I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear that I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in order to explain why.
In an article published in 2000, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a. “Matz”), designer of Ruby, wrote,
For me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, so Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.
And as recently as a 2019 interview, he said,
I designed Ruby for humans, not for machines.
It was during that era, when Ruby was ostensibly for joy, for creativity, for humans, that I developed this code. But that age, of doing things for humans, has passed, and with it my enthusiasm for working on Ruby gems. I won’t say it was always great, but at least we were working with and for people.
The pre-eminent application of Ruby has been making web applications using Rails. Rails is open source software but it’s owned and controlled by a man whose views I find abhorrent, although there is an ongoing effort to fork it. To judge by his keynote at Rails World this year – the conference that he himself set up in pique after he wasn’t invited to RailsConf a couple of years ago – he is no longer particularly interested in Ruby, Rails, or even programming itself. (He’s now using LLM agents to churn out apps in Rust, a language which he compares to “pouring acid into [his] eyes”, but that’s apparently fine because he doesn’t even look at what they generate.)
But even beyond Rails, the Ruby language itself is now substantially developed using LLM agents. Matz is giving talks repositioning Ruby as a “Programming Language for AI age”, to be emitted by LLM agents, and stating that to be able to do that LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here.
In that context, I no longer feel inspired to contribute to a commons that’s being strip-mined by massive corporations to feed the very machines whose unthinking output pollutes it. When people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand, they’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer sustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now. I’m out.