Rails Business

Rolling Your Own APM with Claude: Real Wins, Real Tradeoffs

Brendan Buckingham & Ryan Frisch Episode 35

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 39:23

Ryan and Brendan talk through the growing pains of AI-assisted development — including fatigue, increased confidence in bigger code changes, and what happens when you stop paying for expensive APM tools and just build your own. Ryan walks through how he used Claude to identify memory pressure, fix N+1 queries, and cut his Heroku costs significantly in just a few days. They also dig into the real tradeoffs: maintenance burden, over-optimization, and why you still need to understand what Claude is telling you before you run anything on a live database.

LINKS

- Ryan's Website

- Brendan's X/Twitter

- Brendan's Bluesky

Questions or comments, email us at railsbusinesspod@gmail.com

Send us Fan Mail

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.

Code with Jason Artwork

Code with Jason

Jason Swett
Standing in the Fire Artwork

Standing in the Fire

Very Good Software
Remote Ruby Artwork

Remote Ruby

Chris Oliver, Andrew Mason, David Hill
IndieRails Artwork

IndieRails

Jess Brown & Jeremy Smith
Vibing with AI Code Artwork

Vibing with AI Code

Brendan Buckingham