I spent more of my life that I would like to admit learning and writing Rust. I still build all of my web applications in almost pure Ruby these days. Speed of thought to action is simply unparalleled and it turns out in most situations that was the most important factor.
You know... I was a big Capistrano fan back when I worked on Rails webapps and honestly, thinking back to it, it holds up pretty well. I can't really remember a time when I felt like it actually burned me, and that's not something I can say about very many tools. We had Jenkins automatically pushing dev builds all day long (automatically) and had a Jenkins button to deploy to prod. We did have to use the rollback functionality of cap a few times and it always went smoothly.
I learned to do deployments using custom shell scripts, and then someone introduced me to Capistrano. And i didn't get it at all. Why would i use this tool when i could just write a shell script? What does it save me? My main conclusion was that some people just don't like shell scripts as much as me.
Hah, I agree. I think the thing that made me like Capistrano was basically that someone else had written what was basically shell scripts for me and had worked out a bunch of details so that I didn’t have to on my own (eg rollbacks).
Whether cap or custom scripts, the thing I loved about that is… it’s simple enough that you can fully understand what’s happening. Not just at an abstract level but very concretely.
Can’t remember account login so created a new account to respond.
I recently used Claude with something along the lines of “Ruby on rails 8, Hotwire, stimulus, turbo, show me how to do client side validations that don’t require a page refresh”
I am new to prompt engineering so feel free to critique. Anyway, it generated a stimulus controller called validations_controller.js and then proceeded to print out all of the remaining connected files but in all of them it referred to the string “validation” not “validations”. The solution it provided worked great and did exactly what I wanted to (though I expected a turbo frame based solution not a stimulus solution, but whatever it did what I asked it to do) with the exception of having to change all of the places where it put the string “validation” where it needed to put “validations” to match the name it used in the provided stimulus controller.
Say you hire a developer and ask him to directly debug an issue by simply skimming through the codebase, do you think he can complete this task say in 5-10 minutes? No, right?
In claude code(CC), do the following:
1. /init which acts as a project guide.
2. Ask it to summarize the project as save it as summary.md
3. The prompt needs to be clear and detailed. Here’s an example: https://imgur.com/a/RJyp3f9
I remember reading the origin article for that prompt example and laughing at how long it likely took to write that essay when typing "hikes near San Francisco" into your favoured search engine will do the same thing, minus the hallucinations.
