Rails Business

Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch talk about developing with Ruby on Rails and how to leverage it to build a business.

Rails Business

Ernesto Tagwerker

July 09, 2026 • Brendan Buckingham & Ryan Frisch • Episode 37

0:00 | 53:29

Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby.io / OmbuLabs) returns to talk through how AI is reshaping both sides of his business — speeding up Rails upgrades while simultaneously eating into revenue, and opening a new lane in AI strategy consulting for non-technical businesses. The group digs into the messiness of AI-generated tests, mutation testing, and how to know when your tests are actually testing anything.

01:00 FastRuby's Open Source Claude Skill for Rails Upgrades
03:30 How AI Has Eroded (and Grown) FastRuby's Revenue
07:00 Engineering as Marketing — Why They Open Sourced the Playbook
10:00 The Tooling Isn't the Problem — Engineering Culture Is
12:30 Using Claude to Write Contract Tests and Improve Coverage
15:30 The Problem with AI-Generated Tests
17:00 Mutation Testing Explained
19:00 Classicist vs. Mockist — Where Claude Gets It Wrong
23:00 Playwright for Acceptance Testing in the Development Loop
26:00 Who Watches the Watcher?
28:00 Staff Augmentation and AI Strategy at OmbuLabs
31:00 Working with Non-Technical Businesses in Philadelphia
33:30 Engagement Sizes — AI Discovery vs. Rails Upgrade Projects
35:30 CRM Summaries and One-on-One Prep with AI
38:30 Observability and Guardrails — How Do You Know It's Working?
43:00 LLM as Judge
45:00 Event Scraping — AI Makes Scrapers More Maintainable
50:00 Ryan's Universal Scraper — Using AI to Heal, Not Replace