This was born from years of collecting CSS patterns, opinions, and general best practices that worked on virtually any project, no matter the framework or industry. And it’s something we continue to add to and adjust a...

Sixty-six commits and the commands that didn’t survive Last week, I wrote about building a management system with Claude Code in a week. That post covered the foundation: meeting transcripts, daily logs, a /morning command that pulls everything together. By the end of week one, I had something usefu...

Haggis Ruby returns to Glasgow on April 23-24, and thoughtbot will be there. Rob Whittaker and Mina Slater are attending, and Aji Slater is speaking. Their talk is about playfulness in exploration when tackling novel challenges. What is the challenge in this case? Using Ruby for procedural generatio...

When working with Sidekiq, the framework makes a guarantee that a background job will execute at least once.1 Under normal operation, the process runs smoothly and queues of jobs are processed without issue. It’s critical to realize, however, that there is a small chance for job loss when using the ...

In an era where we can build faster than ever, reducing risk up front is more important than ever. In regulated industries, building products carries extra risk. External compliance and security requirements, complex tech requirements, confusing jargon, and large teams can result in missed deadlines...

Steve Polito makes the case for Bootstrap as the best front-end toolkit for server-rendered applications. In this episode of The Opinionated thoughtbotter, he and Svenja Schäfer debate Bootstrap vs. Tailwind, MVP speed, customization, documen…

Chad, Sami and Will bring a growing issue to the forefront as they discuss whether AI really is to blame for recent industry layoffs.

The Ruby language leans on duck typing rather than formal interfaces. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.” bodies = [poem, essay, case_study, user_manual].map(&:body) These objects come from different classes but all respond to body, so you can treat them uniformly. That’s ...

I copied a prompt and built a management system in a week I’d been reading about people building personal operating systems with Claude Code. Someone had started a new CTO role, opened a folder, and asked Claude to make them the best CTO possible. Three weeks later, they had a system that: processed...

If you’re using RubyLLM in production (or planning to), you’re probably already enjoying its elegant interface for conversation management: tool calls, chat contexts and messages handled neatly. But what happens when you need to debug a latency issue, audit what the model said, track token costs, or...

No one sets out to write a slow test, and yet it happens. A test matcher that burns through a full Capybara timeout. An innocent-looking factory that cascades into dozens of records. One test at a time, your suite gets slower. By the time you notice, CI takes hours and nobody wants to touch it. Havi...

Our hosts come together to wrap up season 2 and share some of their highlights along the way.

Over the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with app generation tools like Lovable, Bubble, Base44, Claude Code, and ChatGPT. Internally, we’ve also been sharing our development cycle on an internal tool called ReadySetGo that generates Rails apps using thoughtbot’s best practices. Like many p...

Aji and Joël get into a flow as they discuss the different diagrams that help guide their thought processes when working.

Shipping API Docs Under Pressure I’ve been lucky enough to work on many different types of projects at thoughtbot, and it always amazes me how important it is to adapt not only to the style of the project, but to the style of the business behind it. I currently find myself consulting on a fast-paced...