by Paul Battley | 2026-10-18
\n*I’ve decided to archive the source code of my Ruby gems to make it clear\nthat I’m no longer working on them; I’ve written this post to link from them in\norder to explain why.*
\nIn an article published in 2000, Yukihiro Matsumoto (a.k.a.\n“Matz”), designer of Ruby, wrote,
\n\nFor me, the purpose of life is, at least partly, to have joy. Programmers\noften feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming,\nso Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.
And as recently as a 2019 interview, he said,
\n\nI designed Ruby for humans, not for machines.
It was during that era, when Ruby was ostensibly for joy, for creativity, for\nhumans, that I developed this code. But that age, of doing things for humans,\nhas passed, and with it my enthusiasm for working on Ruby gems. I won’t say it\nwas always great, but at least we were working with and for people.
\nThe pre-eminent application of Ruby has been making web applications\nusing Rails. Rails is open source software but it’s owned and controlled by a\nman whose views I find abhorrent, although there is an ongoing\neffort to fork it.\nTo judge by his keynote at Rails World this year – the conference that he\nhimself set up in pique after he wasn’t invited to RailsConf a couple of years\nago – he is no longer particularly interested in Ruby, Rails, or even\nprogramming itself.\n(He’s now using LLM agents to churn out apps in Rust, a language which he\ncompares to “pouring acid into [his] eyes”, but that’s apparently fine because\nhe doesn’t even look at what they generate.)
\nBut even beyond Rails, the Ruby language itself is now substantially\ndeveloped using LLM agents. Matz is giving talks repositioning Ruby\nas a “Programming Language for AI age”, to be emitted by LLM agents,\nand stating that to be able to do that LLMs need to consume more good\nhuman-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here.
\nIn that context, I no longer feel inspired to contribute to a commons that’s\nbeing strip-mined by massive corporations to feed the very machines whose\nunthinking output pollutes it.\nWhen people claim that it’s no longer sustainable to write code by hand,\nthey’re not entirely wrong, but only in the same way that it’s no longer\nsustainable to sleep in a bed once someone has taken a shit in it.
\nYou want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re\nsupposed to do now. I’m out.
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