I archived SwiftLinkPreview, one of my most successful open-source projects. Over 1,400 stars on GitHub. Now it’s read-only.

How it all started

I created this library years ago because I was fascinated by understanding how things worked under the hood. I wanted to replicate that Facebook link preview experience. You know, when you paste a link and the title, image, and description show up? I reverse-engineered the entire logic and wrote the parser from scratch.

And it worked. For a long time, it worked really well.

What changed

In January, I realized it was time to stop. And the reason is simple: AI.

What used to require complex scraping logic and constant maintenance to handle a thousand edge cases is now a trivial task for an LLM. Technology evolved to a point where my solution was no longer the best tool for the job.

The hard part (that wasn’t actually that hard)

There’s a lot of ego tied to our code. We want to keep it alive forever, as if it were an extension of ourselves. But clicking that archive button? It was a relief.

It showed me how much the landscape has changed since I started. And more importantly, it reminded me of something fundamental:

Good engineering is also knowing when a problem has been solved by better tools.

Sometimes, the best thing we can do for our code is let it rest.

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Have you ever had to “retire” a project you cared about?