Rails Template — Development skill for Claude Code

Machina — an opinionated, agent-native Rails template

A `rails new` template for building **production** Rails apps that are meant to be worked on by AI coding agents (Claude Code and friends) as much as by humans. It's the template ZAR uses internally — the same one our non-programmer CEO uses to ship real apps to production — with the internal plumbing stripped out so you can use it too.

"Agent-native" means the generated app doesn't just contain code — it contains the **operating manual an agent needs to change that code correctly**: a `CLAUDE.md` orientation file, 32 curated Claude skills, and 17 path-scoped coding rules that auto-apply based on which file the agent is editing.

gh repo clone obie/rails-template ~/rails-template
MACHINA_PORT=3042 rails new myapp \
  -m ~/rails-template/template.rb \
  --skip-test --skip-git

Why this exists

Most Rails templates give you a stack. This one also gives you the **conventions and guardrails** that keep an autonomous agent on the rails (pun intended) while it builds features for you:

• CLAUDE.md — a per-app orientation file: stack, auth flow, dev commands, conventions, and hard "never do this" rules an agent reads on the way in.
• .claude/skills/ — 32 curated skills covering Ruby/Rails craft (ruby, layered-rails, sandi-metz-rules, 37signals-style, test-driven-development), a full Hotwire pack (hwc-*), workflow skills (writing-plans, executing-plans, using-git-worktrees, handoff), and app patterns (rails-activity-timeline, rails-tiptap-autosave, mcp-oauth-setup, design-system).
• .claude/rules/ — 17 path-scoped rules (migrations, controller scoping, CRUD routing, service objects, testing conventions, schema hygiene, …). Each has a paths: frontmatter so the agent only loads the rules relevant to the file it's touching.

The result: you (or your CEO) describe a feature, and the agent builds it the way a senior Rails engineer on the team