I don’t know that this qualifies as enshitification… on one hand, the author created something that scratched his own itch, shared it, and now it’s become a tool that he wishes to steward into a way where he can make money.
I don’t know that these are terrible things inherently, it kind of depends if he wishes to extract as money as possible from his users by any means necessary or if he’s truly trying to scale it so it can help people. All we have is this article and infinite speculation.
I personally didn’t find herdr useful, so I have no stake in the direction of what the author decides to do with herdr.
In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.
If he wants to make money he needs to sell licenses, not give them away for free. To that end, making the free version AGPL is generally a good move. It ensures people can get hooked on your product and when they start working at corporations they have to pay to keep using it.
Enshitification is 100% guaranteed with any vc backing. Maybe not now, but definitely in the future it is the literal point of venture capital. Gain adoption, then exploit to the maximum extent possible.
It’s fine to use these kind of tools, just don’t get too attached and be ready for the rug pull.
I have a hypothesis that the bubble in and of itself would not be so problematic if the United States was not in a war with Iran.
I am looking to test if there are several second order effects of rising oil prices and supply chain issues that can exacerbate financial contagion from an AI bubble (assuming we are in one) and, to the best of my understanding, it depends on what kind of mechanisms fail to contain the fall out.
I don't think it is reasonable to assume doom, but I would imagine there needs to be considerations from a much broader perspective as to discuss the possibility of 'a larger capital stock, higher wages, and a lower interest rate' that is paper is asserting.
I could be wrong (I am still trying to assess my hypothesis), but I am skeptical that the increased value/productivity from AI can overcome a rising cost of living if the war is sustained.
Just out of curiosity, why are there no flat keys and ability to construct chords?
The website looks slick but I think from a functionality perspective, there is a lot lacking with this library. I am also not sure what the value of MCP is here.
Without flat keys (and double sharp/double flats), there is quite a bit of harmonic space that is omitted.
When you look at the source, you can set it to English from the params https://mimo.xiaomi.com/coder?lang=en
but there's a small bug, the hero subtitle isn't translated but everything else is.
Parts like `No boilerplate, no imports, no build system. Just Ruby being Ruby.` and `The insight behind Shoes wasn't technical—it was emotional` seem to fit a pattern I frequently see in AI Generated output.
Even the structure of the blog post follows a pattern I see in AI generated text with the section of `Why This Matters`.
The more I use AI, the more I think about the book Fooled By Randomness.
AI can take you down a rabbit hole that makes you feel like you are being productive but the generated code can be a dead end because of how you framed the problem to the AI.
Engineers need enough discipline to understand the problems they are trying to solve before delegating a solution to a stochastic text generator.
I don’t always like using AI but have found it helpful in specific use cases such as speeding up CI test pipelines and writing spec; however, someone smarter than me/more familiar with the problem space may have better strategies that I cannot of think of, and I have been fooled by randomness.
AI can also make you invest useful time in things that are not useful or not needed. It also deincentivizes collaboration. If everyone builds thier own version of say Beebook with 5 features, thats worthless compared to BeeBook opensource or even corporate Beebook with thousands of features and complex workflows. And everyone who worked on thier own version of BeeBook wasted thier time.
With AI you have to be careful to know what is important, you dont want to waste your time doing random stuff that may not even get a single user. If its for fun, thats fine but if you want to build a business or improve your output, I would advise people to choose well.
I have been programming with Ruby for 11 years with most of the time in a professional context. It's my favorite language :).
I don't care much for types, but it can be useful with denser libraries where IDE's can assist with writing code. It has been helpful in my professional life with regards to typed Python and Typescript.
One potential example that would be interesting is utilizing types for reflection for AI tool calling, the python library for Ollama already supports this[0].
It would make it easier to use such tools in a Ruby context and potentially enhance libraries like ruby-llm [1] and ollama-ruby [2].
If it is at all possible, it would be nice to have a little bit better support for metaprogramming namely around `define_method` and supplying a typed lambda or block for the dynamic method. I can see why this would be a pain to implement, so I don't expect it :).
Otherwise, I think in terms of typed Ruby, this is an incredible undertaking with very well written documentation. Thank you for making this library, I think there's a lot that the Ruby community can benefit from with it. Cheers!
