Rails Business

Jeremy Smith has worked as a fractional Rails developer for 13 years, and he says 2026 is the hardest year he's seen to start. We get into why companies are holding their wallets, what "good code" and good tests even mean when nobody writes code by hand anymore, and why running three agents at once leaves all of us fried by mid-afternoon. Then Jeremy makes his case for where consulting goes from here.
LINKS
- IndieRails Podcast
- Blue Ridge Ruby
- HYBRD (Jeremy's studio)
- Jeremy's Website
- Jeremy's X/Twitter
- Jeremy's Rails World 2026 Talk: Practical Hotwire
- Ryan's Website
- Brendan's X/Twitter
- Brendan's Bluesky
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DHH's Rails World keynote barely mentioned Rails, and the internet decided that meant Rails is dead. We don't buy it. Ryan took one line from the talk as a direct order and had an agent building his CLI the same day, which raises a bigger question: how much of your working life do you hand to an AI agent, and where do you draw the line? Then we ask whether conferences are still worth the ticket, and when they are.
LINKS
- DHH's Rails World Keynote
- basecamp-cli
- Ryan's Website
- Brendan's X/Twitter
- Brendan's Bluesky
--Sponsor--
This episode is brought to you by Flagrant.  Your partners for delivering thoughtful products & applications from any stage in your project.
Questions or comments, email us at railsbusinesspod@gmail.com
Send us Fan Mail

What do you do when the database is maxed out, the busiest day of your year is six months away, and you still don't know what's actually wrong? Andrew Atkinson joins us to talk through that exact scenario at Aura Frames - the Christmas Day 2024 outage that set it off, and how they made Christmas Day 2025 a success. 
LINKS
- Andrew's Book
- Andrew's Newsletter 
- Scaling Rails at Aura Frames: Splitting to 8 Primary DBs and Reaching #1 in the App Store
- From Christmas Outage to #1 App Store Ranking: An Aura Frames Postgres Scaling Retrospective
- Rails at Scale
- Postgres Summit US
- You can't spell Shard without the word Hard
- Open Positions at Aura Frames
- Ryan's Website
- Brendan's X/Twitter
- Brendan's Bluesky
--Sponsor--
This episode is brought to you by Flagrant.  Your partners for delivering thoughtful products & applications from any stage in your project.
Questions or comments, email us at railsbusinesspod@gmail.com
Send us Fan Mail

No guest this week — just Brendan and Ryan working through several things they've been seeing lately. Topics covered include:

  - Anthropic's skills: why both of us started by writing one giant skill instead of small composable ones, and why that's the same lesson object-oriented programming taught us years ago.

  - Where skills end and agents begin — plus a surprise from Brendan's code review setup, where the sub-agents it spun up weren't using the skill at all.

  - Ryan's spam war at Locable: 2,000 fake accounts before breakfast, 60,000 businesses stuck waiting on human review, and whether an LLM should get a vote on what's legitimate.

  - Why the real blocker isn't the skill — it's the APIs, MCPs, and evaluation systems underneath it that nobody talks about.

  - And the PR backlog problem: AI gets you 90% there in an hour, the last 10% is as hard as it ever was, and Intercom and Shopify keep their pull requests under 200 lines for a reason.
LINKS
Anthropic Developers Skill Usage Video
Intercom 2x Shipping Blog Post
Ryan's Website
Brendan's X/Twitter
Brendan's Bluesky
--Sponsor--
This episode is brought to you by Flagrant.  Your partners for delivering thoughtful products & applications from any stage in your project.  Book an hour with Flagrant at beflagrant.com/call
Questions or comments, email us at railsbusinesspod@gmail.com
Send us Fan Mail

Jesse Hanley joined us from southern Japan, where he runs Bento — an email marketing and transactional email platform — as a company of one. Topics covered include:
Why the bootstrapped dream now means picking big, hairy, competitive markets instead of cozy niches AI can replicate overnight.
Automating entire roles with agentic "employees" — Cursor Cloud Agents and Grok Bot wired into MCPs for support, compliance, infra, finance and dev.
Why most jobs are really just cron jobs, and how far one person can go if they build the tools deep enough.
Plus Heroku scale-to-zero, moving Postgres off to PlanetScale, and why he's eating his words on agents replacing labor.
LINKS
- Bento
- Tatami
- Ryan's Website
- Brendan's X/Twitter
- Brendan's Bluesky
--Sponsor--
This episode is brought to you by Flagrant.  Your partners for delivering thoughtful products & applications from any stage in your project.
Questions or comments, email us at railsbusinesspod@gmail.com
Send us Fan Mail