AI fatigue is hitting some development teams hard. In our original research study, engineering, product and technology leaders from US healthcare companies told us they’re feeling pressured to evaluate a firehose of new AI trends and tools while struggling to navigate AI-generated code alongside legacy systems. This isn’t entirely new. The industry has gone through waves like this before, from the rise of the internet and the advent of social media to mobile development and every new round of web technology in between. But the rapid progression of LLMs speeds up this cycle, which can leave…
For the past several months, we’ve been exploring a question: Can we put some of our product expertise into an AI tool that helps people figure out the right thing to build? ReadySetGo is now open for anyone to try (fine print: within a daily new user limit). ReadySetGo helps you turn a rough idea into a build-ready plan by walking you through a product sprint. It guides you through our team’s structured process to pressure-test your idea, challenge your assumptions, and make some of the important decisions that should happen before you start building. For a limited time during open beta,…
The next North West Ruby User Group in Manchester, UK is in a fortnight on 15 October at Colony, One Silk Street. Rob Whittaker will take us through one of his hot-takes: VCR does more damage than good, and there are imperfectly better ways to stub your external requests. Rob Whittaker is Director of Software Development at thoughtbot. He has over two decades of professional web development experience and has worked with Ruby and Rails since 2012. (He’s also the co-organizer of NWRUG!) We’ll be at the venue for pizza from 6:30pm with the talk starting at 7pm. Afterwards we’ll retire to The…
On 29 October, thoughtbot Product Leader Bethan Ashley will be hosting two roundtables at the London Chief Product Officer Conference, bringing product leaders together to explore some of the biggest questions shaping the future of the product function. The topics are different, but they both come back to the same bigger question: what does the Product function need to become next? Has Product become the bottleneck? The roundtable will explore what it actually means to become an AI-native product organisation, beyond simply adding AI tools to an existing process. How should the role of…
People today have a spectrum of opinions on AI: we range from all-in, overly enthusiastic vibe-lifers to luddite curmudgeons. I personally have been from one side to the other and back over the course of this week. Us AI skeptics have good reasons for our fear/hatred/disgust even as we use LLMs daily: adverse effects on the environment and the economy data misuse training on works of unwilling authors bias, hallucinations and lack of accountability stealing our jobs and more! So please build your AI products to let me opt in. Opting in progressively The idea is to cater to everyone on the AI…
We just published a bunch of our agent skills! We’ve been creating these ad hoc as we work on projects, but we finally pulled them all together into a single consolidated list. Check out our thoughtbot/skills GitHub repo for details about using them. It’s pretty cool to see these skills downloaded from my coworkers’ heads and into a format that Claude can use. Many of them were inspired by classic posts on this blog and by our style guides. We briefly considered keeping all these skills private: why share our secret recipes? And honestly some of them feel like a real power-up in the right…
Moving from in-house Product Management to consulting changed how I create impact. Without the same access and authority, I had to rely more on context, influence, and helping clients make decisions.
Big-picture thinking is great, but sometimes you just want tactics you can use today. Here are five quick tips from our recent healthcare security panel, covering everything from handling vendor outages to building your own AI-powered security scanner.
Dependabot keeps your gems current, but it doesn't know about the JavaScript packages pinned in your Rails importmap. We're releasing a GitHub Action that opens pull requests for the ones that are outdated or vulnerable.
A senior designer's diary on picking up React Native. This entry starts with an argument about padding and ends up in the React docs, where three of the five steps in "Thinking in React" described work I already do. Variants are props. The layers panel is a hierarchy. The gap is that a Figma file shows every state at once, and code has to pick one.
I photographed a mystery coat of arms on vacation and asked a handful of AI models to identify it. Their reasoning traces show the difference between a model that backtracks and one that doubles down.
An append-only status model gives you full history, but concurrent transitions can produce contradictory records. Here's how to prevent that.
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