Claude Skills, Spam, and the Last 10% Artwork

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

Claude Skills, Spam, and the Last 10%

September 10, 2026 • Episode 42

0:00 | 42:31

No guest this week — just Brendan and Ryan working through several things they've been seeing lately. Topics covered include:

- Anthropic's skills: why both of us started by writing one giant skill instead of small composable ones, and why that's the same lesson object-oriented programming taught us years ago.

- Where skills end and agents begin — plus a surprise from Brendan's code review setup, where the sub-agents it spun up weren't using the skill at all.

- Ryan's spam war at Locable: 2,000 fake accounts before breakfast, 60,000 businesses stuck waiting on human review, and whether an LLM should get a vote on what's legitimate.

- Why the real blocker isn't the skill — it's the APIs, MCPs, and evaluation systems underneath it that nobody talks about.

- And the PR backlog problem: AI gets you 90% there in an hour, the last 10% is as hard as it ever was, and Intercom and Shopify keep their pull requests under 200 lines for a reason.

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