F'uncle of six. ceo @PlanetArgon, 👨🏼💻 created @OhMyZsh, 🎙 host @_Maintainable and 'On @Rails' podcasts, 🎸 guitarist @MightyMissoula.
Portland, OR USA
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Your agent can’t tell the difference between a pattern, an old pattern, an abandoned experiment, and something somebody copied six years ago and never touched again.
To the agent, it’s all equally plausible prior art.
If there’s a right way to do something in your codebase, make it painfully obvious.
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Looking through some of the photos from Rails World 2026 now that I’m back home in Portland… with plenty to catch up on.
Thanks again to everyone I got to spend some time talking with in Austin. And if you’d hoped we’d cross paths but we didn’t manage to… my email address is easy enough to guess.
Keep showing up.
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It's kind of funny how much of programming has basically been micromanaging computers. We've spent decades getting really fucking good at giving them extremely specific instructions… and now they need a little less supervision.
So we loosen our grip a little. Explain what we're trying to accomplish. Give some context. Define the constraints. Evaluate what comes back. Correct course.
Most of us weren't hired because we had the big idea. We got good at helping other people bring their ideas to life… spotting the holes, asking annoying questions, balancing tradeoffs, turning something fuzzy into something that actually works.
If we can spend less time micromanaging the microchips, what do we do with the time we get back?
I think the answer has a lot more to do with the people we're building for than the code we're producing.
What do they need in this new era?
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Welcome back to your workshop, #RailsWorld attendees.
Follow that curiosity. 💙
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Robby Russell retweeted
In this day one closing keynote from #RailsWorld 2026, @robbyrussell (@planetargon) talks about the "local workshop" every mature Rails app builds on top of the framework: the patterns, shortcuts, workarounds and oral traditions that teams quietly learn to compensate for, and that AI coding agents are now tripping over.
Drawing on years of experience, Robby agrees that while producing code has gotten cheaper, deciding what belongs, what can be trusted and what should change still takes human judgment.
Find the full talk here: piped.video/watch?v=XXjTdyhm…
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Robby Russell retweeted
Hot Cell is ready to go if you're on Rails edge.
Slides are up at mike.daless.io/prez/2026-09-…
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Update: I cannot confirm nor deny that Bending Spoons has got wind of this.
After 17 years, I’ve finally figured out how to monetize Oh My Zsh.
Introducing usage-based pricing.
Every screenshot featuring an Oh My Zsh prompt in commercial or promotional materials will now incur a small licensing fee. Video appearances will be billed per millisecond.
This is admittedly a bit of a last-minute land grab. At conferences, I used to look around and see @ohmyzsh running in terminals on half the laptops.
Now it’s mostly Claude Code... so I need to capture the remaining value while there are still shells left to screenshot.
In the meantime, grab some stickers and shirts via @commitgoods
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Robby Russell retweeted
Every theme in Oh My Zsh started with someone who wanted their prompt to look a little different.
Here are 20 of them. There are 140+ more in the repo if you're due for a change... or drop your own .zsh-theme in $ZSH_CUSTOM/themes and start tinkering.
github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/w…
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A few more prompts later...
It's easy to forget how much typing a few plugins save until someone counts.
gst. rdm. z api. Esc Esc for when you forgot sudo... again.
25 seconds, a handful of plugins, 93 keystrokes. There are 300+ more plugins and 140+ themes where those came from.
ohmyz.sh/
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"Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer... but you may feel like one."
Wrote that a long time ago. 17 years later, 2500+ contributors, 300+ plugins and 140+ themes, and I still think it holds up.
It's easy to forget how much typing a few plugins save until someone counts.
gst. rdm. z api. Esc Esc for when you forgot sudo... again.
25 seconds, a handful of plugins, 93 keystrokes. There are 300+ more plugins and 140+ themes where those came from.
ohmyz.sh/
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After 17 years, I’ve finally figured out how to monetize Oh My Zsh.
Introducing usage-based pricing.
Every screenshot featuring an Oh My Zsh prompt in commercial or promotional materials will now incur a small licensing fee. Video appearances will be billed per millisecond.
This is admittedly a bit of a last-minute land grab. At conferences, I used to look around and see @ohmyzsh running in terminals on half the laptops.
Now it’s mostly Claude Code... so I need to capture the remaining value while there are still shells left to screenshot.
In the meantime, grab some stickers and shirts via @commitgoods
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“I can’t stay for another drink, I have to get back and tell someone on the internet that they’re wrong”
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