What happens when the tool you rely on disappears? For Eduardo and Camila Souza, the shutdown of Pivotal Tracker became the motivation to build Pivotal Tasker, a Rails-based alternative inspired by the project management workflow they missed. They discuss reconstructing the experience from memory and reference material, adding classic and modern interfaces, and integrating coding agents to help create and work through stories.

The conversation expands into their move from consulting toward building products. Eduardo and Camila describe Chamber Builder, an all-in-one platform for chambers of commerce, and a custom sales CRM that brings calling, recordings, transcripts, and AI-generated follow-up suggestions into the browser. Across these projects, they explain how observing real workflows reveals opportunities to replace expensive, fragmented tools with simpler software.

AI helps their small team move faster, but they remain firm about reviewing its output and keeping their applications understandable and maintainable without it. They discuss setting technical guardrails, refining generated interfaces, and using Camila’s business background to make software easier for customers to navigate.

They also share lessons from getting products into customers’ hands, including offering free data migration, demonstrating redesigned websites with prospective customers’ own public information, and switching to direct outreach when advertising failed to produce results. Along the way, Eduardo describes an internal deployment tool built around Kamal, and the pair reflect on how AI is changing both consulting work and the opportunities available to Rails developers.

Links
Pivotal Tasker: https://pivotaltasker.com
ChamberBuilder: https://chamberbuilder.com/
Unlok Labs: https://unloklabs.com/

Sponsors
Ruby Native, by Joe Masilotti: https://rubynative.com/david
Judoscale: https://judoscale.com
Special thanks to Flagrant for the new logo and header images for the podcast!