Our React Native playbook, Tailwind x Shopify & Rails + AI

Standardizing React Native: Our new guidelines

We just published our official React Native guide in the public MarsBased Handbook. After comparing technical decisions across our recent mobile projects (like Voyager Genomics and Everesting), we've aligned on a single set of rules for the future.

The guide covers our standard stack: Expo managed workflow, NativeWind with gluestack-ui, TanStack Query, Hey API, and EAS for builds. It is completely open to the public, so feel free to use it as a baseline for your own engineering teams.

Tailwind CSS is joining Shopify

The frontend ecosystem saw a major shift this month: Adam Wathan announced that the Tailwind CSS team is officially joining Shopify. This acquisition is a big milestone for the utility-first CSS framework. We'll be watching closely to see how this affects Tailwind's open-source roadmap and Shopify's internal tools.

Rails gives AI agents a convention-driven framework

Juan Salvador highlighted a new guide from Ruby on Rails showing why the framework is a great fit for AI coding agents. Because of its convention-over-configuration approach, Rails makes it easy for agents to generate production-ready code. Data shows Opus 5 is the most accurate model for Rails, while Opus 4.8 offers the best balance of cost and performance.

Claude Code productivity hacks

• Run Shell Commands Natively: Type ! in the prompt before a command and it will run in your shell within the same session. Output goes straight into the chat, so you don't need a second terminal for things like ! git checkout main.

• Enable Sandbox Mode: For security reasons, our engineering team now runs Claude Code with sandbox mode enabled by default. It lets you define exactly which files and network domains the agent can touch, preventing unintended system modifications. We highly recommend configuring it.