thoughtbot/rails-consultant

Rails Consultant

A collection of [skills][] for Rails development and consulting, with an emphasis on learning, communication, and client success.

Installation

Add the marketplace to Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add thoughtbot/rails-consultant

Install the plugin:

/plugin install rails-consultant@rails-consultant

Commands

Understanding the Codebase

/explain

Explains a specific piece of code or a user-facing flow. Point it at a file, class, or method for a close reading; point it at a feature or user action for a system-level diagram with entry points, branching logic, and side effects.

/explain app/models/user.rb
/explain password reset
/explain the Stripe webhook handler

/prior‑art

Finds every place the codebase handles a specific concern — the consistent pattern and the exceptions. Answers the "how does this app do X?" question before you build something that reinvents it.

/prior-art How does this app handle authorization?
/prior-art Where do we send transactional emails?
/prior-art How are background jobs retried on failure?

Test-Driven Development

/test‑driven‑development

Strict outside-in TDD workflow for Rails. Starts with a feature spec describing behavior from the user's perspective, lets each failure guide what to build next, and drops to unit tests for non-trivial logic. Enforces the discipline: no production code without a failing test first. Red-green-refactor.

/test-driven-development Users can cancel their subscription from the billing page
/test-driven-development Fix the bug where archived projects still appear in search results

Based on [Superpowers][superpowers] by Jesse Vincent, adapted for Rails with guidance from [Testing from the Outside-In][outside-in], [The Testing Pyramid][testing-pyramid], and [Testing Antipatterns][antipatterns].

Code Quality

/socratic‑review

A pairing session, not a report. Reads the code silently, then leads y