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.

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.

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.

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.

Parasites that kill the host are bad parasites.

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 specialized terms) were impossible for me to work with without seeking out specialized 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.

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

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'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?

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?

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

> 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 ;)

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.

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.

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).

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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whatever... i guess pissed in his cheerios this morning and he decided to rage quit. trust me, you won't be missed. That's the best thing about LLMs and agents coding now... you aren't held hostage by someone else for a library you depend on. If you need it, you can create it or update it yourself now.

These developers whom have this God complex are going to find out they were Gods in their own minds real quickly.

"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.

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

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.