Evil Martians
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles
We’ve got articles for junior and experienced developers, case studies for startup founders and managers, and thorough technical deep dives into unexpected terrain. No matter where you’re coming from, you’re certain to gain some insight here, whether it’s more practical, or something that really takes you for a ride.
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Rails Hyperdrive: supercharged agentic development for Rails
Evil Martians
Introducing Rails Hyperdrive: a development-only Rails engine that gives AI coding agents live answers from your booted app and lets any gem in your bundle ship guidance gated to your Gemfile. Convention over configuration, applied to agent knowledge.
8日前
Give up a little speed, get your team back
Evil Martians
Agentic speed turned all of us into super-ICs and broke our ability to collaborate. Two types of work that both produce code, and three recipes for working together again: a safe perimeter for experiments, shared rules everybody pays for, and an intent log your agents write themselves.
14日前
The Golden Switch, or migrating from Gatsby to Astro in under 9¾ days
Evil Martians
367 posts, four years on Gatsby, and no dedicated team: here's how we moved evilmartians.com to Astro in two weeks with an LLM.
15日前
Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure
Evil Martians
Gusto runs payroll for 500,000+ businesses on one of the largest Rails monoliths anywhere. Why a team this strong hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq at scale, what running background jobs at that size actually takes, and when to stop waiting for the perfect hire.
21日前
10 anti-AI slop moves for frontend projects going faster than humans can review
Evil Martians
Ten checks that catch what AI-written frontend code hides: contract codegen, boundary linting, mutation testing, and dead-code detectors.
22日前
Why engineers should come to the SF Ruby Conference in 2026
Evil Martians
SF Ruby is an engineers' conference: meet the people building Ruby open source, scaling Rails in production, and shaping what agentic Rails looks like next.
1ヶ月前
Access control for AI agents on Rails: gating SQL with Action Policy
Evil Martians
Our Rails AI assistant had read-only SQL access and could still return peer review scores. Learn how we kept open-ended analytics in an in-app AI assistant while making database access honor application permissions.
1ヶ月前
Get in, human: cut Rails boot time with require-profiler and this guide
Evil Martians
Rails boot time is a DX metric in the AI age: meet require-profiler, learn to actually read sampling profilers, and see the pit stop that cut a 200-component monolith's boot by 40%.
1ヶ月前
Ship agent skills like packages: discovery index, digests, and install sources
Evil Martians
How to publish agent skills so any AI coding agent can find and install them: the .well-known/agent-skills/index.json discovery index, SHA-256 integrity digests, single-file vs multi-file vs bundle packaging, and every install command. Worked from the catalog we just open-sourced.
1ヶ月前
Fair by design: orchestrating background jobs in Ruby
Evil Martians
Are you treating your users fairly? They could be stuck in the queue while a greedy user monopolizes resources. And you might not even know it! In this post, you’ll see if it’s time for you to take background job prioritization seriously, and how to make it fair for all users.
1ヶ月前
5 best practices for preventing chaos in Tailwind CSS
Evil Martians
Tailwind CSS has become a very popular CSS framework, and it can speed up development. But using it without proper caution can add mayhem to your code. Learn best practices to avoid getting swept away!
2ヶ月前
+14% activated users for AppSignal: designing a new homepage in code
Evil Martians
We designed and shipped a fresh AppSignal homepage in code, then validated it in an A/B test with a 14% lift in activated users.
2ヶ月前
The secure way to release an npm package in 2026
Evil Martians
How to protect your npm package from being stolen in a supply chain attack and improve its position in security ratings
2ヶ月前
Which AI actually reads your site? Two months of LLM traffic, measured
Evil Martians
We told you to measure. So of course we did it ourselves too: two months of server-side LLM traffic to evilmartians.com. Find out which agents read HTML, which read Markdown, what llms.txt actually does, and the one technique that got zero hits.
2ヶ月前
The joy of Inertia Rails: painting your own with 50 happy little lines
Evil Martians
Inertia is Turbolinks with one twist: render JSON instead of HTML on the second visit. We rebuild the whole protocol on a real Rails app with a 50-line client and a 16-line server, then audit what the real gem adds on top.
2ヶ月前
Storybook Workbench: audit vibe-coded UIs and find hidden bugs in hours
Evil Martians
Storybook Workbench is a bundle of Agent Skills that turn Storybook into an audit layer for AI-generated UIs: find dead components, design-system drift, and hidden accessibility bugs.
2ヶ月前
AI vs. human illustrators? AI + human illustrators!
Evil Martians
Evil Martians went from attempting to one-shot AI illustrations to a human-in-the-loop workflow with a dedicated illustrator. When a human owns first and last mile of this process, illustrations are crisp, high-quality and fun. Go BTS of our illustration production.
3ヶ月前
Most MCP servers don't need to exist. Your case might be an exception.
Evil Martians
An MCP server is a product interface for the age of agents, not an AI feature itself. This post presents a framework for deciding between direct API calls, CLI, Skills, and MCP, detailing the architectural signals, the hidden costs, and the failure modes you should know about before embarking on an MCP quest.
3ヶ月前
Choose your fighter: benchmarking 5 WebSocket servers for Node.js
Evil Martians
Evil Martians benchmarked five WebSocket servers for Node.js: Socket.io, uWebSockets.js, and AnyCable (OSS and Pro). How we caught our own load generator lying, and how to make WebSocket benchmark numbers honest.
3ヶ月前
Building a design system specced for engineers and agents
Evil Martians
Coding without design guidelines can leave teams with an inconsistent UI design and a complex feature development process. Here's how we built a design system for Currents that's readable by engineers and AI agents.
3ヶ月前