Changelog News

Mike Judge breaks down why he doesn't believe the AI coding claims add up, the folks behind Cactoide create an open source alternative to Meetup / Eventbrite, Ryan Farley tells the story of how RSS beat Microsoft, Dominik Szymański ditched Docker for Podman (and thinks you should too), and Stripe announces a new layer 1 blockchain called Tempo.

Dominik Meca is infuriated by Next.js, Josh Bressers explains why open source is just one person, Huon Wilson describes the usefulness of "Copy as cURL", Herman Martinus re-licenses Bear, and Nawaz Dhandala unpacks why dependency bloat is such a pervasive problem.

Elon Musk and xAI take on Microsoft, DHH ships version 2 of Omarchy (his love letter to Linux), Glyn Normington on managing developer's block, Mitchell Hashimoto declares that all Ghostty contributions must disclose AI tooling, the United States government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and Adam Derewecki thinks we should do things that don't scale, then don't scale.

Cursor has a big problem, Alireza Bashiri thinks plaintext beats todo apps, Manish built an offline AI workspace, OverType is a WYSIWYG markdown editor that's just a textarea, and sshrc lets you bring your config with you to remote machines.

Open source maintainers share their regrets, Thomas Dohmke steps down as GitHub CEO, James Kettle breaks down HTTP/2 from a security perspective, PHP is getting the pipe operator this November, and a class action copyright suit threatens Anthropic and the rest of the AI industry.

Alex Kondov knows when you've been vibe coding. (He can smell it.) our friends at Charm release a Go-based AI coding agent as a TUI, Jan Kammerath disassembled the "hacked' Tea service's Android app, Alex Ellman made a website that provides up-to-date pricing info for major LLM APIs, and Steph Ango suggests remote teams have "ramblings" channels.

Jono Alderson takes aim at SPAs thanks to modern CSS, copyparty turns almost any device into a file server, Ernie Smith honors the Game Genie's 35th anniversary, Anthropic shares how their teams use Claude Code, and Drew Lyton tells why he believes the future is NOT self-hosted.

Przemysław Dębiak beat an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a 10-hour head-to-head coding marathon, Linux breaks 5% desktop share in U.S., Stefano Marinelli is writing a series on making your own backup system, César Soto Valero switched to Python (and is liking it), and Charlie Graham thinks it's rude to show AI output to people.

Researchers in Japan achieve a world record in data transmission speeds, Robin Sloan explains how an app can be a home-cooked meal, Windsurf founders Varun Mohan & Douglas Chen are headed to Google, new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says it's too late for the incumbent, Anton Zaides says stop forcing AI tools on your engineers, and Adrien Friggeri visualized his ten-year running streak.

Justin Searls describes the "full-breadth developer" and why they'll win because AI, Cloudflare comes up with a way publishers can charge crawlers for access, Hugo Bowne-Anderson explains why building AI agents fails so often, the Job Worth Calculator tells you if your job is worth the grind, and Sam Lambert announces PlanetScale for Postgres.

David Singleton says coding agents have crossed a chasm, Anton Zaides explains how SWEs should approach the "squeeze", Mat Duggan has ideas for Kubernetes 2.0, Sean Goedecke does a nice job elucidating the coding agent commoditization, and one more good reason to write, even though it's hard.

Lukas Mathis tells us to stop uploading our data to Google, Robert Vitonsky wants web devs to not guess his language using his IP, Tom from GameTorch reminds us that software talent is gold right now, Austin Parker from Honeycomb describes how LLMs are upending the observability industry, and Vitess co-creator, Sugu Sougoumarane, joins Supabase to lead their Multigres effort to bring Vitess to Postgres.

Diwank explains why you should never let AI writes your tests, Apple redesigns all of their software platforms, AI has brought about the rise of judgement over technical skills, Peter Steinberger says Claude Code is now his computer, and the curious case of Memvid.

We're doing a live show in Denver this July, Danilo Alonso has seen the 'developer replacement' hype cycle many times, Dan Sinker says we're in the Who Cares Era, Cap looks like a solid alternative to typical CAPTCHA solutions, Michael Flarup on the return of texture, depth, and expressiveness in UI & Kan is an open source alternative to Trello.

The San Fransisco Standard published some sobering news for new graduates, the Forge team decided to put an AI agent in your shell, Fernando Borretti says you can choose tools that make you happy, Jujutsu's flexibility and safety changed Nathan Witmer's approach to version control, Anil Dash is as excited about MCP as almost everyone else is & Alex Kladov shares two rules of thumb around pushing "ifs" up and "fors" down.

Microsoft finally opens the source of WSL, Paolo Scanferla describes an inherent trade-off in TypeScript's type system, Alberto Fortin is taking a step back from heavy LLM use while coding, a pseudonymous hacker spent two weeks coding from their Android phone, and NLWeb might become the HTML of the open agentic web.

Rasmus Holm takes a critical look at MCP, Stefan Judis shares a new term he learned from Scott Hanselman, Raf beautifully describes the curse of knowing how, Void is an open source Cursor alternative & React Jam is back for its 6th online game jam.

The DOJ's beef with Google might spell doom for Mozilla, Clayton Ramsey makes a plea for not using ChatGPT for writing, Tim Cook loses a big gamble, Brandon Reinhart migrates his game dev away from Rust and Bevy, and Ibrahim Diallo throws zip bombs at malicious bots.

Zach Bellay tells us about the devil and the angel on his shoulders, Pete Koomen thinks today's AI apps are like horseless carriages, Hyperwood is an open source system for crafting furniture from simple wooden slats, Scott Antipa agrees with YAGNI but adds YAGRI & Antony Henao debunks three common myths that get engineers stuck.

We drop our fourth Changelog Beats album, Dex Horthy proposes the 12-factor AI agent, Thorsten Ball takes us step-by-step through building a coding agent, Zachary Huang builds an LLM framework in 100 lines of code & Philip Laine's Spegel project gets unknowingly forked by Microsoft.

Google announces an open protocol for AI agent collaboration, Datastar is an Alpine.js / htmx love child, Matthias Endler documents things he finds common in the best programmers, turns out Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days & Zev is a CLI that helps you remember (or discover) terminal commands using natural language.

Daniel Kokotajlo and the AI Futures Project lays out a potential scenario of superhuman AI's impact, Liam ERD generates beautiful, interactive ER diagrams from your database, Mozilla takes on Gmail with "Thundermail", algernon explains why grepping remains terrible & Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira rans on the insanity of being a software engineer.

Theodore Morley wonders why tech workers so frequently point our wanderlust toward hands-on trades, Eduardo Bouças explains why he's lost confidence in Vercel's handling of Next.js, "xan" is a command line tool that can be used to process CSV files directly from the shell, Pawel Brodzinski takes us back to Kanban's roots & Sergey Tselovalnikov weighs in on vibe coding.

Steve Yegge's latest rant about the future of "coding", Ethan McCue shares some life altering Postgres patterns, Hillel Wayne makes the case for Verification-First Development, Gerd Zellweger experienced lots of pain setting up GitHub Actions & Cascii is a web-based ASCII diagram builder.

Amelia Wattenberger bemoans the computer's great flattening, the Learnk8s team lets you manage your cluster from a spreadsheet, Jan Swist gets a surprising response from Cursor, the French and German governments team up for an open source Notion alternative & XPipe lets you access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop.

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?

Allen Pike on the JavaScript ecosystem after a decade away, Lars Wirzenius was there at the birth of Linux, Piotr Migdał archives things in Markdown, Jacob Stopak is gamifying Git with Devlands & Juan Diego Rodríguez runs down how CSS functions (will) work.

Kane Narraway thinks through the radical change AI tools have brought to the technical interview process, Rhys Kentish built an app that makes him touch grass, Microsoft announced their progress on quantum computing, Chris Horsley learns about software estimations by yak shaving a washing machine install & Andreas Gohr built StumbleUpon for the IndieWeb.

Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she's learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

Bill Maher excoriates the software industry for making our lives more difficult, two professors from the University of Washington put together a curriculum to help us manage life in the ChatGPT world, Daniel Delaney thinks deeply on chat as a dev tool UI, Benedict Evans explores our assumptions that computers be 'correct' & the Thoughtbot team writes up six cases when not to refactor.

Tim Sh tracked himself down through in-app ads, Sniffnet comfortably monitors your Internet traffic, Cate Huston opines on what makes a good team, Victor Shepelev draws on 25 years of coding to share seven things he now knows & Grant Slatton tells you how to write a good design document.

Xuan-Son Nguyen opened a low-level code PR written 99% by DeepSeek-R1, Adam Wathan announces the release of Tailwind CSS 4.0, Matheus Lima opens up the Computer Science history books to create list of influential papers, Namanyay Goel thinks AI is creating a generation of illiterate programmers & Russell Baylis shares what he's learned about optimizing WFH lighting to reduce eye strain.

Benj Edwards wants to put the "personal" back in "personal computer", the answer.ai folks took Devin for a month-long spin, Asaf Zamir explains why senior engineers can remain ICs and still have a fulfilling career, Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti rethinks documentation by putting user actions first & Tero Piirainen lays out his case for Nue, the standards first web framework.

Bloomberg reports on a concerning new trend in tech hiring, Sean Goedecke has a lot to say about large established codebases, Jacob Bartlett thinks Apple is ruining Swift's original vision, Ahmed Khaleel built a cool tool for turning GitHub repos into interactive diagrams & Bridget Harris goes deep on the potential of crypto stablecoins to disrupt Visa and Mastercard's duopoly.

M.G. Siegler goes way out on a limb with some BIG predictions of things that could happen this year, Simon Willison's year-end roundup is a must-read and perhaps the only thing you have to read to get up-to-speed on the state of the LLM, Allen Pike describes a method for magic, Tom Critchlow thinks small databases are magic & James Stanier agrees with me about Parkinson's Law and the usefulness of deadlines.

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

We're making some big Changelog changes in 2025, the previously featured Stanford study on ghost engineers doesn't live up to the hype, Git ingest is a simple service that turns any GitHub repository into a simple text ingest of its codebase, Simon Willison dishes out some hard-earned wisdom he acquired by working at Lanyrd / Eventbrite & Matheus Lima warns us about six mistakes that new managers make.

Alex Russell answers the question, "If not React, then what?" Csaba Okrona identifies four core problems that create and reinforce knowledge silos, Rob Koch's Markwhen is like Markdown for timelines, Jeff Geerling is quite impressed by Apple's latest iteration on the Mac mini & Sylvain Kerkour took the time to draw a comparison of Amazon's O.G. S3 service with Cloudflare's R2 competitor.

Ben Affleck's take on AI replacing actors, Stanford researcher (Yegor Denisov-Blanch) busts the ghost engineers, Electrobun takes a crack at Electron apps, April King opens up a cookies can of worms, John Arundel thinks many of us are making a career ending mistake & Typogram's CodingFont.com is like Zoolander's Walk Off but for coding fonts.

Evan Doyle says AI makes tech debt more expensive, Hunter Ng researches the ghost job ad phenomenon, Gavin Anderegg analyzes Bluesky in light of its recent success, Martin Tournoij rants against best practices & Evan Schwartz tells us why he thinks binary vector embeddings are so cool.

Changelog Merch is now on sale, IronCalc sets out to democratize spreadsheets, Grant Slatton writes about algorithms we develop software by, Mark Rainey gives respect to the ultimate in debugging, Gitpod is leaving Kubernetes & Johannes Kaufmann's html-to-markdown converts entire websites into Markdown.

IEEE Spectrum reports on the return to physical buttons and dials, Microsoft released GenAIScript, iFixit's Elizabeth Chamberlain announces a big Right to Repair win, Daniela Baron reimagines technical interviews & John O'Nolan, shares some thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media