Claude, Rails and me - An Inflection Point
TL;DR
Claude Code with Rails feels like magic. I’ve avoided and actively ignored the hype, I’m a professional sceptic, but the last week deep dive has convinced me:
For experienced Rails developers, there’s orders of magnitude of productivity gains to be had. Right now. No joke.
It may not be the 10x developer we hear so much about, but without question, 2x to 3x is what I’m experiencing. If we can scale that over teams, it’s transformational. Read on…
The Rise of the Transformer
Like many others in tech, the launch of ChatGPT from OpenAI a few years ago was such an unexpected but exciting development. I too jumped in and spent a lot of time playing with this new technology, but it really didn’t click at all outside of the fun. I couldn’t see an application of it that would solve real problems “for me”.
That persisted for at least a year. I subscribed for $20/month and continued to experiment. I still found it incredibly interesting and a complete game changer, but most coding exercises were simply taking longer and leading me down strange paths. Don’t get me wrong the transformer architecture and capabilities were mind boggling, but it just didnt work “for me”.
Anthropic
I tried Claude.ai from Anthropic and immediately subscribed. It seemed leaps ahead in my use case which was essentially typing out questions in the web UI, copying in code, and copying out answers. I really don’t like the code completion or IDE integrations yet, so while clunky, it works. The artefact model was also really well implemented. But still, it really wasn’t net positive “for me”. I excitedly tried Claude Code and that was intriguing but left me running in circles.
Inflection Point
Claude Sonnet 4’s release has changed my workflow entirely. I have a couple of Rails side projects I’ve been working on and Claude Code has been just sensational. I’m not sure what happened but I’m honestly shocked.
Claude Code with Sonnet 4 is incredibly good at understanding what I’m trying to do when I interact like a pair. I’ve been powering through some new features at a phenomenal pace. I’ll stick to focused tasks, work in branches and not be afraid to roll back, but it’s really working well. After initially being very doubtful, I’m convinced now this has changed my specific scenario as an experienced Rails developer, I can talk through features, easily give feedback and suggest alternatives, suggest better patterns, and the pace is breathtaking.
Sure, Claude struggles and makes mistakes, but so do I, and I think this flow of pairing with Claude is the way “for me”. It seems to struggle most with tests - as do I - and sometimes makes stupid decisions that can distract eg it decided to override my log_in_as_user helper, and often adds JavaScript inline, but a quick correction “lets always use stimulus” is all that’s needed. Renaming a model is also a refactoring that I’ve done so many times, but Claude handles it in seconds. And completely.
In the past when testing I’ve been annoyed within a short period of time, but in the last couple of days I’ve been flying. As you can see by the above, just the last few days is when this really clicked for me. My usage is up 10x from May, which was itself 10x from April.
Wrapping Up
A bit of a different post, and just opinion, but I truly have seen a massive change in the last couple of months with Claude and for Rails development specifically, and I’m all in.
Would love to hear your experiences with LLM’s so don’t hesitate to drop me a note at my new favourite place Blue Sky or via any channels listed here