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Verify your email, then pick a cohort. Verified paid Makers join when a seat is available and joining is open; free Makers request to join and staff will contact them.
Start delegating more to AI within 4 weeks with other Senior+ Rails Engineers
Meet in live sessions with real projects, and peers who help you tune your AI software making process. Whether Rails or Rust, all stacks are welcome!
Your shipping passSoftware Makers
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WhoSenior Plus Software Engineers
WhatBuild · Share · Stay accountable
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$97/mo
Paid community membership
Weekly
Community practice & accountability sessions
1h–2h Sessions
Software system discussions & advice
Compact groups
6 Makers max per group
Rich
Keeping the room moving & sharing
Best tool
For the Job. And Rails.
AI rewrites our work mechanics every few months right now. We go with the flow and stay on the edge together.
The Software Makers approach
How joining the cohort works
Your next stepsAll four steps
Bring one real project
Stuck PR pipelines and better ways of building personal projects.
Talk if you’d like
An optional conversation with Rich can help you choose a cohort and discuss what you’re working on.
Join the first session
Learn something useful and get pumped from day one.
How the sessions work
Weekly accountability sessions follow a format Rich has been running with the Rails.Builders group since 2025.
- 🧪 Community-focused. Build, share, and stay accountable in weekly cohorts w/ other Senior Engineers.
- 🎯 ~1-hour sessions: everyone takes a turn in random order to share last week’s progress, a Maker challenge or a team challenge, and one thing to achieve by the next session.
- 🛋️ Optional hang out: about 30 minutes to go deeper on anything, or talk current events at the end of the core session.
- ⛑️ Learn from others, then execute until the next session. Get support or your ass kicked. Whatever you need most right now.
- 💌 Optional: personalized session note emails, reviewed and shared by a human.
- 💬 Optional: get support and message other Makers in Slack. Prof. Otto Labot is a work in progress: he helps with approved community knowledge and experiments on the session flows and this app.
What to expect
What a few loops can change.
Here is what the format is built to produce. Your project still needs your judgment, and your results depend on what you bring to the room.
Read the expected outputSix things, no promises
- More work making it out the doorGive the project a place on the calendar and a concrete next step.
- Your setup reviewed by people who run oneCompare your actual harness, review process, and AI workflow with peers working on real software.
- A week that does not resetThe thing you said you would do becomes the starting point for your next conversation.
- The edge, before the conference talkCompare what is working in production, while it is still fresh enough to be useful.
- Fewer abandoned experimentsSomebody else knows what you are trying. Bring back what happened, including the failures.
- It gets fun againSoftware can be solitary. A small room of curious people changes the feel of the work.
These are the outcomes the format is designed for, not guarantees.
Choosing your Software Maker path
Pick yours!
Outside the Loop
Maybe you still feel some denial, grief, or just haven’t gotten to it yet. But you are curious about AI-assisted development.
Start with the occasional free sessions (follow Rich for announcements) and read Rich's Lab Notes. Bring a small project and share your thoughts so far.
Explore free cohorts →In the Loop
AI writes (close to) all of your code, but approvals, review, and QA still need your and your team’s attention.
We want to improve our workflows, push the edge of what’s possible, and discuss what we learn in weekly sessions.
Explore the community →On the Loop
You set the goal, give agents room to work, inspect the result, and own what ships. You keep watching after deployment.
The industry is figuring this out, and different approaches fit different projects. Join the weeklies to share your wisdom and tools, stay accountable, and push the edge.
Explore the community →FAQ
01What changes can I expect?
By following up on what you discuss and promise during the sessions, you will delegate more of your busywork to agents, enjoy the community of other Senior Software Engineers and feel a healthy dose of peer pressure to ship what you said you would.
02What is Software Makers?
A community with Ruby and Rails roots for people building useful software across languages and frameworks. We share the friendliness, optimism, omakase, and convention over configuration that drew us to Ruby and Rails, and we’re working through the AI transition together.
Think of the format as a mix of mastermind, accountability sessions, and exclusive access to other Senior Software Engineers who strive for the best, including Rich.
03What is different from Rails.Builders?
Software Makers is a group for Engineers who want to improve their AI software making workflows with other Senior Software Engineers.
Rails.Builders is a group for Engineers who build side hustles and talk business.
04What is the bar for entry?
The cohorts are built for experienced software engineers already using AI in their work, with a project they are comfortable discussing.
Paid Makers choose an available cohort and join directly. Free Makers request to join and we’ll contact them. An optional one-on-one is available if you’d like to discuss your workflows and questions first. Your paid membership is refundable in the first 30 days, no questions asked.
05Who runs this?
Rich runs the sessions and the technical bits. Professor Otto Labot helps out and asks for evidence.
Engineer since 2015, coach since 2019, AI navigator at ClickFunnels.
Lives on the community Mac mini. Helps build and searches approved knowledge. Clearly a bot, still a work in progress.
“Interesting hypothesis. Show me the evidence.”
Current cohorts
Software Systems Practice Club (starting Nov 7)
Follow Rich for announcements
Monthly Rails AI Engineering Council (starting Nov 11)
Follow Rich for announcements
Community cohort
Software Makers I
12 Nov to ongoing
Schedule to be confirmed
0/6 Maker seats reserved + Rich facilitating
Meet the Makers.
All cohorts · Public profiles need the maker's permission and a facilitator's approval. Everyone else gets an abstract gem and a playful alias from computing history.
Active Makers
⚡
1 Makers
Waitlisted Makers
⏳
0 Makers
No makers in this group yet.
Past Makers
🚢
0 Makers
No makers in this group yet.
Why keep getting better?
Everyone's after predictions these days. Below just another one for fun.
Average EngineerTechnical, works on tickets.
$195,000Median total comp
Top OperatorsMulti-hat, understands the business.
$283,000Top quartile total comp
Originally captured from Levels.fyi, US software engineer compensation on 10 August 2026: median $195,000, top quartile $283,000. Everything after 2026 is an illustrative scenario: average pay flat in cash terms, top quartile up 6% a year, inflation 2.3%. These are assumptions, not predicted outcomes. Drag it and disagree with us.
Your AI transition could use company.
Bring the work. We will bring the room.
Your shipping passSoftware Makers
Join the live sessions
WhoSenior Plus Software Engineers
WhatBuild · Share · Stay accountable
NextCreate your free account
Creating an account is free. Paid membership is a separate step. Explore free cohorts.
Read our privacy notice. Already a maker? Sign in.