Giant Robots: thoughtbot Blog

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A Conversation With The Situation

My situation disagreed.
Richard Newman
May 8, 2026
The TEXTSIZE trap: how TDS silently truncates your binary data in Rails

SQL Server has a session-level setting that silently truncates your binary data before it ever reaches Ruby. It defaults to 4KB. Most drivers fix it automatically. tiny_tds does not.
Trésor Bireke
May 7, 2026
The output must be cleaned (with skill)

A Claude skill for the noisy RSpec output you’ve always wanted to clean up.
Jared Turner
May 6, 2026
- Rails
- RSpec
- Skills
Austin Tech Leaders is growing, thoughtfully (and we have the photos to prove it)

How we’re building a curated tech leadership community in Austin, from intimate meetups to a SXSW event, and why intention beats scale.
Lindsey Christensen
May 5, 2026
- Events
- Community
- Austin
Simple, affordable unsupervised agentic coding from my phone with Claude Code in Github Actions

Podcasts and the blogosphere are awash with people talking about building software while away from their desks, but often burning serious cash in the process. Here’s a simple and cheap way to try this out for yourself.
Fritz Meissner
May 4, 2026
- AI
- Llm
- Agents
- Claude
Your carousel might not be accessible: designing for reduced motion

Accessibility as the key factor for debugging, designing and developing a carousel with logos on a webpage.
Valeria Graffeo
May 1, 2026
- CSS
- Design
- Frontend
- Accessibility
Reviewing Dependabot PRs is boring. Let Claude do it for you.

A Claude skill to do the boring stuff for us.
Jose Blanco
April 30, 2026
- Artificial Intelligence
- Rails
- Review
- Claude
- AI
- Development
- Skills
- Dependabot
Retro-driven development

Twenty-four refactor-from-retro commits in a week. How the management system started refactoring itself.
Rob Whittaker
April 28, 2026
- AI
- Claude Code
- Management
- Gtd
- Productivity
Trimming our CSS with sibling-index() and sibling-count()

We’re experimenting with two new CSS functions to clean up our logo marquee code.
Elaina Natario
April 24, 2026
- CSS
- Design
- Frontend
Seven commands and the communication layer that emerged

Week three of building a management system with Claude Code. Seventeen commits in one day, a command that lasted 24 hours, and the realisation that commands are conversations.
Rob Whittaker
April 23, 2026
- AI
- Claude Code
- Management
- Gtd
- Productivity
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