Brian Scanlan: Building AI-First at Intercom

Brian Scanlan: Building AI-First at Intercom

From On Rails by Rails Foundation, Robby Russell

April 22, 2026 · 1h 52m · Season 2 · Episode 2

About this episode

Brian Scanlan discusses Intercom's engineering philosophy and their use of AI tools.

In this episode of On Rails, Robby is joined by Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, where a 15-year-old Rails monolith with millions of lines of code sits at the heart of the business. Brian shares how Intercom's philosophy of being "technically conservative" has kept their engineering organization productive and focused on shipping product rather than managing infrastructure complexity, and on Intercom's all-in bet on Claude Code as their singular AI tool, now generating ov...

People in this episode

Host: Robby Russell

Guest: Brian Scanlan

Topics covered

  • AI
  • Engineering
  • Rails
  • Product Development
  • Monoliths

Keywords

  • AI-First
  • Intercom
  • Rails monolith
  • Claude Code
  • engineering productivity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Intercom

Products: Claude Code

Places: Rails

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