Giant Robots: thoughtbot Blog

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The Bike Shed Ep 505: What is a “principal” or “staff” engineer?

Sally and Joël join forces to discuss the different ways to interpret the role of a ‘principle’ or ‘staff’ engineer, and the handwaving around what those titles mean in terms of the gradation.
Joël Quenneville and Sally Hall
July 7, 2026
- Podcast
Your vibe coded website is going to get you fined

Vibe coding might get you 80% of the way there. But the other 20% is what really counts. It’s what makes you stand out from AI slop and helps you avoid huge accessibility fines. thoughtbot designers can give you that extra 20%.
Ferdia Kenny
July 3, 2026
Roux’s New Component Library

We’ve added UI components to Roux!
Elaina Natario and Dave Iverson
July 1, 2026
- HTML
- CSS
- News
- Open Source
Superglue 2.0 beta: React ❤️ Rails even more

The Rails way of building Rails and React apps just got easier.
Johny Ho
June 29, 2026
- Ruby
- Web
- Ruby On Rails
- React
- Redux
- JavaScript
- Hotwire
- Stimulus
- Turbo
- Superglue
Why we're choosing stewardship over an exit

The most common path for companies like ours is to be sold. We’re taking a different path. The THOUGHTBOT PURPOSE TRUST is designed to preserve our values and mission.
Chad Pytel
June 25, 2026
- News
The Bike Shed Ep 503: Seeing the Graph for the Trees

Aji and Joël discuss graph and tree structures, their connection to the emergent properties, attributes and qualities found from a largely connected group of data.
Joël Quenneville and Aji Slater
June 23, 2026
- Podcast
Announcing Shoulda Matchers 8.0: validate multiple attributes in one line

The latest Shoulda Matchers cuts repetitive validation specs down to a single line, runs on Ruby 4, and keeps up with the newest Rails.
Matheus Sales
June 23, 2026
- News
- Ruby
- Ruby On Rails
- Testing
- Open Source
- Shoulda
AI's "overnight" solution for our flaky tests took two weeks to adopt

We lived with flaky tests for years until Claude found a solution overnight. It only took two weeks to make the solution useful.
Fritz Meissner
June 22, 2026
The Playwright debugging tool Rails devs aren't using

Playwright records every test in cinematic detail. Most Rails devs aren’t watching.
Justin Toniazzo
June 19, 2026
- Rails
- Testing
- Capybara
- RSpec
- Debugging
- CI
Giant Robots Podcast Ep 614: AI Code Audits

Our hosts Chad and Sami team up this week to discuss AI code bases and whether they can be built to be developer friendly and with best practices in mind.
Chad Pytel and Sami Birnbaum
June 18, 2026
- Podcast
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