There's No Ethical Production in Capitalism

It's been a while! Sorry about that.

I tried to write on one of my book ideas and ran out of spare time. Part of the reason is that I am in an absolute crisis of faith with my current career path. I got fifteen years of Ruby on Rails under my belt. I picked up Ruby because I was fascinated by object-oriented programming (I still am all these years later) and right when I slipped into the career every startup was told Rails was "the thing" to use, so I was high in demand.

Ruby on Rails was made by David Hamburger Helper (not his actually name but it doesn't matter, we'll just call him DHH cause that's how you've heard of him). In the Open Source tradition, since he made it, he was crowned the benevolent dictator for life. Turns out... the benevolent part of that equation was optional. He's explicitly racist and fascist in thought and action. This article is a year old so just imagine DHH has only gotten worse (he has).

I needed an image and since I'm talking about rails, you get to see it.

I like to consider myself a good person, but I know that bit by bit that I auction off my soul with little compromises. I live in a rural chunk of the US and have a gaggle of children. There ain't no public transit around here and there's no infrastructure supporting electric vehicles so I have a car with an internal combustion engine. I contribute to the climate collapse that will probably come before my children are fully grown. That's a compromise I have to make.

I have already expressed I have strong thoughts on AI, so I try not to use it. The bad news is that not only is my day job pushing me to use AI (fresh off the heels of being laid off at my last place for not using AI), but Rails is out here saying it is an AI-first framework. I'm now asking myself more and more if I'm going to have to auction off my soul some more for another compromise.

Which prompted me with the question: can I even ethically build a website in 2026? Is there any framework or language that will allow a dynamic site that isn't touched by AI? Even if I abandon Ruby (in the last year Claude has been a large contributor to the codebase, with an increasingly high rate - in the last three months it is the highest contributor), there is no major language that is free of AI. My best options are either gleam or zig - neither of which I'm familiar with, so that'd be a helluva learning curve. And neither feels like they'd be an actual web framework. I might as well figure out how to get COBOL running on the web.

Here's the real problem - I'm trying to find an ethical way to quickly build simple websites for nonprofits I work with and cheap ways to host them.

And I think I have a solution that uses Ruby.

Bridgetown is a framework for static sites and is a fullstack application. It can't do everything... but it certainly can do a lot. And it has a staunch anti-AI rule for code contributions. I've also started working with Mosscap, which positions itself as an ethical fork off of Rails, positioning itself both away from DHH and from AI. While Hanakai is also out there as an ethical framework alternative to Rails, it makes a lot of decisions that are big leaps for me. Mosscap is positioning itself to be a way to migrate away from Rails with existing Rails applications. So until I'm ready to make the big leap, Mosscap feels like a good idea for apps that need more heft than Bridgetown.

All these solutions still use Ruby which 🤷 might fall apart in the next year or so when Claude code starts making it collapse on its own over-engineered weight. Or once Mosscap is functioning, maybe a Ruby fork will exist and I can just find a specialist as an ethical web developer. But hopefully, by then, I'll just be doing nonprofit stuff full-time.