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44 points seuros | 14 comments | | HN request time: 1.493s | source | bottom

BreakerMachines is a production-ready circuit breaker for Ruby/Rails with built-in async/fiber support, fallback chains, and rich monitoring. Unlike existing gems, it handles modern Ruby's fiber scheduler and avoids dangerous thread timeouts.
1. felipemesquita ◴[] No.44481035[source]
I’m usually weary of long readmes with too much styling as that indicates to me a high likelihood that they were written by ai and the author might not have even read all of it. The use of generic ai images also gives a bad impression - for example, there’s an image captioned “The green lines? Those are your CPU cycles escaping.” without anything green pictured.

I’m not saying your gem is bad. It’s nice to se an attempt at a circuit breaker that is based on the state machines gem, I will certainly look into the actual code if I have a need for it in the future.

Just wanted to give you this bit of feedback about maybe cutting down on length and loosing the ai images in the readme as I think it might be a turnoff for others as well.

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2. seuros ◴[] No.44482583[source]
Appreciate the feedback—really.

You are correct to point out the mismatch on the image caption, i generated a few and copied the wrong one. That one's on me, i will update it later.

And while AI might correct a typo or help rephrase a sentence here or there (I’m not a native English speaker), everything in that README—tone, structure, content, rants, and lore—is 100% me. It's my style. Love it or leave it.

As for scaring people off ? That’s not a bug, that’s a feature. This is an open source circuit breaker, not a SaaS onboarding funnel. If someone decides not to use a well-tested library because the README isn’t sterile enough for their corporate taste, that is their loss. I'm not here trying to win two potential enterprise clients who expect a PDF pitch deck and a hug.

The circuit breaker pattern itself isn’t new, I didn't invent it, it has even its own wikipedia page. But the Ruby ecosystem? Still treating it like a nice to have.

Existing circuit breaker gems like Circuitbox, Semian, etc., are stuck in the past. They rely on patterns and syntax from the Ruby 2.6 era, and integrating them into a modern codebase often means a painful refactor or bending your architecture backwards. BreakerMachines is built for 2025, fully async, fiber-safe, and designed to work with modern Ruby without dragging a legacy ball and chain. It's don't even support version of ruby that is 1 version behind. Upgrade then use.

If someone is going to get frustrated by a long README or AI-generated images, they’re welcome to go pay someone to write them a handcrafted if/else block and call it resilience.

The code is clean. The tests are good. And if just that MD file makes them walk away from that—again, their loss. They don't even read it.

I maintain a ton of gems. And I’ll be honest: my enthusiasm for open source has been repeatedly drained by the "please make this more corporate-friendly" crowd. Not talking about you specifically—but there’s a whole wave of people who want everything politically polished and personality-free. That’s not why Ruby was created.

Ruby was made for joy. And this gem? It reflects that.

Cheers for actually reading and for giving honest feedback. You’re rare for that. Just don’t expect me to dress up like a SaaS salesperson anytime soon.

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3. seuros ◴[] No.44487130[source]
I did split the readme now. Thank you again.
4. moritonal ◴[] No.44518227[source]
I actually like the style. It's very on brand for Ruby from what I've read. Make coding punk again.
5. dewey ◴[] No.44519237[source]
Reading this I expected the README to be unreadable, filled with images and emojis, but found them to be very detailed with lots of code examples (Which I often miss in Gems) and explanations which was obviously a lot of work to do. Thanks for that!

PS: Speaking of "bit of feedback" for the parent commenter, it's losing not loosing.

6. Perz1val ◴[] No.44519727[source]
I mean no offense, but your writing style gives the LLM vibe, this comment included. They all start with saying the user is right and thanking for their input, then wall of text, then a hook to incentivise further discussion. All well formatted and split into logical paragraphs. It is good and correct, but you may wish to not sound like chatbot
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7. seuros ◴[] No.44519975{3}[source]
No offense taken—you're absolutely right.

In fact, I even added an em dash shortcut to my Logitech POP keyboard. That’s dedication. See? — — — — —

I’m not just writing like this—I’ve industrialized it.

If it sounds like a chatbot, maybe it's because I have spent too much time training them and not enough time pretending to be a chaos monkey in HN threads.

Appreciate the feedback though.

Now excuse me while I reboot into Windows just to add and to my custom shortcuts.

I have still got one more slot—what do you think I should add?

Go wild. Bonus points if it makes someone uninstall the gem out of pure emotional confusion.

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8. zendist ◴[] No.44520044{4}[source]
Weird.
9. ljm ◴[] No.44520163{4}[source]
I'm not sure if I'm on HN or LinkedIn Lunatics now.
10. ljm ◴[] No.44520200[source]
I'm sure I saw this gem posted a few days ago (maybe not on HN?) and at the time all the docs were in one mahoosive README.

I think it's a massive improvement that it's been broken down into chapters in a docs folder. I can take or leave the writing style but do miss the old whimsy of _why and his poignant guide to ruby. The examples are great and quite thorough.

11. chao- ◴[] No.44520237{4}[source]
As someone else who appreciates em dashes—deploying them judiciously for many years, I too am plagued by people suddenly perceiving my natural writing style as suspect.
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12. seuros ◴[] No.44520279{5}[source]
Same here, i used them for years.

Feel you.

13. ◴[] No.44520911[source]
14. syspec ◴[] No.44532246{4}[source]
This thread is getting a bit scary, are you okay?