Lute v3 dev delays

04 Apr 2026

The last commit on Lute’s development branch was on May 3, 2025. This is due to vision problems I have developed, which has had a big impact on me mentally.

This post is disorganized, sorry :-)

Background

I’ve always had bad vision. Thick glasses as a kid, then contacts, but I didn’t like contacts either. Maybe 20 years ago or so, I had LAZIK eye surgery, and things were great. In 2021, I had some distortions in my vision, and had a very quick retinal surgery to remove a small film that had grown on my right retina. That was fine.

Things were fine for a while, but then I noticed other distortions. My eye pressure was also elevated. I had some dark spots in my vision due to small bleeding spots on my retina – these were disconcerting, but not terrible.

Then I had some more difficult items. Another retinal disturbance caused my vision to distort right in the center of my field of vision. Imagine trying to read, but the word that you are looking at is twisted, like it’s caught in a whirlpool. Then my vision in my right eye seemed to deteriorate more, thanks to cataracts (lens clouding).

Current state

My vision is still bad … that’s fine, sort of, I’m somewhat used to it. The distortions remain, though they are not as acute – it makes the words on the screen “swim around” a bit though, or I mean, that reading is not an effortless activity, you know? Glasses help the vision, but then the distortions become more noticeable.

The greater challenge is the mental toll this has brought. I’ve always had depression, and this vision trouble has had an impact. It has caused my little world to contract a bit further and made previously bad but manageable thoughts to be much heavier. I’m doing a few things to work on that, but it hasn’t been easy.

What does that mean for Lute?

Lute has worked well for many, which is super! Due to my vision troubles I haven’t been able to use it myself, which sucks. Though I was the main guy working on it, I’ve never really thought of it as “my” project. It needs to become its own thing. Since I was the main guy, that means others need to be onboarded, or the project pipeline (test/quality-check/build/release) needs to be totally solid, totally bulletproof.

I’m in a bit of a bind. The project still wants to move forward, but my vision and mental challenges make it tougher. Some miscellaneous points:

• For onboarding: I did try to make Lute code and docs as clear as possible, both for myself and others, but one-on-one/mentoring time is always invaluable. I may have to ask others to step up more than I would have otherwise … hard to say, Lute’s free and open source, and taking on a role of code ownership/stewardship takes a lot of work!
• For contributions: There are always code quality issues, and somebody has to go through these things and ensure that the right choices were made. Sometimes such choices aren’t obvious, even though I tried to make the Lute code as obvious as possible. I’m not certain how to offload this work to others. Some people have opened PRs, asked questions, and want to help, but I can’t offer much guidance because it takes screen time, which is hard, and it takes mental clarity, which I am having trouble mustering.
• For build/test/release: I am reasonably confident that the project could take contributions without too much oversight, but “reasonably” doesn’t mean “100% certain.” Try as I might to make the automated testing to be super perfect, there’s always a feeling that something is missing.

To summarize: this is a tough spot to be in. At least the project works and the code is good. I’m just not sure how to summon the energy to take the project to the next level; i.e., for it to become a real model for self-sustaining open source development and use.