RuboCop 2.0: Where do we go now?

Slide deck from my talk at RubyConf Austria 2026

Transcript

2. (Slide intentionally left blank)
3. TODO: Insert brilliant intro here
4. Servus!
5. I’ve got a very long history with Vienna
6. My fi rst fl ight was to Vienna
7. The fl ight was 9 EUR in both directions
8. The taxi from the airport to our hotel on Mariahilfer was 70 EUR… in one direction
32. About @bbatsov
35. „Bangaranga!“: Bulgarien gewinnt den ESC – und Deutschland stürzt ab
36. Balkan Ruby
39. Hot Takes
40. Stop watching “Prison Break” after Season 1
42. The perfect language for agentic programming is Clojure
43. The perfect language for agentic programming is OCaml
44. Emacs is the One True Editor
45. Emacs will be the One True LLM
46. •Car mechanic •Tile layer •Plumber •AC technician
47. End of Hot Takes
56. Божо / Bozho / Bug
57. Disclaimer: Not writing a book
58. Disclaimer: Not writing a book about AI engineering
59. I’ve been doing Ruby since…
61. Ruby 1.9.0 2007-12-25 Ruby 1.8.6 2007-03-12
62. Clojure was fi rst announced in 2007
65. Optimize for programmer happiness
66. Simple made easy
67. No breaking changes EVAR
68. Hammock-driven development
69. Ruby 3/4: To In fi nity and Beyond
70. — Master Yoda Dif fi cult to see; always in motion is the future.
71. You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been…
72. Today RuboCop is one of the most loved and hated Ruby projects
75. I don’t like hats, but they are often useful
77. Useful products get used
78. Useful products get used (By humans and machines)
81. 327 releases
82. 1.86.2
84. Guiding design principles
85. Rubyists know best
86. Less is more
87. Churn is bad
88. Lots of churn is very bad
89. Saying NO is good
90. Recent RuboCop Highlights
91. Big focus on performance
92. Startup performance
93. RuboCop/LSP server
94. Modern (real) plugin architecture (https://docs.rubocop.org/rubocop/latest/plugins.html)
95. More polish, less new cops and features
96. MCP Server (optional feature)
97. Rubydex integration (optional feature)
99. Rolodex
100. Rolex
101. Rulex
103. What’s holding us back from doing RuboCop 2.0?
104. We have to decide what to do with all the pending cops
107. 155 / 606
108. We have to decide what to do with the proposed breaking changes
109. • Changes to the con fi guration format • Renaming cops and con fi guration options • Kind of solved even know (with caveats) • Using Prism natively • Currently we use Prism via a translation layer • Changes to the default con fi guration (e.g. enable less cops)
110. My time with Clojure has made me really dislike breaking changes
112. AI detour
113. Upgrades are easy…
114. You can fi nally fi x all those RuboCop offenses without autocorrect
115. You can fi nally implement your dream features and fi x some annoying bugs
116. — Rick Rubin, legendary music producer (60 Minutes) "I have no technical ability. I know nothing about music. I get paid for my taste."
117. Bigger OSS projects get a lot of vibe-coded contributions
118. The role of the maintainers is to keep those in check
119. https://blog.fogus.me/meta/LLMe.html While LLMs may function as occasional tools of convenience, they fall short where it matters most—cultivating judgment, transmitting experience, and sustaining the human relationships that reproduce real expertise. Their bias toward digitized artifacts, plausible continuations, and sycophantic agreement leaves them ill-suited for the tension- fi lled, exploratory work of serious design—work that depends on contradiction, discernment, and lived understanding. What is at stake is not mere ef fi ciency, but the conditions that make deep competence possible in the fi rst place.
120. https://blog.fogus.me/meta/LLMe.html While LLMs may function as occasional tools of convenience, they fall short where it matters most—cultivating judgment, transmitting experience, and sustaining the human relationships that reproduce real expertise.
121. Small & frequent (major) releases
122. Do we still like SemVer?
124. What’s next for RuboCop?
125. More of the same
126. Polishing the existing cops
127. Simplifying the initial con fi guration
128. Presets RuboCop’s (maybe) upcoming feature • Essential • Classic • Extreme
129. Severity RuboCop’s forgotten feature • Info • Refactor • Convention • Warning • Error • Fatal
130. Deeper Rubydex integration
131. Re-write in Zig or Rust?
132. The end of RuboCop is near?
133. You can replace it with an agent that just read your style guide
134. You can vibe-code your superior linter yourself
135. Obie’s Praxis
136. Vibe-coding will make Ruby redundant
137. Vibe-coding will make all programming languages redundant
138. — Master Yoda Dif fi cult to see; always in motion is the future.
139. One more thing…
140. A new RuboCop release is out!
141. RuboCop 1.87
153. Ruby is Love
154. The End