Giant Robots: thoughtbot Blog

- All Topics
- Design
- Development
- Product
- More topics
What Shoulda Matchers Is Actually Doing For You

Rails model specs full of setup and error-message checks? There’s a reason so many teams replace them using shoulda-matchers. We’ll look at what those expectations are doing, how they make your tests more resilient to changes, and a lot less noisy.
Matheus Sales
January 23, 2026
- RSpec
- Rails
- Shoulda
- Ruby
- Testing
Giant Robots Podcast Ep 600: The Special One

Celebrate Giant Robots’ 600th episode in style as Sami pulls together thoughtbot staff old and new to celebrate this monumental milestone.
Chad Pytel, Will Larry & Sami Birnbaum
January 22, 2026
- Podcast
A JavaScript developer's guide to Rails: Where Does Everything Come From?

Discover where Rails methods come from and solve the biggest confusion JavaScript developers face when learning Rails.
Will Larry
January 21, 2026
- Web
- Best Practices
- Ruby
- Rails
- JavaScript
- Development
- Learning
The Bike Shed Ep 490: Large Language Misadventure

Aji and Sally sit down to dissect the complicated beast that is AI.
Sally Hall and Aji Slater
January 20, 2026
- Podcast
Code audits In the days Of AI - A new Claude skill

Run a code audit on your Rails app using thoughtbot’s best practices with this new Claude skill.
Jose Blanco
January 20, 2026
This week in #dev (Jan 9, 2026)

Overriding Rails credentials, a helper to submit forms with images and how to count tests with rspec’s –dry-run option.
thoughtbot
January 19, 2026
- This Week In Dev
- TIL
- Testing
- Rails
Our UK Tech Leader Tour

In addition to our regular tech leader event in London, we’re partnering with local tech leaders to bring the event to Manchester, Bristol, Brighton, and Edinburgh this year.
Chad Pytel, Rob Whittaker & Maria Filimonova
January 16, 2026
- Events
- London
Giant Robots Podcast Ep 599: Be Bold

Chad and Will start the new year off right by discussing their aspirations for 2026.
Chad Pytel and Will Larry
January 15, 2026
- Podcast
A JavaScript Developer's Guide to Rails - Series Introduction

Where does current_user come from? Why is there no import? A series for JavaScript developers learning Rails.
Will Larry
January 14, 2026
- Rails
- JavaScript
- Development
- Learning
Building programmable QA with AI

What’s one of the biggest challenges with using AI for QA? It’s the lack of programmability. We set out to find a solution by pairing Playwright MCP with several different LLM models. Find out where we landed.
Chad Pytel, Clarissa Borges & Michelle Taute
January 14, 2026
- AI
- Automation
- Llm
Sign up to receive a weekly recap from thoughtbot

Your email address

Looking for even more ways to stay connected?

Check out our feeds

Sign up to receive a weekly recap from thoughtbot