Twenty-five years of shipping. Ruby on Rails at the core, AI agents in the loop.
Panos Creative is the consulting practice of J.J. Merrick — a Nashville-area software engineer who ships production Rails for everyone from two-person startups to Amazon One Medical, and puts AI agents to work doing it.
Email J.J. →Currently taking contract work.
bin/agent "add usage-based billing"
reading app/models/subscription.rb
drafting migration add_metered_events
writing app/services/billing/meter.rb
running bin/rails test billing
54 tests passed — PR #312 ready for review
services
Ruby on Rails, done properly
Rails 3 through Rails 8, the full Hotwire / Stimulus / Tailwind era included — plus the PHP and ColdFusion that came before it. Healthcare, FinTech, LawTech, procurement, and e-commerce.
- Feature development on production apps
- Stripe: subscriptions, marketplaces & billing
- Integrations: Plaid, Twilio, Shopify, FHIR
- Upgrades, rescues, and legacy codebases
AI agents that pull their weight
Not theory — I built and operate a multi-tenant platform for AI phone, SMS, and chat agents, and I develop with coding agents every day. Ask me why every repo I touch has a CLAUDE.md in it.
- AI voice, SMS & chat agents in production
- LLM features inside Rails applications
- Agent-assisted development workflows
- Helping teams adopt agentic coding
recent work
Amazon One Medical engagement via Thoughtbot. CKE is the parent of Hardee's & Carl's Jr.
what clients say
“J.J. seems very focused and dedicated to solving any problems that come up. I'd recommend him to any company looking for someone that will get the job done.”
— Matthew Dunham, Senior Full-stack Developer
“J.J. has the unique ability to take complex information and develop it into simple and easy-to-use applications. I would recommend him to anyone.”
— Casey Cornett, Sketch Creative
Have a Rails app that needs a senior hand?
Or a team that wants to work faster with agents? One email starts the conversation — no forms, no calls with sales.
jj@panos.cc