
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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