I was chatting with a friend who commits on a very well known open source project (~80K stars). He is disillusioned not because the robots aren't good at what they do -- they totally are. The sad thing is that he enjoyed writing code and working with the community on improvements because it was a very human, collaborative thing to do. So, while the robots are great at pushing the project forward even faster and doing fantastic things for security and performance, the joy is gone.

I can totally identify with that feeling. It must be how professional mathematicians are feeling as well.

One thing that strikes me about what is going on: we have been promised this renaissance in software, yet, it been 2-3y of accelerated agentic/LLM development and I haven't see anything great coming out of the LLM developed software world that is worth looking at. Let's take open source as an example: No new 3d/2d CAD packages that are more capable than Blender/FreeCad/KiCad, nor Blender/FreeCad all of the sudden became much more capable than they were just few years ago. I also want to point out,that I haven't seen any new LLMed software in Electronic/ElectroDynamic simulation, something I would LLM to excel at, beyond what already existed before. No new software that is equal to Adobe Creative Suite (that Vibed coded replacement is trash IMO), No new Operating Systems that are taking over. No new utilities that are super useful in day work. We are using the same software, we've used before LLM arrived.

Reverse Engineering became much easier, it is plus. Finding vulnerabilities also became much easier, another plus. Models are getting better. But where is the new cool software ?

Edit: I will go even beyond OSS. M$ & Goog, who are DEEPLY Vested into AI, have access to the best possible frontier models and large groups of highly proficient engineers. Yet, Windows and Android are as laggy & buggy, as they were 4-5 years ago.

What a great phrase!

>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.

I have a strange feeling that we'll see an increasing number of these to the point where we'll start to see legitimate issues in ecosystems as real talent exits (due to projects no longer evolving, being deprecated, etc as a response to AI).

Will be quite funny when there's a noticeable decline in stability and development—despite having AI—because it turns out you actually need talented, creative people to build the building blocks the AI spits out. LLMs can parrot but they're basically the Crazy Town [1] of software development.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6xffJn4-w

One of the most underrated abilities in this industry is knowing when to walk away from something that no longer bring you joy. It's sad that it has come to this, but I'm sure the OP will find something more fun to do with their time.

This hits too close to home.

I started learning to write code when I was 11, in year 2000, out of pure curiosity of how tech works. I remember when a family friend opened up our very first computer, a Gateway desktop, to change out the modem that was no longer supported after an OS upgrade and the excitement and awe I felt seeing the boards and cables eager to know more. I got back online and immediately started learning how to build web pages.

I learned Flash and ActionScript in high school then got my first job as a developer building websites for local small businesses when I was 18 while in college. Most of those were largely custom Wordpress or PBBoard installs and configs. That was my 3rd job while I was majoring in aerospace, with no insight that programming could even be a career. It was just a fun part-time job for me.

A couple changes in major, a degree in computer science, several startups, and 19 years later here I am wondering whether I really want to stay in tech at all. The joy of solving problems using tech is just dead. My tagline on LinkedIn for a decade has been "Solving problems, sometimes with code" which is as true now as it ever was, but it's hard to reconcile what's happening now with why I got into this to begin with.

It was never about the money for me, otherwise I'd have worked at any of the big tech companies when I was getting hounded by recruiters for years. Instead, I've opted for the fun challenges at startups and getting to be closer to the customer, flexing my skills across disciplines and specialties. I'm mourning how the joy and spark are fading, but I'm also mourning what we are losing in the field. Things used to be about more than just the work, and you may think I'm naive for believing that, but it's very clearly just about the work and output now. It's soulless.

I have wondered where we are with stuff like this.

I myself have been using an open source lib that I contributed a fix for and inquired about it. I didn't just drop a PR either, opened an issue, was told PRs accepted, opened a PR, signed a license agreement and then the PR just sort hung out for months without response even after some gentle prodding.

Now, they don't owe me anything and they don't have to merge the code, it is their repo after all. However what did I do? use an LLM, fork the repo with my changes and now "I" maintain that private fork and add to it as needed.

As time goes on I think these smaller packages / clients will start to disappear as people/LLMs just spit out a client library or whatever or just implement the same thing over and over. Combined with the opinion of the author I figure oss libs for npm, ruby, pypi etc will start to dwindle.

> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now. I’m out.

Totally fair. The source code is open. Thanks for all the fish.

I can't speak to Ruby or other programming languages, but as a creator and occasional hacker with a media background, I have found AI to be incredibly liberating.

Now I can build things that would never have been possible without huge investments of time and/or money. The latest project: a hybrid human/AI tech newsroom that leverages LLM-driven advances in translation (https://asia-tech-news.ghost.io).

For my personal passions, LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago. Take genealogy: I used to manually transcribe old letters, and documents in foreign languages (often archaic terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out experts. The other night I had an AI go through a book of 200-year-old religious records and pick out references to potential ancestors. A few weeks earlier I worked on an old diary transcription (https://youtu.be/P6r1I-4T9is?si=qhaf3Wd5zZNjieEw) which I later shared with relatives to proof and enjoy. Such tasks are no longer a chore. It's fun again.

The closest comparison I can make was stumbling upon an old HTML tutorial on an MIT website 30+ years ago. All of a sudden, as a writer and creator, I was no longer tied to my employer's business model to get my words and images out to the world.

Well, it might be a rational view for the author, but for me that's like saying "I no longer like cooking, because there are companies providing the recipes I like as ready-made meals", or "I no longer play my instruments and make music, because there are machines which can create the music I like"; both topic apply to me personally, and I wouldn't agree to the statements. I still like to design and implement systems, make clever architectures and solve tricky problems. Why should I care if other people use LLMs to do so?

I'm so conflicted about this. I do love being able to create and bring ideas to life at the light of speed. But I also see the unique value in the experience of coding, deeply caring about the craft. Can we have both?

If AI can do what we deem creative work, say implementing a chunk of a Ruby gem, should we still consider such work creative in the first place? I was wondering if we should face an uncomfortable realization: much of what we call being creative was really the cost of overcoming cognitive friction due to the limit of our brains.

Cognitive scientists like Margaret Boden used to break creativity into three different categories: combinatory, exploratory, and transformational. It looks like a lot of our programming tasks are really combinatory and exploratory. Yes, they can be deemed novel and creative by individuals, but collectively they are standardized. It's just like finding integrals used to an art, but nowadays Mathematica can do it better to most of the integrals. Mastering special functions used to be the key to solving tricky PDEs, but nowadays few engineering students need to spend multiple semesters learning them. Quasi-RH was considered a Fields-level hard problem, yet AI could brute-force a proof with elaborate estimates. We humans have a brain that can process only a few variables at a time and it took ingenuity and years of effort to master a series of concepts before using them to solve a problem, but that could be just the cost of knowledge transfer, which AI can drive to zero in many cases.

However, the need for creativity does not go away. It just moves more to the transformational category. In addition, our craft will shift to arguably a less romantic tier: problem formulation, verification, and grounding. It will be a painful transition to many people, me included, but we have no choice but to adapt.

Note I'm not ignoring the economical impact of AI. It's very possible that lowering the cost of producing code increases the aggregate appetite for software, but the demand of software engineers can still go down. Even if total code volume explode tenfold, the labor market may not absorb displaced engineers. I wish there are solutions to this pain, but I fail to see what they are.

One thing I always like about coding is that when something is annoying or hard to do, you can improve things so that it becomes easier and more straightforward, at least in principle. For example if a library is badly designed, buggy, or just doesn’t exist, you can write your own. If tooling is bad, you can improve it or create your own tooling. At the extreme, you can create your own programming language, database or operating system. In the small, you can write your own macros and wrapper functions.

With LLMs, that route largely doesn’t exist. Yes, you could write your own harness and agentic tooling. Maybe you could RLHF an existing model. But it all feels less tangible, and you can’t really change the interface to the LLM on the semantic content level in a well-defined way, like you can precisely control the semantics of a library. What you’re prompting against is not malleable in the manner that what you’re coding against is malleable. If your LLM repeatedly goes down the wrong paths, you can’t fix that once and for all, like you can fix a misbehaving library.

Ruby seems like one of the worst language for LLM development for all the reasons that some humans tend to like it.

I felt inspired by this, and removed all my Github projects (except a few that people may depend on, which I just archived).

Ruby is still fun to write, in fact I make the LLMs write the underlying libraries in Rust while I enjoy writing Ruby on top. win win

I feel like this is valuable context to why a Ruby dev may feel disheartened https://youtu.be/IEOqgPfGLQ8

TL;dw: DHH recently held a RailsCon keynote funeral for hand coded Rails in favour of AI Rust. It's well presented and most of the attendees are probably out drinking.

Parasites that kill the host are bad parasites.

> LLMs need to consume more good human-written Ruby code. You might already have seen the problem here.

You might already have _been_ the problem here.

Fixed that typo ;)

That's a real issue in my opinion.

A lot of people get involved in open source because of the sense of community or because they like the idea of giving something to the world.

What's the point in contributing to opensource if your work gets violated by vibecoders and corps that disrespect your licensing and give you no credit while simultaneously clamiing your work is useless and you're going to be replaced by a LLM model?

Any ecosystem declines when there are too many cynical grifters compared to well meaning hard working people.

The author is more than welcome to take his interest wherever he wants, however:

> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now. I’m out.

This is way too spiteful to use as the closing message. Yes, we will ask AI agents, and chances are the code they'll write will be better.

a LOT of these arguments against New Thing seem to always fall into the category of "I no longer receive social credit for being a productive member of a niche in-group, so I quit.", masked as "They peed in the pool!".

The pool they're talking about isn't software or CS, it's the attached treadmill that provides social kudos and credit for a job well done.

This whole thing has been a huge revelation for me in that I naively presumed at first that other 'computer people' were also in it for the passion and interest in the hobby, now I am realizing quicker and quicker that "it's just a job" for the majority of people I talk to, the rest of the people do it "for exposure" , which is a nice way of saying that they're playing the Facebook/MySpace social kudos game with their linkedins and github profiles and blog articles.

very few Terry style "just passionate about the thing" people out there, and I had never realized how rare that was.

This is going to be happening all over the place. I've released some code in the past but I'm definitely not going to do so again without ironclad agreements in place about AI ingestion. I'm not going to help the likes of Amodei and Altman to a further increase in their power, my goal was to help normal people not weird cult-like corporations and I suspect that a lot of people that have released code over the years have the same attitude (though obviously not all of them).

> You want changes? Go ask your agent or something. I’m told that’s what you’re supposed to do now.

Entirely fair. It will be very very interesting to see what happens to software when everyone is running their own vendored fork trying to maintain them with AI agents.

Will the whole thing collapse under its own complexity? Or will smarter agents eventually dig their way out of the hole dug by their predecessors?

> In that context, I no longer feel inspired to contribute to a commons that’s being strip-mined by massive corporations

Open-source was always strip-mined by massive corporations. It was main source of free labour for decades.

Unfortunately there are always people willing to subsidise these corporations with their time for a badge of "honour" and few pats on the back.

Great to see more people awaken to the fact corporations thrive on unpaid work whilst making billions for their shareholders.

I am yet to see this trickle down wink

Is it me or do most of these "I'm quitting programming" posts seem to be coming from the Ruby community?

I know of at least 3 significant rails projects/donors that are actively discussing AI-lead refactors since DHH's talk declaring rails dead. Even if you like the language it's going to be a total mess in a year or two.

Ruby is definitely not bringing me joy since I have to see needlessly depressing articles like this. Rails did not bring me joy 12 years ago when I needed to update dependencies for a legacy cloud service we relied on. Ruby's middling syntax didn't bring me joy either, despite the hype of the time. My child named our cat Ruby, and I had to explain to fellow nerds that it wasn't inspired by the language.

The robots aren't as good as you think. Its just that we're sceamed at all fay by hoardes of people saying they are.

Some of the least skilled people are doing the screaming. They desperately want to establish a consensus that anyome can do what you do now and being skilled doesnt matter...

You know why? Because they have no skills, they're mediocre and the best way they can succeed in a meritocracy without skills is to get people with actual skills to give up, or become meat proxies for the machine like yourself, then maybe you'd stnad a chance.

People will downvote me here, and tell me I dont get it. No I do, you're not skilled and you dont want to have to compete on your own merits. You want me to be impressed with you because you make things with llms. Im not.

"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."

Insane. This is the guy who was proclaimed to be "nice" by his followers. The biggest LLM sellouts in open source are Ruby and Scala.

Ironically Oracle with Java is now being the good guy.

God I hate these screeds. Especially not a fan of the slimy shots taken at DHH.

While the author finds DHH “abhorrent”, I actually find DHH refreshing. He is honest and doesn’t do things just because they will look politically correct. I wish more leaders were as blunt and honest about why they would do/not do something.

while I appreciate the authors contributions to the ecosystem, I dont recommend anyone throw a tantrum on their way out the door. So you disagree with DHH (On what? Just everything I guess? No discussion worth having at all?) and you disagree with Matz (we're supposed to intuit what the 'problem' is; I'm assuming that he uses LLMs?).

Its definitely reasonable to be sad about the loss of our craft, but lashing out at others in a vague and undefined way is not it.

What a man child.

This is an overreaction. Yes, with AI we can all write our own features and bug fixes for open source, but there’s still community benefit in having a canonical version somewhere, rather than everyone writing bespoke solutions for themselves.

"I refuse to code in this language due to the language founders imagined future political leanings" is not a flex.