Rails Business Podcast (again)
How AI has changed my day-to-day as a developer.
I joined Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch on the Rails Business Podcast to talk about how AI has changed my day-to-day as a developer.
John Nunemaker on AI Development - Rails Business
John Nunemaker returns to discuss how fast AI tooling has changed and argues tech leaders should adopt Claude Max (defaulting to Opus), set up agent-friendly local environments, and roll that out to their teams. He shares how his company built an…
Here are the highlights:
- Your job as a tech leader is to go first. Get Claude Code with Opus, set up your local dev environment to be agent-friendly, then do the same for everyone on your team. I told everyone to get the $100 Max plan and offered to pay for it myself if they didn't think it was worth it. No one's taken me up on that.
- "Brain," an AI-in-a-box for the company. I built an internal tool on a cheap Hetzner server using LibreChat, Postgres MCP (read-only replica), Stripe MCP, and a custom support MCP. Non-technical teammates can now ask natural language questions about customers, support trends, and revenue data without going through me. Secured it all behind Tailscale.
- The support insights were eye-opening. By slurping all our Crisp support conversations into a database and hooking it up as an MCP, I could ask things like "summarize the last week of support requests" and "what's the tone of our support person?" and get real answers. Next step is cron jobs that automatically post weekly summaries to Slack.
- Claude as a code review spin cycle. Team members now run Claude review locally, fix issues, then run
@claudereview on the GitHub PR before requesting human review. By the time it gets to me, it's usually ready to merge. This solved the bottleneck of everyone suddenly producing several PRs a day. - Conductor changed the game for parallel work. It manages isolated worktrees with separate databases, ports, and sessions. I can work on 3-5 things simultaneously, like a feature, a bug from Honeybadger, a support request, each in its own workspace. Setup and teardown scripts handle the isolation (fewer than 100 lines of code per app).
- People who couldn't write Rails before now can. Phillip, who we brought on for React/HTML, is now consistently making solid Rails PRs. Claude bridges the gap. The first PR needed some guidance on resiliency patterns, but after that, the spin cycle workflow handles it.
- Caddy for local HTTPS and custom domains. Drop it in your Procfile, point wildcard subdomains at it, and you get HTTPS locally with custom domain support. Solved a bunch of pain around cookies, CORS, and multi-workspace development.
- Stay bullish. Software engineering jobs are reportedly up about 4.5% month over month. There's an arbitrage window right now for teams that adopt these tools early. Don't get behind. That's the worst place to be.