rails-rocket-sheep

The project

A Rails 8 application template for building with AI coding agents. rails new gives you a framework; this gives you a codebase an agent can be productive in on the first prompt: the patterns are already there, the conventions are written down one rule per file, a generated CLAUDE.md routes the agent to the right rule before it touches anything, and the rules a machine can check are checked at push time and in CI. The result is that the tenth feature looks like the first one.

It was built because many side projects start from rails new. The template gets the boilerplate out of the way and gives each one the same foundation, ready to develop and deploy the same day. It is applied once and leaves behind ordinary Rails files: no gem, no runtime dependency, nothing to upgrade. MIT licensed. This site was generated from it.

How it was built

The workflow started at work. From March 2026, uCollect's team repo carried a set of agent slash commands for planning, submitting and reviewing pull requests, with teammates adding to them; in July they were reshaped into the chain on /workflow: /pick, /feature_plan, /task_plan and /implement. The template itself was carved out of an existing Rails app in January 2026: the stack, the service and registry patterns, and a CLAUDE.md. From August the workflow, conventions and gates were extracted into it, tested against the apps the template generates, and adopted back into the project repos: DailyDrop and uCollect in August, IDLEmpire in October. When it was mature enough, the template began running its own workflow on itself: since October 2026 its features go through it, with a design doc, slices on a feature branch, and gates in CI. What came of it: four releases, and the codebase this site was generated from.