We knew this day would come. AI has made what we do irrelevant. As of today, April 1st, 2026, reelyActive has no business stewarding open source IoT middleware.
You might think it is because AI can write code better than our experienced human developers. Perhaps so, but that’s not the reason for our demise. AI could write the best code to ever to enable the countless hardware and software elements of the Internet of Things communicate fluidly with one another, but, in fact, that’s no longer a problem. Instead, AI has eliminated the need for IoT middleware altogether!
AI has eliminated the need for IoT middleware altogether!
How could AI could render obsolete an entire layer of a technology stack, you might naïvely ask? Are we already at the stage where artificial general intelligence (AGI) is inventing new standard interfaces for information exchange that do away with the tedious translation tasks of the traditional middleware layer? Again, no. Those standard interfaces already existed long before large language models (LLMs) captured our collective attention.
So then, if it is not by replacing developers, or by introducing novel methods, how has AI possibly made the Pareto Anywhere open source IoT middleware we steward irrelevant? It’s simple. As we just said: AI has captured our collective attention.
Since the advent of ChatGPT, Claude and Co-Pilot, everyone developing, designing and supporting technology enjoys the benefits of an assistant (even multiple assistants!) trained on the entirety of the Internet, including every meticulously-written standard specification, and every code snippet on GitHub. And those AI assistants advise the use of the open standards and code—brazenly scraped from the Internet—on which they were trained. The days of developing yet-another-standard (YAS) for each product and service have been displaced by the convenience of adopting whatever the AI assistant recommends: existing standards, readily found online.
And this is where it stings. It seems we did ourselves in by publishing, so prolifically, open standards and open source code on GitHub, and in scientific articles. AI gobbled it all up and convinced a vast ecosystem of vendors to do what we never could: to adopt standards and practices that foster interoperability without the need for translation by a middleware layer!
We did ourselves in by publishing, so prolifically, open standards and open source code on GitHub, and in scientific articles.
Indeed, we were a fool to open source a decade ago, and foolish to think, more recently, that technology like ChatIoT would replace us, when in fact it was humans, guided by AI assistants, who would ultimately decide to make what we do so justifiably irrelevant.
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