Our hosts Chad and Sami team up this week to discuss AI code bases and whether they can be built to be developer friendly and with best practices in mind.

The checklist I expected Last week I attended a workshop on neuroinclusivity in learning design. I expected to come away with a checklist. Use larger fonts Send slides in advance Offer cameras off Use a dyslexia-friendly typeface Instead, the biggest takeaway was that there is no checklist. Hold on ...

Your most-viewed page might be one no human has ever opened. That is what AI crawlers have done to view tracking in 2026. I ran into this problem on a production app that needed engagement tracking. The first version tracked everything server-side, the way Rails apps have done analytics for years. I...

Aji and Sally are back together again, this time to discuss the different apps they use to make their workflows and To Do lists easier and quicker to achieve.

Stop. Right now, stop reading and take 2 minutes. Draw how to make toast. That’s it. No further instruction. No clarification. Just those words on repeat. “Draw how to make toast.” The moment you say it, something interesting happens. Everyone stops. Instantly engaged. Then the questions start. “Wha...

So one day a client came to me and said: “we want a Chrome extension.” Simple enough, right? First thing to know: the client didn’t want to build a real extension from scratch with its own codebase and logic. They wanted a wrapper, essentially their existing Rails app, dressed up and living inside a...

As AI-assisted software development becomes more widely adopted, more of the Ruby code in our Rails apps is being written by agents. Each team has its own conventions for how that code should look and behave, and we want those conventions enforced automatically rather than relying on the agent to re...

Our blog posts now have the option to Copy as Markdown to help our robotic friends more easily consume our content. (It’s just up there, below the title) Click the button and you will get this blog post copied to your clipboard in cleanly formatted Markdown. Then paste it into any prompt to give you...

Sally and Joël get technical as they lay out their thoughts on blog posts.

A few months ago we shipped a chat experience to production. Users ask a question, our app routes it through an LLM model, the model calls a few internal tools, and an answer comes back from it. It worked. Sort of. When the model answered well, we had no idea why. When it answered badly, we had no i...

Sometimes AI really does feel like magic, and right now just about any no-code app builder provides that magical experience for entrepreneurs with big ideas but no coding skills. You can spend half an hour typing a few details about your app into Lovable and create a simple, functional app with a po...

Welcome to another edition of This Week in #dev, a series of posts where we bring some of our most interesting Slack conversations to the public. Alternative Text for CSS-Generated Content Matheus Richard learned that the CSS content property accepts alternative text for screen readers, separated by...

The Giant Robots trio are back to discuss the development of thoughtbot’s ReadySetGo app, and whether AI might be causing developers to go backwards.

I ran HTML-validate and Axe core and a Claude prompt against a new website I’m building, and they caught a bunch of stuff I missed! This gave me a chance to remember the easily overlooked bits of building a website. And I visited a few dark corners of the HTML spec I hadn’t been to yet! Data attribu...

Duck Typer is a Ruby gem that validates interface compatibility across polymorphic classes sharing the same role, so they can be used interchangeably. It detects and clearly reports interface drift directly in your test suite. Since Duck Typer launched, there’s been some discussion about the validit...

The Bike Shed celebrates its 500th episode with hosts new and old as they reflect on the show’s history and ask, what’s new in your world?

Biometrics (Face ID, Fingerprint and more) authentication have quickly become something users expect from a modern mobile app. These are fast, familiar, and removes friction that comes with typing passwords on the phone. With React Native, biometrics authentication can be an easy feature or a tricky...

Moving from Figma to Claude Code and back again is now possible. This could be a game changer for less technical, more visual Product Designers. What is this post about?: In June 2025, Figma announced the beta release of their MCP server, a connection that lets AI coding tools read your Figma files ...

For more than two decades, Ruby has shaped how we think about software development at thoughtbot. It influenced how we write code, how we collaborate, how we teach, and how we build products alongside our clients. Many of the practices, tools, and ideas that define our company today were either born...

This summer, we’re bringing the London Tech Leaders Meetup series outside. Over the next few months, we’ll be hosting a series of outdoor summer gatherings across London for founders, CTOs, engineering managers, product leaders, designers, and builders who enjoy having thoughtful conversations with ...

Last week I attended an excellent conference in the Irish consulate in San Francisco titled “AI & Minority Languages: A Bay Area Perspective”. Our team at thoughtbot speaks over 25 different languages, from Swedish to Bekwarra, so this conference was of particular relevance. Here are my key takeaway...

Last week I attended Startup Grind Global in Redwood City, CA. I find it can be helpful to get boots on the ground to hear first hand what’s happening in the industry. Here are my six key takeaways, grouped by theme. As you can probably guess, there was a lot of AI talk, so please bear in mind there...

Ana Tudor posted about this recently and I agree: CSS shorthand properties are genuinely useful, but they’re not universally applicable. There are no hard and fast rules here. The question to ask yourself isn’t “can I shorthand this?” but “will someone reading this later, including future me, unders...

One of the best things about hosting the Giant Robots podcast is that I get to spend time talking to people that might otherwise pass me by. It’s an opportunity to turn casual small talk into meaningful conversation. After meeting Lord Chris Holmes at the DigiGov Expo in 2024, where I was collecting...

I didn’t realize it had a name until I looked it up, but a Rubin vase is a famous optical illusion. It’s the one where you first see two faces looking at one another, and then realize it can instead be seen as a vase. You might have had it the other way around. That one is well known enough that you...

If I’m measuring water into a marked cup, I slow down as I’m nearing the mark because I don’t want to overshoot it. I bet you do that too. I can pour quickly at first, but as I near the line, I’ll decide I need to be more precise. I slow the rate so I can control it more. If I poured it all at full ...

I was planning to build a tiny storage shed for my small backyard. Part of me wanted to jump in and start framing right away, but lumber is expensive and I could imagine wasting it. Being wood, the structure could easily become too heavy to move. I might need access to the wall behind it, so I wante...

During a legacy data migration, imported images kept rendering as broken files. Everything looked fine in the logs. No errors, no warnings. It took me some back and forth to finally discover that TDS was quietly truncating varbinary(max) columns on the way out. One SQL command fixed it. client.execu...

Presenting clean-rspec-output, a Claude skill that systematically eliminates unexpected output from a Ruby on Rails RSpec test suite. You know the feeling. You run bundle exec rspec and instead of a clean wall of dots, you get this: ❯ bundle exec rspec DEPRECATION WARNING: Defining enums with keywor...

At the end of 2025, two things clicked for me at the same time. First, I was feeling a lack of professional network in Austin that had been building up for some time. I had been filling this void through Linkedin, but the increase of AI-generated communication had put a real damper on the connection...