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Ben Curtis

@bencurtis.com
3.8K followers 534 following 309 posts

Christian, husband, dad, co-founder of Honeybadger.io, fan of Ruby, creator of the faker gem, EV nut (1, 2, and 4-wheel), LSU football fan, and cycling enthusiast in the PNW.

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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 14/09/2026
Do you fail open or fail closed? www.bencurtis.com/2026/09/fail...
bencurtis.com
Fail open or fail closed? - Ben Curtis
Ben Curtis - Fractional CTO & Co-founder of Honeybadger
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 04/09/2026
My wife and I may not agree on everything, but we agree on the important things… like which way the TP roll is oriented. 😉
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 26/08/2026
Giving Claude access to production logs sent to Insights is *so handy*
Screenshot of Claude Code session with this text:

(user input) Have codex check your changes

(output)
  Ran 1 shell command

Finding 1 would silently break everything, so let me verify it rather than take it at face value.

  Called honeybadger-eu 3 times

Codex's top finding is wrong — I checked it against live data.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 05/08/2026
Claude + Honeybadger is like peanut butter and chocolate. I got a Honeybadger alert, and asked Claude, "find out what's going on with [HB error URL]". It did its MCP thing, figured out and fixed the problem, and included this tidbit in the analysis:
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 03/08/2026
Ok, Prairie Dog (prairiedog.app) is officially cool now... it has found a place in my browser's favorite bookmarks. :)
prairiedog.app
Prairie Dog — the lookout for your team’s pull requests
One dashboard that answers “what needs my attention?” — reviews waiting on you, approved PRs ready to merge, stale branches. Installs as a GitHub App.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 02/08/2026
TUIs like Hunk are bring back good memories of Turbo Pascal apps. :) www.hunk.dev
hunk.dev
hunk — review-first terminal diff viewer
Hunk is a review-first terminal diff viewer for agent-authored changesets. Multi-file review stream, inline AI annotations, watch mode, and Git/Jujutsu integration.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 28/07/2026
Prairie Dog is getting more and more handy... now I'm using it to clean up long-neglected PRs in addition to managing the flurry of PRs that Claude is creating.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 21/07/2026
We've had a significant uptick in the number of pull requests needing to be reviewed at Honeybadger in the past few months, thanks to Claude. It's cool to be shipping more stuff, but it can also be a lot sometimes. So I had Claude build an app to help keep tabs on all of them 😁 prairiedog.app
prairiedog.app
Prairie Dog — the lookout for your team’s pull requests
One dashboard that answers “what needs my attention?” — reviews waiting on you, approved PRs ready to merge, stale branches. Installs as a GitHub App.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 17/07/2026
With the Honeybadger MCP, resolving bugs is as simple as asking Claude to resolve fault X. The next thing you know, you have a PR. Love it. :)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 13/07/2026
I'm wondering whether I'll leave the building even once while I'm at RubyConf this week due to the heat. :) Either way, I'm looking forward to it!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 07/07/2026
New Honeybadger feature just dropped... and I'm pretty excited about it: Anomaly detection! docs.honeybadger.io/guides/integ...
docs.honeybadger.io
Integrations
Send Honeybadger data to other services.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 22/05/2026
I'm wondering how to contact my helpdesk provider about their helpdesk product not working (and yes, their status page is all green) ... how's your Friday? :)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 12/05/2026
I just used crit.md for the first time while working on a PRD. Very cool!
crit.md
Crit - Your feedback loop with the agent
Your feedback loop with the agent. Review plans and code changes with inline comments, multi-round diffs, and structured output any AI coding agent can consume. Single binary, works locally.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 02/05/2026
I just flipped a feature flag for Honeybadger... see if you can find the new feature. :)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 01/05/2026
Absolutely loving using feature flags (Flipper) to get feedback from beta customers on new features in Honeybadger. And it's easy to sync the "launch" of a feature with an update to the docs. :)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 15/04/2026
PDX ➡️ SEA … when the taxiing time exceeds the flight time. 😏
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 14/04/2026
I’m super happy I made it to @microconf.com … the content, the conversations, and the connections have been fantastic!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 14/04/2026
@robwalling.com we have a good number of MCP users … and CLI. 😉
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 13/04/2026
Excited to be @microconf.com this week … looking forward to connecting with peeps!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 06/04/2026
@simonwillison.net I liked the Cleanup Claude Code Paste tool you published.. thanks for making that! I made it into a PopClip extension: github.com/pilotmoon/Po...
github.com
Add Reflow extension by stympy · Pull Request #1329 · pilotmoon/PopClip-Extensions
Summary Adds a new Reflow extension to contrib/ that cleans up text pasted from terminal output (e.g. Claude Code) Removes the ❯ prompt character, joins soft-wrapped lines into proper paragraphs, ...
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 05/04/2026
The grave has no victory, and death has no sting. Happy Easter!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 28/03/2026
I had a great time chatting with @justinjackson.ca and @briancasel.com today on The Panel: panelpodcast.com/39
panelpodcast.com
The Panel | Can AI be your CRM?
Justin's hosting this one and he brought along Ben Curtis from Honeybadger to talk about how AI can be a CRM and also your designer.Timestamps:YOU ARE THE PANEL – send us your thoughts 🗣️🎤 Send us ...
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 26/03/2026
I have opened 3 PRs so far this morning without using Claude. AMA 😉
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
vrunt @vrunt.social · 19/03/2026
perfect, no notes. -- my review of 4'33" by john cage
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 18/03/2026
Do I know anybody going to SREcon next week? I’d love to meet up if you’re going to be there.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 16/03/2026
The superpowers Claude plugin is pretty great.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 11/03/2026
I just added a one-shot script to install the Honeybadger CLI and a systemd service to get host metrics (CPU, RAM, and disk) sent to Insights: github.com/honeybadger-...
github.com
GitHub - honeybadger-io/cli: Official CLI for interacting with the Honeybadger API
Official CLI for interacting with the Honeybadger API - honeybadger-io/cli
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 09/03/2026
For everybody who's missing FounderQuest, here's a guest pod appearance for you. ;)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 27/02/2026
My favorite safari trick: opening a bunch of tabs, shift clicking to select them all, then dragging them all off to make a new window.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 25/02/2026
You gotta watch this… it’s cool
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 18/02/2026
I’m tracking events in Breakwater with Honeybadger Insights, and I wanted to know how my periodic background jobs were doing, so I used the Honeybadger MCP server in Claude Code with this prompt: Can you show me the last few job executions from Honeybadger Insights for this project? ...
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
Jeremy Morrell @jeremymorrell.dev · 17/02/2026
Why not just use capnweb then? Isn't it really nifty?
Cap'n Web is an object-capabilities RPC library from Kenton Varda. Beyond its support for object-capabilities, it is designed to integrate very nicely with TypeScript and Cloudflare Workers. I couldn't find a JSON-RPC library that worked as nicely, so I stole its design used Cap'n Web as inspiration for a JSON-RPC implementation.

Cap'n Web has a number of benefits over JSON-RPC

Object capabilities. You can pass functions and classes by reference. This is more than a feature, it completely changes how expressive your API can be, and enables patterns that are not possible with a more limited RPC protocol.
Pipelining. Invoke two methods and then pass their results into a third in one round-trip.
Support for non-JSON data types: ReadableStream, bigint, Date
So why would you ever want to use JSON-RPC instead?

Mainly it's boring (link to Choose Boring Technology by McFunley) and has been around for longer than a few months. The JSON-RPC 2.0 Spec was last updated in 2013. Even more impressive, you can sit down with a cup of coffee and read the whole thing. Your coffee might not even be cool enough to drink when you've finished.

A few more points:

Widely used in the Language Server Protocol which drives code-editing basically everywhere
Used in MCP spec
Easy to invoke with plain curl commands
Works well with browser dev tools
Many client implementations in many languages
Cap'n Web is strictly more powerful, and I look forward to seeing it grow and mature, but for many projects today JSON-RPC is a great fit.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 13/02/2026
This post about "Respectful Open Source" by @andrewnez.bsky.social inspired me to have Claude build forkwatch, a tool that analyzes forks of any repo and highlights where multiple forks converge on the same fix. nesbitt.io/2026/02/13/respectful-open-source.html github.com/stympy/forkwatch
nesbitt.io
Respectful Open Source
Maintainer attention as a finite resource.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 31/01/2026
I like the term "Automatic programming" from @antirez.bsky.social I think it fits for the process I was describing in www.bencurtis.com/2026/01/buil...
bencurtis.com
Building Breakwater with AI - Ben Curtis
What used to take weeks now takes hours. I used ChatGPT and Claude Code to design and build Breakwater, and the results have changed how I think about shipping software.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 30/01/2026
For the afternoon folks: I shipped a thing, I had fun, and I blogged about it. ;) www.bencurtis.com/2026/01/buil...
bencurtis.com
Building Breakwater with AI - Ben Curtis
What used to take weeks now takes hours. I used ChatGPT and Claude Code to design and build Breakwater, and the results have changed how I think about shipping software.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 30/01/2026
It’s fun to tell Claude, "ship it", and watch it commit, push, and open a PR. I just did that for my latest blog post about using AI to build Breakwater, an app for managing licensing and access control for Docker container distribution: www.bencurtis.com/2026/01/buil...
bencurtis.com
Building Breakwater with AI - Ben Curtis
What used to take weeks now takes hours. I used ChatGPT and Claude Code to design and build Breakwater, and the results have changed how I think about shipping software.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 28/01/2026
I recently shipped something fun for Honeybadger: You can keep closer tabs on your cron jobs now, and even use them to get data into Insights for querying, charts, and alarms. :) www.honeybadger.io/changelog/ch...
honeybadger.io
Check-in payloads: know how your jobs ran, not just that they ran on time
Basic check-ins tell you when your cron jobs and background tasks don't run on schedule. But what happens when a job runs and fails? Or takes twice as long as...
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
Josh from Honeybadger @joshuawood.honeybadger.io · 27/01/2026
Production debugging with AI agents has really improved my workflow lately. Here's how to automate fixing bugs on @github.com. This approach should work for Claude Code and other agents too, lmk if you want ideas. www.honeybadger.io/blog/copilot...
honeybadger.io
How to Build a Copilot Agent That Debugs Production Errors
Learn how to build a Copilot agent that connects to your error tracking tool, fetches stack traces automatically, and proposes fixes with tests.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 17/01/2026
I don't trust AI enough to let it loose managing my infrastructure, but ChatGPT and Claude sure are helping in creating runbooks and modifying terraform configurations in response to a an incident!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 16/01/2026
It's pretty wild to be looking at code that I haven't touched in ten years, especially when this app is getting updated every day.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 15/01/2026
This is pretty cool :)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 15/01/2026
Some details on how AI helped… * Product name: workshopped with AI * Color scheme, HTML, CSS: generated by AI * Homepage content: workshopped with AI * Early access form: suggested by AI * OpenGraph image: created/iterated with prompts * Terms and privacy policy: *not* generated by AI ;)
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 15/01/2026
I’m amazed at how good Claude has gotten recently. It accelerates my work so much that I launched a new product to over the Christmas break: www.breakwaterapp.com It went from an idea to launched with less than 20 hours of my time. 2026 is going to be wild for B2B SaaS, y’all.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 06/01/2026
One of the perks of using Fastmail: easy setup for outbound email for your side projects. Set up your new domain with Fastmail, then create an app password in Fastmail (limited to just SMTP access), then use that password and Fastmail's SMTP server in your app's mail configuration.
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
Technology Connections @techconnectify.bsky.social · 31/12/2025
And see, even in that post I let out yet more context: I didn't see any condensation around my exterior doors, including on latches and hardware. What little I saw in those rooms was due to the air trapped between the blinds and the glass. Just hard to explain my whole reasoning concisely.
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
Mekka Okereke @mekka.mekka-tech.com · 31/12/2025
There are a few people that do realize that racism was wrong, and those people are welcomed with open arms.♥️👍🏿 But what usually happens, is people conflate "Leopards are my face!🤡" with true reconciliation. Eg, as people are trying so hard to do right now with MTG. No. Rejected. Stay on that side.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 25/12/2025
Merry Christmas!
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 09/12/2025
Kafka pro tip: If you're having performance issues, try increasing your batch size. It's magical! :)
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Reposted by Ben Curtis
Honeybadger.io @honeybadger.io · 27/11/2025
Don’t forget to instrument your turkey for #observability today. 📈 Happy Thanksgiving! blog.thermoworks.com/accurate-pro...
blog.thermoworks.com
Proper Probe Placement in Your Turkey
Temperature control is key to cooking a turkey, and it all starts with accurately placing your oven thermometer's probe.
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Ben Curtis @bencurtis.com · 26/11/2025
Today I launched a big (back-end, infrastructure) thing and not one customer noticed. 💯 🎉 Just the way I like it. 😉
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