r/ruby • u/davidslv • 9d ago

Airtable's official Ruby gem hasn't shipped code since 2016. I rebuilt it, and I'm looking for someone to take it over.

Airtable's official Ruby gem hasn't had a code commit since November 2016. gem install airtable still gives you 0.0.9, released October 2016. Its README tells you to authenticate with an API key, which Airtable switched off in February 2024.

I asked Airtable about it twice. Support confirmed in writing that it is "not actively maintained" and pointed me at airrecord. Airrecord is good, but it's a different shape, so switching means a rewrite that ends with the features you already had.

So I forked the official gem instead. Same namespace, same method names, drop-in. Underneath: zero runtime dependencies, persistent connections, client-side rate limiting, retries with backoff, batch operations with partial-failure reporting, and upsert.

It was AI-assisted, Airtable's API docs are extracted into the repo and coded against. 119 tests, plus weekly canaries that diff Airtable's published contract and run a real round-trip against a throwaway base.

It's deliberately not on RubyGems. I'm not after users, I'm after people who still need it and can be maintainers.

Repo: github.com/Davidslv/airtable-rb
Write-up: https://davidslv.uk/2026/08/26/airtable-ruby-gem-unmaintained.html

8 Upvotes

56% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

29

u/toomuchmucil 8d ago

Does AI have to write all the posts in here? Or is that not the “shape” we’re going for?

12

u/DPrince25 8d ago

My same gripe in other threads. Posters will say “my English is not good so I use ai” when in reality using their English is what gets their English better.

Every few posts reads with the same skeleton different skin. Beyond frustrating now đŸ˜«

-8

u/davidslv 8d ago

My English is alright, not my first language but enough that it gets me by. Using AI is a choice and I will choose to use it.

2

u/DPrince25 8d ago

I was sharing my experiences with the commenter above. None of which was targeted at you or your post. Hence I stated, my same gripe in other threads.

I had no idea English is not your first language nor did I ask you to stop using it.

I am allowed to state my peeves with someone else which should not affect you.

0

u/davidslv 8d ago

Of course. I haven’t stopped you, it’s your choice to share your opinion

-5

u/pBlast 8d ago

LLMs are not AI. They are just text generators. They cannot think or understand anything.

-1

u/Witless-One 8d ago edited 8d ago

Lmao, that’s incorrect.

1

u/pBlast 7d ago

How so?

1

u/Witless-One 7d ago

Well you have multiple claims. First LLMs are AI, I don’t think anyone serious will dispute that, they are huge transformer models. They don’t just “generate text,” they have reasoning capability through chain of thought. They cannot think or understand anything: this is more a philosophical assertion than a functional claim, perhaps you’re right but it doesn’t really matter

1

u/pBlast 6d ago

What "reasoning capability through chain of thought" mean? Why does it not matter if they can't think or understand anything?

1

u/Witless-One 6d ago

They write out their “chain of thought reasoning” and generate output and are graded on that output. So that incentivizes good reasoning and hence ideally good final output.

It doesn’t matter because it’s a philosophical question that doesn’t really have any bearing on their usefulness to fulfil tasks, like writing code, summarizing text, making tool calls, etx

1

u/pBlast 6d ago

The chain of thought reasoning is just text that is generated using linear algebra. If they can't think then they can't reliably do any of the tasks you just listed.

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1

u/pBlast 6d ago

If they can't think, then how can they output a "chain of thought"?

-7

u/davidslv 8d ago

You more than welcome to contribute. What’s your point?

2

u/mrfoto 6d ago

Airtable was bought by Bending Spoons. It's dead.

And even when it wasn't, their API was/is horrible and unmaintained. I've faced SO MANY issues integrating with it directly that many times I wanted to give up. Don't even get me started on how their webhooks work 🙈

1

u/davidslv 6d ago

Didn’t know that was Bending Spoons who bought them. We still use and depend on it. Not something I’m particularly interested to maintain, just a business decision.