If you’re following the AI hype train, you’ll have heard serious software people talk about building software (without needing to code) while they take their kids to the park. This is obviously appealing, but it’s often discussed in ways that imply serious barriers to entry: the interviewee from Ant...

On a website I worked on, I noticed some logos stacked vertically on the left instead of being spread horizontally and evenly spaced, as I expected, and as the design clearly suggested. Opened an issue. Carefully listed browsers and versions. I investigated like a careful end-user. Not like a develo...

I’m not going to lie, when I start my day and I see 10 Dependabot PRs open in the project, I just want to close the laptop and go for a walk. And I have the feeling that, like me, many other developers feel the same way, because I keep seeing Dependabot PRs sit open in projects for weeks. Nobody wan...

Every session ends with a retro. This week, twenty-four commits out of about a hundred and forty started with that retro. Only a handful added anything new. I wasn’t building the system anymore. It was refactoring itself. It is Week Four. Tuesday: four commits before lunch The 17th. Four refactor-fr...

CSS got some handy new functions recently: sibling-index() and sibling-count(). sibling-index() gives us a number based on a child element’s position relative to its siblings, starting at 1. For example, the third child in a list of 10 would have an index of 3. sibling-count() gives us the total num...

On Tuesday, 11 February, I made seventeen commits to my management system. That is more than any other day in the project so far. The previous two weeks had been about structure. Daily routines. Meeting sync. Project tracking. This week was about communication. The trigger was simple. I ran /inbox a...

I’m an AI skeptic. I’ve resisted using AI in my work and haven’t installed any AI tools before. I have asked ChatGPT questions a few times, but I end up yelling at a robot more often than I end up with the answer I was looking for. I have concerns about the effect on the environment, the ethics of h...

A few weeks ago, Axios, the popular HTTP client for JavaScript, suffered a supply chain attack on NPM. An attacker compromised the lead maintainer’s NPM account through social engineering and published two backdoored versions that delivered a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) to macOS, Windo...

A lot of teams assume moving faster means hiring more developers or adopting the latest framework. But in our experience, the biggest drag on development speed is usually upstream. It’s how decisions get made, the way priorities are set, and whether there’s alignment (or misalignment) across teams. ...

If you’re building LLM-powered features in a regulated industry, sending unfiltered PII to a third-party provider isn’t just risky, it may violate compliance requirements like HIPAA or GDPR. That’s why we originally built Top Secret. However, when we first released it, RubyLLM was still in its early...

As a product manager, my weeks are defined by context switching. Between working on a client project, internal initiatives, leadership meetings, 1:1s, investment time, or personal development, there’s a lot to hold at once. Each of those contexts has its own history, to-do lists, open questions, fol...

Our hosts provide a peek behind the scenes as they discuss their work on recent thoughtbot projects.

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...