John Athayde

We shadowed customer support before touching anything. Agents spent more time writing up each call than they spent on the phone with the customer. You don't find that in a ticket queue. You find it by sitting with the people doing the work. www.produxlabs.com/product-thin...

From a team lead on Reddit: "we're starting to drown from code review." The AI factory doesn't get rid of review. It piles more onto it, and on Rails teams a lot of that pile is UI. Naughty Claude. Send me one AI-built screen plus your design system. I'll send back 3 fixes, free.

Framer shipped an MCP this week, so your AI tool can now edit the canvas, manage CMS content and publish. Spline's MCP went remote too, and v0 now pulls from Slack. All 28 design-to-code changes from last week: designengindex.com/weekly

youtu.be/_wG2r3FX3hQ I've spent the last year working on this process that has gotten me great results, leveraging different LLMs in various ways for research, PRD writing, build, testing, and more. I've even built out a series of static tools to save on tokens.

Do I know anyone doing devrel for agentic companies?

I built DesignEng Index: an independent tracker of AI and design-to-code tools. Pricing, weekly changelogs, straight-verdict comparisons, and a graveyard for dead tools. New: Figma vs Paper vs pen.dev vs Penpot. designengindex.com

ui_guardrails ( github.com/meticulous/g... ) is getting a feed ramp. When I released the gem at Rails World, it was mostly around blocking bad AI decisions from getting through CI. But that didn't help the AI not just make random crap up or ignore the design system and components. Release soon!

Motiff and Visily shut down Oct 31. If you're still on either, here's where to go next, plus what every AI and design-to-code tool shipped this week. I built DesignEng Index to track it all: pricing, changelogs, head-to-heads, and a graveyard for dead tools. designengindex.com/graveyard

Dan Mall told me: make it a policy. Companies have policies. You own a company. The policies are yours to set. Saved me years of waiting for permission to set boundaries on availability, scope, and pricing. www.indierails.com/72

In 2024 I redesigned the Rails Guides for the Rails Foundation. Code review came from Carlos, DHH, and other core team members. What I didn't expect: the community showed up to make it better, not to tear it apart. That's how open source is supposed to work. www.indierails.com/72

This is why you gotta read the code when you're working on an app. Yeah LLMs do cool stuff, but then they randomly inject emoji into your app that has a design system with icons. Naughty Claude.

Specialization gets a lot of attention. Curiosity matters more. The engineers who keep getting better are the ones who keep asking questions, not the ones who already know the most. Curiosity compounds. www.indierails.com/72

PrismML's Ternary Bonsai 2 27B Based on Qwen3.8 27B, Bonsai 2 27B is 9x smaller than its full-precision counterpart while retaining 98.2% of its aggregate benchmark performance.

My rewritten guide on the Rails Asset Pipeline just landed in `main`. This was a big-ish change, streamlining the narrative to focus on Propshaft and how it works. Check it out:

"AI is the end of programming." "Nothing is going to change." Both miss what's happening. AI gets us to 80% in 20% of the time. The remaining 20% is where the work still lives. It's the next abstraction layer, not the end. www.indierails.com/72 `#AI`

If your app is vanilla Tailwind UI with the default purple, that's not a brand. Tailwind is a toolkit, a starting point, not a finishing point. Brand has to show up somewhere beyond the logo in the corner. www.indierails.com/72

Most Rails apps get built data-model-first. The shift is to start with the user's story: who shows up, what they're trying to do, how easily they can do it. The data model follows. Not the other way around. www.indierails.com/72

In 2014, Sam Crigman caught me on the escalator at RailsConf Chicago. He wanted to talk Procore UX. That conversation turned into setting the operating model for design embedded in scrum teams. Domain knowledge mattered. www.indierails.com/72

Engineers tell me "I can't design." I push back. Route structure, response payload, field naming. All of it shapes the user's experience. You're designing in code whether you call it that or not. www.indierails.com/72

Users don't read. They scan. The squint test takes 5 seconds: squint at your screen, see what jumps out, that's what the user notices first. If your CTA has the same visual weight as everything else, it's invisible. www.indierails.com/72

The most common Rails UI problem is key-value pair dumping. Half the labels in any Rails app are doing zero work, because a dollar sign already tells you it's a price. Cut the labels the data speaks for. www.indierails.com/72

Watching the storms over Afton from Stony Point.

@amyhoy.bsky.social Hap hap happy birthday!

John Athayde is starting things off at @blueridgeruby.com, stepping out of the garden and on to the stage. @johnathayde.com

Learning from permaculture by @johnathayde.com at @blueridgeruby.com A lot of lessons we can learn from permaculture and apply to sustainable software development and maintenance #blueridgeruby

This is a slide from my talk this week at Blue Ridge Ruby connecting Permaculture with Sustainable Software Development. Lots of cute animals and lots of fun concepts to help you shift frame on how we approach this work. I hope to see you there!

Couldn't happen to a nicer piece of software. Buh bye, Publisher!

I love chatting with @jeremysmith.co and I am really looking forward to both giving this talk and hanging out with everyone at Blue Ridge Ruby. Get your tickets asap!

Hundreds of HTML elements, anchored to each other randomly, by using the CSS anchor positioning feature. Because, why not? A new kind of popup hell. This, and other fun experiments at patrickbrosset.com/articles/202...

It's quite insane. As a firefighter, we have CISD (critical incident stress debriefing) any time there's an on-scene death. And this is dying of natural causes/accidents—watching state murder, live, is not good for you. Please talk to a professional. I would say "if impacted", but, you are.

I had so much fun in our wide ranging conversation with Jeremy and Jess. Check out the pod!

Merry Christmas! Kransekake complete! Not as perfect as the formal bakers but I’m happy. Much better than last year’s!

So it begins! Stollen done, pies wrapped, (all gluten free!), smoker going with a ham from our friends farm and brisket from our own, and kransekake is up next!

Most of the world prompts AI, saying "build me a house" and then complains that it sucks when it's not the house they had in mind. Tools like this prompt generator help see the possibility of specificity that you can get to: f-stop.vercel.app

Black Friday time! 50% off "Typography for Developers". Fix the basics of your application look and feel with good typography. learn.developerux.com/p/type-is-de...

The German company that makes the mechanical ladder used in the Louvre heist has used the image to advertise, with the text 'When you need to move fast' 10/10 response, no notes

Speaking at 10:30 this morning at NOVA Code Camp (novacodecamp.org ) today! (18 October). Come say hi!

#RailsWorld Day 1 in the books. From our fun morning boat ride with the Baltic Ruby crew to DHH's keynote, the great hallway track in a beautiful space here in Amsterdam, and the random cat in the window spotted on the way through... Lots of great talks and new and old Ruby Friends.

I’m a consultant. I’ve seen inside every kind of organization. Good managers/leaders doing important work don’t run their teams ragged, and especially don’t brag about it.

The RailsConf talks have been released! Here’s my talk on UX for Rails devs. Thanks to everyone who came out and I hope you enjoy it! youtu.be/ybUhVeTqGN4