A Ruby developer has decided to archive all their open-source gem repositories and stop maintaining them, publishing an explanation of their decision on their blog.
According to the post, the developer’s frustration centers on how Ruby and its ecosystem have evolved. They note that Ruby was originally designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) with an emphasis on programmer joy and human-centered development. The developer contrasts this original vision with current trends, arguing that the language is now being actively developed using large language models (LLMs).
The developer points to Matz’s recent positioning of Ruby as a “Programming Language for AI age” intended to be generated by LLM agents. According to the post, Matz has stated that for LLMs to effectively generate Ruby code, they need access to more human-written Ruby source code to train on. The developer sees this as problematic—characterizing it as a “commons that’s being strip-mined by massive corporations to feed the very machines whose unthinking output pollutes it.”
The post also critiques the state of Ruby on Rails, the framework most closely associated with Ruby. The developer notes that while Rails is open-source, it is controlled by a person whose views they find objectionable. They reference Rails World, a conference created after the Rails founder was not invited to RailsConf, and point to his recent keynote as evidence that he is no longer interested in Ruby, Rails, or programming itself. According to the post, the Rails founder is now using LLM agents to generate applications in Rust, despite having previously expressed strong negative views about that language.
The developer concludes that they no longer feel inspired to contribute to Ruby’s open-source ecosystem given these circumstances, stating they are “out” of Ruby development.
Key facts
- A Ruby gem developer has archived all their repositories and ceased maintenance
- The decision was prompted by concerns about Ruby being positioned as a language for LLM agent development
- According to the developer, Matz has stated LLMs need more human-written Ruby code for training
- The developer criticizes the use of human-written code to train AI systems that then generate code
- The Rails framework, Ruby’s most prominent application, is controlled by someone the developer disagrees with