Eluned and I are both sad and happy to announce that we have decided to close down our company, M6R. Sometimes opportunities arise that are so unusual it's impossible to turn them down. I got offered one of them so I'm writing this from the beautiful city of Abu Dhabi!
M6R was set up with a clear goal to build software that could help everyone involved in software development. We did just that!
Our software was designed to do things in a very different way to other AI development systems. We embraced a brand new GUI design, where others chose a less expressive route of running inside a terminal, or simply clones other GUI dev tools. We championed users getting to own their AI development lifecycle by making LLMs totally interchangeable at any point. We were doing what others now call "spec driven development" via Metaphor back in October 2024.
Our product, Humbug included all these elements, alongside an agentic terminal design that allows any LLM to interact with any terminal running in the system. This has demonstrated some astonishing emergent properties where even non-thinking AIs could automatically debug complex issues, heal themselves against incorrect tool uses, and all while maintaining human-in-the-loop safety mechanisms.
Most recently, we've also just embarked on building AIFPL, a pure higher-order functional programming language designed explicitly for AIs to use. It's 100% side-effect free and thus allows LLMs to do complex deterministic processing without any need for human supervision or approval.
Taking a somewhat extreme approach to dependency management a correct design meant Humbug was going to take a long time to get going, but the last few months have reconfirmed that this was the right choice. The agentic terminal and AIFPL designs were able to leverage very robust features that were added earlier in the year and were built at incredible speed. There is still something magical about switching away from the human needing to control the tools to watching an AI start to do exactly the same things with those same tools.
While all good things must come to an end, I'm very happy to confirm this is not the end for Humbug. Humbug was always open source and will remain so. I use it for all my software development work and couldn't imagine doing anything else now. I may not have as much time to spend on this myself, but I am now confident I can leave much more of the heavy lifting to LLMs!
If you've followed and supported us on the M6R journey, please accept our thanks. Your encouragement and feedback has been invaluable, and I hope you will still continue to support the now pure open-source Humbug, Metaphor, AIFPL, and whatever else happens next.
Dave