IndieRails The Obligatory AI Episode
Oct 28, 2025
They catch up on travel, conferences, and running indie businesses. They share travel stories from Balkan Ruby and RailsConf Amsterdam and experiments with hostel budgeting. They explore a text-free, audio-first app concept and magic-link email logins. They talk about using Claude and other AI tools for coding, the costs of tool switching, docs-first workflows, and how AI can introduce subtle bugs.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Live-Streaming a Textless Rails App
- Jeremy live-streamed building a Rails app called Wordless that uses no text in the UI and authenticates via emailed magic links.
- He found streaming while coding challenging and learned deployment and hosting lessons during the stream.
Use Railway To Skip S3 Setup
- Try Railway for hobby Rails apps to avoid setting up S3 and to use attached volume storage for Active Storage during early development.
- Use Postmark for email and Cloudflare for DNS to handle inbound/outbound mail and domains.
AI-Assisted Rapid Prototyping
- Jeremy used Claude (Claude Code) to write stimulus controllers and assist with deploying to Railway, accepting many generated changes for a quick POC.
- He noted mixed help from AI on deployment details and that human persistence solved remaining issues.