Steve Clarke

I have 200+ production Rails codebases on my local disk. Discourse, GitLab, Mastodon, and a ton of others — all as git submodules in one repo. I've been referencing it for years. For most of that time it meant a lot of manual grepping and reading file after file. Valuable but tedious. You had to be really motivated to sit there and read through that much source code. This past year, with agentic coding, everything changed. Now I just ask questions and the agent searches all 200+ apps for me. "What are the different approaches to PDF generation?" "Compare background job patterns across these codebases." What used to take hours of reading takes a single prompt. The original repo hadn't been updated in two years and I was using it enough that I figured I should fork it and bring it forward. So I did: - Updated all 200+ submodules to latest - Added Gumroad, @dhh's Upright, Fizzy, and Campfire - Stripped out old Ruby tooling (agents do this better now) - Added an installable agent skill - Weekly automated updates If you're building with Rails, clone this and point your agent at it. If you know of apps that should be in here, open an issue or PR. github.com/steveclarke/re… PS: Hat tip to Eliot Sykes for the original repo.

@stolinski You mean journalists have actually been AI bots for decades??

It's crazy how AI is really good at the stuff I don't know anything about and total dog shit at the stuff I do.

@MoocheeHD @obie It's just me in a dedicated repo with Claude Code running in the terminal.

@SevenviewSteve @obie hey Steve, / Obie curious when you guys did this whats the primary method of communication? Is it literally typing in the terminal or claudeCode Desktop versus Slack interface / Discord? the openClaw camp is loud

@strzibnyj xcode-select --install Then my dotfiles do the rest github.com/steveclarke/do… But without that I'd install homebrew then write the Brewfile and `brew bundle`

What would you install first on Macbook Pro 14" M4 Max?

Name one album that’s perfect from start to finish. No skips. No filler. Just pure greatness...🎶🎸

I use Wispr Flow with my Newfoundlander accent and just yolo everything, so excuse the bad stream-of-conciousness grammar lol

Just a typical day of infrastructure work with Claude.

@bradgessler Claude Code, Codex, etc.

@SevenviewSteve Thanks! Still not sure what an AI harness is... do you?

This is true. Has anybody found a decent combo of skills? /front-end can only do so much.

@mattshumer_ also: best band

Extremely underrated AI trick most people don't know about: If you want great designs from AI, don't prompt the model directly… use Google AI Studio's app builder. They're doing some magic behind the scenes. Same model, same prompt, completely different output:

Windows 3.1 came on my first PC. Oddly enough when I got my first PC, for some strange reason I asked the vendor to give me the computer with no software installed. I knew nothing about PCs at the time - my first computer was a C64. I don't know why I did that but it turned out to be very useful because it forced me to figure out how to install MS-DOS from scratch. I had to read the entire manual to understand even how that worked and then I had to install Windows. I think I attribute that now to a big reason why I've had my 30-plus-year career in this industry.

What was the first Windows you ever used?

@dinnaiii Nice! Happy to see more of this pattern!

I'm learning/building with effect so I set this up: github.com/jeremyosih/rea… Just a small repo collecting git submodules to a handful of open EffectTS codebases I could find. Only 4 repos rn — all used in real life, from internal apps to bigger ones handling 1M+ users (@RhysSullivan's @answeroverflow, @jullerino's t3code, @mattpockock's course manager, @davis7's r8y and soon better-context once it's updated ;) Helpful for grepping patterns or feeding to agents while figuring things out. Know any good opensource @EffectTS_ apps ? drop a link/PR — would love to submodule more examples! try it now: npx skills add jeremyosih/real-world-effect shout out to @SevenviewSteve and real-world-rails for the original repo !

I created an SVG with quiver.ai yesterday for a little side project. I dropped the SVG into Claude code. Claude described it in detail and said, "Oh, thats a great image to go with this project." It described all the details of the image, including the representation of a house, a cliff, and waves.

lol I was writing docs and it had an ascii diagram that was looking weird. Asked Claude Code "can you turn this into an SVG?" - it sniffed the right colors to use from the CSS, generated it with neat style, and imported it from the page. Vitepress instantly updated. Took like 5 seconds. Damn.

@elonmusk That's as dumb as saying "size 10 shoes is the way"

Dark mode is the way

@dgalarza When I try to explain to my wife what I'm doing these days, the best I can do a lot of times is just to bust a gut and laugh out loud.

Agreed! It feels like an incredibly fun time to build things.

I built a Ruby CLI for @Superthread_ that's designed for AI agents (and humans). In addition to regular views, every command outputs JSON. It ships with a Claude Code skill so agents know every command without running --help. v0.7.3 out now: github.com/steveclarke/su…

The thing people don't understand about kids is that they don't scale linearly. My experience: I grew up in a family with six kids. After a certain point, after the first two or three kids, my older siblings raised the ones below. We entertained ourselves, we took care of ourselves, we ran the household. Joyfully. We self-organised. I wouldn't trade my upbringing for anything. That's where I learned project management.

having 3 kids is crazy you can literally have 10 kids at the same cost

I keep seeing developers say AI coding tools took the joy out of programming. I can't relate at all. I'm having more joy than I've dreamed possible in my 30 years at this! I think it comes down to what your bottleneck actually is. For a lot of great engineers, the craft itself was the reward. The hard nights, the slow discovery. AI removes that journey and I know why that matters to them. For me, my imagination has always run way ahead of my available time. The keystrokes were never the reward. They were just the cost of getting ideas into the world. Neither of us is wrong. We're just different kinds of builders I guess.

@rails @PlanningCenter Nice! I've been using them since day 1. I was actually starting to write my own Planning Center Services using Rails back then when I discovered them and pivoted to something else!

Planning Center​ @PlanningCenter is a 220-person bootstrapped company serving 90,000+ churches, running on Rails for nearly 19 years with no outside investment, no major rewrites, and a team of 100 engineers. And now they've joined the Rails Foundation as a Contributing member. Read the news here: rubyonrails.org/2026/3/3/plann…

My GitHub contributions are up 15% over the last 6 months areyougoingexponential.rhys.dev/steveclarke

@yarotheslav I agree. It's been my go-to for years, and the agentic era has 10x it! My son is implementing the PDF generation engine in our SaaS now using Prawn.

PDF generation in Rails in 2026? ❌ Grover+Puppeteer ❌ Ferrum ❌ WickedPDF ✅gem Prawn AI is great at generating PDF with Prawn.