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Full post of my thoughts and permalink: duncan.dev/link/rubygem...

What a mess. I personally believe that everyone was acting with the best of intent from their point of view under a lot of pressure. I can’t help but think how much better this would have gone if everyone had sat down first over a meal and a beverage to talk through how to accomplish this.

Finally, last month Ruby Central took some much needed steps to consolidate control and accountability over the RubyGems GitHub repositories. It was the right general thing to do but the execution of it was… not the greatest. Blame flew hard and fast.

That didn’t help as much as it should have and things have been in an uncomfortable state since then. During my entire tenure at Shopify, I worked closely with the Ruby and Rails teams there and we were incredibly concerned about the security of the Ruby ecosystem software supply chain

A bit of history:

For a while after its creation, RubyGems was loosely supported by the community. Then, Rails-hosting provider Engine Yard stepped in and provided support until 2015 or so. Then, André Arko and several others formed Ruby Together to serve as a vehicle for sponsorship of the work.

I’m really happy that Ruby core is stepping in for the repos/governance. Gems is core to Ruby now, and has been for a long time. It should be there, imo.

I’ve been staying out of it but I know that there are layers and layers, probably most of which aren’t visible and therefore making what we see in the surface seem really weird.

It’s a fascinating example of how LLMs generate what *ought* to exist rather than what *does* exist. Pattern matching, not truth retrieval.

Theia Vogel has a great deep-dive on why this happens: vgel.me/posts/seahor...

Good timing for sure!

Halcyon on and on… so good

Well… you know.

I’m a fan of Satya and hold Microsoft stock.But I’m not a fan of this zero-sum approach to the near future. I may be naïve. But I still believe there’s a positive-sum version of AI disruption—one that values people and builds new leverage for teams, not just balance sheets.

That inversion? It’s the shift from human-driven productivity to AI-driven margins. It’s a vision where profitability can grow—without so many of those messy human costs.

Satya’s memo is polished and clear. It lays out Microsoft’s pivot toward an AI-first future and positions layoffs as an inevitable consequence of reinvention at scale. “For years, the sector has been generous to its employees… AI, however, inverts that relationship.” says Om.

One door closes and the next opens. God speed my friend.