6 key insights from Startup Grind Global 2026

Here are 6 key insights I took from the Startup Grind Global conference 2026 along with 3 cool companies worth checking out! | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 days ago

When to use (and not use) CSS shorthand properties

A case for verbosity in CSS properties. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 3 days ago

Reflections on my conversation with Lord Chris Holmes MBE

Two months ago I sat down with Lord Chris Holmes MBE to talk about his AI regulation private members bill. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 4 days ago

Illusions Of Fluency

And then I tried to explain it. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 5 days ago

The Pace Of Feedback

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 6 days ago

A Conversation With The Situation

My situation disagreed. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 9 days ago

The TEXTSIZE trap: how TDS silently truncates your binary data in Rails

SQL Server has a session-level setting that silently truncates your binary data before it ever reaches Ruby. It defaults to 4KB. Most drivers fix it automatically. tiny_tds does not. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 10 days ago

The output must be cleaned (with skill)

A Claude skill for the noisy RSpec output you've always wanted to clean up. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 11 days ago

Austin Tech Leaders is growing, thoughtfully (and we have the photos to prove it)

How we're building a curated tech leadership community in Austin, from intimate meetups to a SXSW event, and why intention beats scale. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 12 days ago

Simple, affordable unsupervised agentic coding from my phone with Claude Code in Github Actions

Podcasts and the blogosphere are awash with people talking about building software while away from their desks, but often burning serious cash in the process. Here's a simple and cheap way to try this out for yourself. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 13 days ago

Your carousel might not be accessible: designing for reduced motion

Accessibility as the key factor for debugging, designing and developing a carousel with logos on a webpage. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 16 days ago

Reviewing Dependabot PRs is boring. Let Claude do it for you.

A Claude skill to do the boring stuff for us. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 17 days ago

Retro-driven development

Twenty-four refactor-from-retro commits in a week. How the management system started refactoring itself. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 19 days ago

Trimming our CSS with sibling-index() and sibling-count()

We're experimenting with two new CSS functions to clean up our logo marquee code. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 23 days ago

Seven commands and the communication layer that emerged

Week three of building a management system with Claude Code. Seventeen commits in one day, a command that lasted 24 hours, and the realisation that commands are conversations. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 24 days ago

Human vs Machine: the Bug

Sally fixes a bug without AI, then invites Claude to try. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 25 days ago

Let's enable MFA for all Ruby gems

Supply chain attacks are getting more common. RubyGems might be next. Here's how to help the ecosystem be safer. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 26 days ago

Ship faster: How to unlock development speed in regulated industries

Slow development isn’t always a code problem. It’s often a process one, especially in regulated industries. Here’s how navigating change to embrace a shared agile process helped one of our clients start finishing ahead of schedule. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 27 days ago

PII filtering for RubyLLM with Top Secret

Automatically filter sensitive information from your RubyLLM conversations before it reaches third-party providers. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Giant Robots Podcast Ep 608: Project Updates with Will, Chad and Sami

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


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

The AI stack I developed to help me context switch

How I use Obsidian, Claude Projects, and Gemini Meeting Notes to stay present when my brain has too many tabs open. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

The age of snarky UI

Your devices are all judging you. They're just too polite to say it directly. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

AI in Focus: A new Claude Skill for Rails code audits

Learn what happened when Chad installed the open source rails-audit-thoughtbot Claude skill, ran it on thoughtbot's decade-old internal Hub app, and walked through hits, misses, and how we'd tighten the skill over time. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

You, too, can make a boilerplate

Adapt your own patterns and processes into a reusable piece of content. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Sixty-six commits and the commands that didn't survive

In week two of building a management system with Claude Code, I created fifteen commands in a day. By the end of the week, I'd deleted three of them. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Attending and speaking at Haggis Ruby

thoughtbot is heading to Haggis Ruby in Glasgow on April 23-24. Come find us. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Enhancing job reliability with Sidekiq Pro's super fetch strategy

Explores how the core Sidekiq fetch behavior has the potential to lead to loss of job data and how the super fetch strategy provided by Sidekiq Pro can resolve this. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

How strategic product design reduces risk before you write code

Common ways projects in regulated industries fail and how thoughtbot designers proactively reduce risk. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

The Opinionated thoughtbotter: Bootstrap is the Superior Front-End Toolkit

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... | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Giant Robots Podcast Ep 606: AI layoffs are BS

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


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Meet Duck Typer: your new duck typing friend

Keep the beauty of duck typing with no annotations while still catching missing methods, mismatched signatures, and accidental drift across classes. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

I copied a prompt and built a management system in a week

How I used Claude Code to build a GTD-based management system from a borrowed idea, meeting transcripts, and three days of real work. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 1 month ago

Observability for your LLM-powered apps: OTel Instrumentation for RubyLLM

LLM calls are black boxes in production. Learn how to add structured observability to your RubyLLM-powered app with OpenTelemetry. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

The Bike Shed Ep 498: Season 2 Recap

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


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Introducing Test Budget: a linter for test performance

Your test suite didn't get slow all at once. It won't get fast all at once either. Start by making sure it stops getting worse. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

How to launch a Lovable MVP in 2026

AI tools can spin up polished apps in a weekend, but speed makes it easier than ever to build the wrong thing. Here’s how to turn a “Lovable MVP” prototype into a real product that delivers value. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

The Bike Shed Ep 497: Diagrams we love

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


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Claude Skill incoming! Generating Postman collections with AI

When speed matters more than perfection, API documentation can quickly become a bottleneck. In this post, I share how we used thoughtbot’s Claude Skill to generate Postman collections directly from a Rails codebase. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Combine Capybara selectors to avoid the sequential timeout trap

How I shaved over a minute off a test suite with a one-line change. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

The Bike Shed Ep 496: Test suite performance

Joël and Sally cover all the bases as they look at improving their test suite performances times. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Your chat bot needs a better rate limit strategy

Don't let one ambitious user trigger a denial of service. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

The Opinionated thoughtbotter: Linting is Non-Negotiable

Linting isn’t about tabs vs. spaces. It’s about team consistency. thoughtbot senior developers Svenja Schäfer and Rémy Hannenquin talk code style, automation, PR review sanity, and why “just format the whole codebase” might be the least painf... | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

How to choose and implement an LLM for your healthcare product

Choosing and implementing the right large language model for healthcare requires balancing security, economics, and inevitable hallucinations. Here’s what you need to know before integrating AI into your product. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

48 companies you didn't know were using Rails in 2026

Rails is still alive and kicking in 2026, and a lot of companies trust it for their applications and backend infrastructure. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Claude Code skills: Automating FDA-required documentation for software as a medical device

Generating and maintaining FDA-required documentation for software as a medical device can be tedious and time-consuming. We built a Claude Code skill to automate documentation for 510(k) submissions. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

The Bike Shed Ep 495: A shortcut to years of experience

Sally and Aji flick through thoughtbot’s guide to best practices in a bid to brush up on their coding habits. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Giant Robots Podcast Ep 603: The product we are going to build

Sami makes his triumphant return to the Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots Podcast as he and his fellow hosts discuss a brand new tool currently in pre-production at thoughtbot. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago

Going beyond vibe coding with ReadySetGo

Introducing ReadySetGo. An AI application generator that creates first versions of products, built in Rails, to thoughtbot’s best practices. Not throwaway, vibe-coded prototypes. Real foundations that can be built upon. | Continue reading


@feed.thoughtbot.com | 2 months ago