Hello Energized Makers!
I've been in Austin, went to some tech meetups, hackathons, a big conference (you probably know which), saw Cappuccinos served by robotic arms in glass boxes, drove in self-driving cars and Cybertrucks (in Mad Max mode), got some barbecue, and saw some Bats. 🦇
But most importantly, I met the best people I know of thus far.
Meanwhile, DHH at that conference shared that he retired as a Progressive Programmer (2001-2026) and proclaimed that all of us are now Energized Professional Makers!
If you happen to have a lonely lunch, the following might be a fun or depressing watch for you, depending on how you feel about today's transition. But also historic because it's different from how DHH, and probably any other leader in the history of tech conferences, ever started a conference. So I didn't want to not share it with you (you see I'm so conflicted I'm using double negations to confuse you and myself):
From the futurism of Austin back to Europe, I realized that I had to drop the name and domain that I bought one week earlier "softwareshippers.com" and turn it into Software Makers (still WIP, so I'm not sharing the domain). It just sounds better, and it was just promoted by the Ruby on Rails man himself. So keep an eye on the new Software Makers (Software.Makers??) project. It's similar to Rails.Builders, but for Rails Engineers going through the transition in a community setting to get closer to the edge of what's possible in today's engineering, using the best tool for the job.
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While I was in the future, I used the hands-on hackathon and AI Implementation Club sessions to work on my own locally running software factory, trying to turn 50+ ideas for an enterprise application into PRs. Just to realize that the bottleneck is me again, although way less than it was before. For sensitive stuff, like a big app's API surface, you want to have the requirements right down to the finest details, so it's gonna require a grill session or whatever you do to create a good spec so you can pass it to the factory. Still, it's better to be a bottleneck in one or two places than in every step of the journey.
I'm not exactly sure how this first spec step might ever be automated in a sensible way. I heard of the apps that "write themselves", and I'm sure there will be one that will provide value someday and grow big, but I still feel like it will be the outliers.
Anyway, do you see the younger brother of Clippy in the PR Bot Review step in the factory image above? It's our in-house bot, Clicky. He didn't sleep either, and our CTO gave him the last kick in the butt to become a software factory, too. This is just a glimpse:
Clicky: a factory that improves itself
The full story is going to be revealed gradually. I will work on my local factory to shift to Clicky, since Clicky runs in the Cloud and is just the right place to focus engineering efforts. The only thing it will require is more ad hoc configurability, like model selection and skill settings at the different steps of the factory to cover different tasks. If you knew how much is involved in building your own coding agent, you probably wouldn't start (ours is built on Rails).
For low-risk greenfield community apps like https://Rails.Builders, you don't really need software factories to bring them from a rough idea to deployment. Since there are fewer steps and vibing hoists quicker results than engineering, plus it saves tokens. A well-engineered factory in a big app is going to eat them up for QA and iterations. If your app becomes mission-critical someday, you can always rewrite it in assembly with the best practices you missed on the first try.
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Anyway, I hope you get pumped with us on that journey to try to turn those tokens into value, get the team workflows right, make ambitious things, and, most importantly, have fun while the token supply lasts.
"It's pure game theory. And the only player is Optimism" - Loosely quoting DHH, Rails World 2026
[AIN#38-39] AI Nuggets Week#38-39#
Hands-on links#
https://ora.ai/score/myclickfunnels.com
We've recently bumped our agent accessibility for myclickfunnels.com quite a bit with a bigger PR. Nice UX and clear instructions. ClickFunnels is now in the top 1k of the long list!
https://x.com/brunotorious/status/2101795072761065947
I have a Raycast shortcut (junz) that works well for me to translate AI smart speech and comments into something sensible:
explain like i'm junior and the flow step by step. sketch where possible. keep it short still.
https://x.com/thorstenball/status/2101305394190557466
The possible future of coding. Plus, most software development gonna run in the cloud.
🎰 Just for Fun links#
(I'm having fun so you don't have to)
https://x.com/brunotorious/status/2101700881590694050
I only have a feeling for how it’s pronounced. But it pops up in books, I think, when authors want to be extra honest somewhere.