A Ruby developer archived every gem he wrote, citing Matz's pivot to the AI age
Paul Battley left one line on his archived repositories: if you want changes, ask your agent. He says that's what people are supposed to do now.
Paul Battley, a London developer, archived all his Ruby gems and wrote that he no longer wants to feed a commons that big companies strip-mine for machines. He points at Ruby's own core team, which he says now builds the language largely with LLM agents.
In the thread, the founder of an email company described a friend on an 80K-star project who is disillusioned too: the robots work, but the joy of collaborating is gone.
Why Paul Battley stopped maintaining his gems
Battley's post is the notice he links from each archived repository. He leans on Yukihiro Matsumoto's 2000 essay saying Ruby was made to make programmers happy, and a 2019 interview in which Matsumoto said, "I designed Ruby for humans, not for machines."
Three things broke that bargain for him. He calls DHH's control of Rails abhorrent and says DHH's 2026 Rails World keynote showed little interest in Ruby, Rails or programming itself; DHH reportedly now has LLM agents generate Rust apps he does not review. He says the Ruby language itself is now substantially developed with LLM agents, with Matsumoto pitching Ruby as a "programming language for the AI age" that LLMs will emit, which in turn needs more human-written Ruby to train on. And he no longer feels inspired to contribute to a commons that, in his view, is being fed to machines whose output degrades it.
He ends with a shrug aimed at downstream users: go ask your agent, I'm out.
"It's the same as someone having been in your bed"
The thread was not unified in grief. The line most quoted back came from a commenter who liked the blunt metaphor:
"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." — lbrito, a commenter quoting the post's best line
The more interesting testimony came from people with skin in the game. The founder of MailChannels relayed a friend's story:
"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." — Founder of MailChannels, repeating a friend's account from an 80K-star project
Maintainers are already quietly forking
One commenter described the exit from the other side. After a PR to an open source library sat unanswered for months, they had an LLM fork the repo and now maintain a private copy, and expect small packages on npm, RubyGems and PyPI to dwindle as people generate their own clients instead.
The pushback: it's a Ruby thing, and the tools are liberating
Not everyone bought the framing. The creator of SQLAlchemy and Alembic asked whether most of these "I'm quitting programming" posts come from the Ruby community. A hybrid human/AI newsroom builder said the opposite of Battley:
"LLMs have completely opened up areas that were extremely painful to deal with 5 or 10 years ago." — ilamont, a creator with a media background who now builds with AI
Another commenter pointed to the evidence gap: two to three years into agentic coding, they see no CAD package rivaling Blender, FreeCAD or KiCad.
Battley's post is a datapoint about who leaves when a language's own leadership changes its pitch. If maintainers of long-tail gems follow, the cost lands on projects that depend on them without a name on the lockfile.
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