Ruby on Rails rescue & prototype works · Austin, Texas

It demoed fine.Then it met production.

We take stalled, AI-generated apps and rebuild them in Ruby on Rails. We build new prototypes in five working days. Either way you leave with a codebase a competent developer can pick up on day one, and the runbook to prove it.

Book the 20-minute diagnostic See the timetable

Rails since 2007 Author of GeoKit Early engineering, Stitch Fix 45 years shipping software

Departures Fixed price

ServiceStatusFare

Diagnostic20 minutes free, then a written teardown of what you actually have.

Open$2,497

Rescue RunYour AI-built app, rebuilt in Rails and deployed. Five days.

Boarding$7,997

Prototype RunIdea to a working, hosted Rails prototype. Five days.

Boarding$4,997

RoundhouseMonthly upkeep once it is running. Cancel any month.

Monthly$1,497

Two runs on the schedule at a time. The diagnostic fee comes off the fare if you board.

Pre-boarding inspection

You are not looking for a developer. You are looking for someone to stop the noise.

Most people who call us built something real in a weekend and have spent two months failing to make it stay up. See how many of these you recognize.

It runs on your laptop and nowhere else, and you have stopped trying to find out why.

Every new feature quietly breaks two old ones, and nobody notices until a user does.

Nobody can tell you what the database actually stores, including the tool that wrote it.

Your AI tool keeps rewriting the same file instead of fixing it. You are 40 prompts deep.

A developer looked at the repo, went quiet for a week, then quoted you a full rewrite.

An API key is sitting in the front-end bundle and you found out from a stranger.

Run the full ten-point self-check →

This is not a you problem. Veracode tested more than 100 models across 80 coding tasks in 2025 and found that when a model could choose between the secure and the insecure way to write something, it picked the insecure one 45% of the time.

Escape.tech scanned over 5,600 publicly reachable apps built with Lovable, Bolt, and similar tools and found 2,038 critical vulnerabilities, more than 400 leaked secrets, and 175 cases of exposed personal data, some of it bank account information.

Veracode GenAI Code Security Report, July 2025 · Escape.tech, The State of Security of Vibe Coded Apps, October 2025

The timetable

Two runs. Five days each. Price fixed before we start.

No discovery phase that bills for six weeks. No hourly meter. You know the departure date, the arrival date, and the fare before anyone writes a line of code.

The Rescue Run

$7,997 fixed · 5 working days

For the app that exists, sort of. Built with Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit, Cursor, or a contractor who stopped replying.

Day 1
TeardownRead every file. Map what the app actually does versus what you think it does. Written findings by end of day.
Day 2
Stop the bleedingRotate exposed secrets, close the open doors, get a real backup of your data before anything else moves.
Days 3–4
Rebuild the core in RailsThe parts that matter get rewritten properly: data model, auth, payments, the jobs that keep failing at 3am.
Day 5
Deploy and hand overLive on your infrastructure, with tests, a deploy runbook, and a walkthrough recording for whoever comes next.

The Rescue Run in detail

The Prototype Run

$4,997 fixed · 5 working days

For the idea that needs to exist by the board meeting, the demo day, or the first customer call.

Day 1
Scope lockWe cut the idea down to the one path a user has to walk. Everything else goes on a list for later, in writing.
Days 2–4
BuildRails 8, server-rendered, Tailwind. Real database, real auth, real data. Daily link so you watch it come together.
Day 5
Deploy and hand overHosted at a URL you can send to anyone, in a repo you own, with the same runbook and walkthrough.
After
Your callTake it to your own team, take it to a hired developer, or keep us on the Roundhouse plan. No lock-in either way.

The Prototype Run in detail

Why we rebuild in Rails

The stack that both machines and humans already know.

Rails is not the fashionable answer in 2026. It is the one that leaves you with something maintainable, which is a different question and the one that costs you money.

Models write it well

Rails conventions mean there is usually one right way to do a thing, and the models have seen it a million times. Less invention, less token spend, fewer surprises in the diff.

Humans can take it over

A Rails app follows a shape every Rails developer recognizes. When you hire someone in a year, they open the repo and know where everything lives. That is the whole point of the handoff.

It is boring on purpose

Server-rendered pages, one database, one deploy. Fewer moving parts than a front end, a backend, an edge function, and a hosted database that all have to agree with each other.

92%of atomic Rails tasks solved by the top model in the Rails Foundation benchmark, August 2026

The Rails Foundation commissioned a benchmark of coding agents working on a real Rails codebase. Frontier models solved the large majority of scoped tasks, and the cheapest capable model finished all 63 of its runs for under a dollar.

The same report found the catch: the models mostly write their own version instead of reaching for the framework's built-in API, and hand-rolled code is code somebody has to maintain forever. Closing that gap is the job we do. The full argument →

The handoff

You own the engine.

The fastest way to get burned twice is to escape one black box into another. Everything we build is yours from the first commit, and we write down how it works whether you stay or not.

If you hand this to a different developer next month, that is a success, not a failure. It is what the deliverables are designed for.

Read the Handoff Standard

The repository lives in your GitHub organization from day one
Deployed to infrastructure billed to your accounts, not ours
A written deploy and rollback runbook, not tribal knowledge
Tests on the paths that would cost you money if they broke
A recorded walkthrough for the next developer, not just for you
Standard Rails, no proprietary wrappers or in-house frameworks
Secrets in encrypted credentials, never in the code or the front end

The engineer

Bill
Eisenhauer

Rails since: 2007
Open source: Author of GeoKit
Silicon Valley: Early engineering, Stitch Fix
Also: Senior engineering manager, ezCater
Shipping since: 1981
Based: Austin, Texas

One engineer, on the phone, who has seen this before.

I wrote my first production system in 1981 and my first Rails app in 2007. GeoKit, the geocoding library, is mine. I was an early engineer at Stitch Fix and a senior engineering manager at ezCater, running the growth platform team.

Atomic Locomotive is new and I am not going to invent testimonials for it. What I will tell you is what you get instead: you talk to the person writing the code, the price is agreed before we start, and the first ten clients get founding rates in exchange for permission to write up the results.

If the diagnostic tells me your app does not need a rescue, I will say so and refund the fee. That has to be a real possibility or the diagnostic is worthless.

More about the engineer →

The Roundhouse

Somewhere to bring it back to.

A locomotive does not go straight from the factory to the scrapyard. It comes back to the roundhouse to get serviced. Once your app is running, this is where it goes.

Dependency and security updates, uptime and error monitoring with someone actually reading the alerts, small changes and fixes, and a standing call every other week. Roughly a day and a half of work each month. Cancel any month, keep everything.

$1,497

per month · cancel anytime

Security and dependency updates
Monitoring, with a human reading it
Small changes and bug fixes
A call every two weeks

About the Roundhouse

Before you book

The questions everyone asks.

My app is not in Rails. It is React and Supabase.

Most of them are. The diagnostic tells you honestly whether the app is worth repairing where it stands or worth rebuilding in Rails, and roughly what each path costs. Sometimes the answer is that you should keep what you have and fix three specific things. You get that answer in writing either way.

Can anything real be built in five days?

A working prototype, yes: real data, real accounts, deployed where people can use it. A hardened product serving thousands of paying customers, no, and anyone promising that in a week is selling you a template. Five days gets you something true enough to show investors, test on customers, or hand to a developer. What comes after that is a different conversation with a different price.

You are one person. What happens if you get hit by a bus?

This is the right question to ask any solo shop. The answer is the handoff package: your repo, your infrastructure, standard Rails, a written runbook, and a recorded walkthrough. It is built so that the next developer can pick it up without me. That is not a promise, it is a deliverable you can inspect on day five.

Why does the diagnostic cost money?

Because it takes a day of real work and produces something useful on its own: a written assessment of what you have, what is broken, what it would take to fix, and what it would cost. If you go ahead with a run, the fee comes off the price. If I tell you that you do not need me, you get it back.

Can I just keep prompting until it works?

Sometimes, and if that is working you should keep going. It tends to stop working at the point where the problem is structural rather than local: the data model is wrong, the auth is wrong, the thing that breaks is not in the file the model is looking at. If you have been circling the same bug for two weeks, that is the signal.

What does it cost after the run?

Nothing, if you want. Take the repo and go. If you want the app kept alive without hiring, the Roundhouse is $1,497 a month and you can cancel any month. Larger builds after a prototype get quoted separately, fixed price, same as everything else.

All the questions →

Steam it up.

Twenty minutes on a call, free. You show me the app or describe the idea, and I will tell you which run you need, or that you do not need one. No deck, no discovery process, no sales sequence.

Book the 20-minute call

bill@atomiclocomotive.com · Austin, Texas · Usually replies same day