How I use AI to build production features
I’m not 100% done with the feature I’m currently working on, but I’m far enough along that I wanted to share how I’m using AI right now to help ship production features in a Rails / Turbo / Hotwire / Postgres web app. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ AI subs: chat Pro 100$ plan, Claude Max 100$ plan so both 5x dev tools: vscode, codex app, chat 5.5 pro, claude code CLI in warp ( do I have to try out ghosty? One thing I really like about Claude in Warp is that I can paste images right away ) codebase agent accessibility helpers: a small Claude.md, a conventions.md and a rules folder with categorized conventions. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ The feature I’m currently building Right now I’m working on a multi-tenant tracking integration for communities on our platform., so they can add meta pixel and CAPI as well as gtag for google. Normally I start by brainstorming and talking with my colleagues about what creators actually need from the feature. After that, I look at examples from other companies and form my own thoughts around the product and technical direction. Until a few days ago my next step was a chat with codex or claude code ( switched mostly to codex for a while ) and than from our discussion it generates a spec.md ( depends on the complexity of the feature I sometimes also went with an investigation phase and .md in the first place and than a plan.md afterwards. If the feature includes new database tables or columns, a lot of the early discussion usually goes into data modeling and schema design. I kind of agree with Thariq that large .md files can be hard to consume. To help with that, I often had Claude create Mermaid diagrams inside those markdown files, because diagrams are usually easier to consume than long text.. But for the current feature I tried using an HTML-based spec instead of markdown ( will attach a reference image ). I like the idea of replacing markdown for this use case, but I’m not 100% happy with the result yet.