Nate Berkopec
On Remote Ruby
“Most people are opening their Claude Code window and shipping 3,000-line mega pull requests and sending them to their colleague, 'hey, review this, bro.' It's bad for you. It's bad for your coworkers. It's bad for the AI. It didn't make sense four years ago. It doesn't make sense now.”
Remote Ruby · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Berkopec contrasts Intercom's practice of auto-merging tiny pull requests with what he sees at most companies using coding agents. His argument is that many small PRs are how you manage the higher change velocity.
Transcript
…so funny is like, we're still here. We're still on the remote Ruby podcast. And like, I want to hang out with you guys. Like, I don't want to hang out with, I don't know, whoever writes Rust or Python or whatever. I don't know those guys. I don't like them. I want to hang out with Ruby people.
…for you? Like, what is exciting now? What do you see yourself spending time on? And what do you enjoy too? Because that I think has changed a lot where the highs and lows are not the same anymore because you're like, oh, cool, I exploited something. We're like, I didn't really do the exploit. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe this gets to why I was able to feel this in January. And only now other people are sort of waking up to what's going on. Is back in January and March, if you wanted like a role model or like to say, well, who is actually doing this now today in a way that I can see and like copy or like, who's actually doing this? Your only option was like Steve Yeggy doing Gastown. That dude's crazy. Gastown was legitimately a fever dream. It made no sense. It never made anything useful. So if your only model back then is a literal crazy person, I could see why you'd be like, well, this is dumb. The thing is, now in October 30th of 2026, there are a lot of role models that you can go look at who are doing really cool things with AI who were legit before AI, you know, and like we're shipping cool stuff before AI and are shipping more cool stuff now. So let's run through some of the examples of people you should go look for for inspiration. And, you know, one of these hopefully clicks with you. Okay. Jeff Dickey, easy. So he's merging 60 PRs a day to all of…
I feel that a lot. Dude, the other day, what was I doing? Testing something on the latest Ubuntu LTS Resolute. And it was like, oh, yeah, we can't do this, it turns out, because the Rust core utils have changed and they don't support this thing that the old version did. And I was like, well, that…
lot of people are in the nihilism phase of like the grief cycle here where because what their workflow is is basically keeping one to three clawed code windows open and switching between them. And what happens is like they do what you just did. Like they're like, wow, I found a real bug in CH own…
I love that. I have thoughts on that or questions about like, what is the goal with the automation? Because I could have it go like, go find any kind of bugs or regressions on Ubuntu, which might be quite a bit of a distraction from building my product. But the other thing I wanted to point out was…
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