The Changelog

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.

Abi Noda from DX is back to share some cold, hard data on just how productive AI coding tools are actually making developers. Teaser: the productivity increase isn't as high as we expected. We also discuss Jevons paradox, AI agents as extensions of humans, which tools are winning in the enterprise, how development budgets are changing, and more.

We talk with Don MacKinnon, Co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft—a lightspeed search engine built in Rust. We dig into the future of search, how it blends vector embeddings with classic ranking, and what it takes to build developer-friendly, production-grade search from the ground up.

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.

Jeff Cayley joins Adam to talk about selling mountain bikes all over the planet and making some of the best outdoor and mountain bike gear, parts, and accessories you can buy. They have a killer YouTube channel as well.

Thorsten Ball returned to Sourcegraph to work on Amp because he believes being able to talk to an alien intelligence that edits your code changes everything. On this episode, Thorsten joins us to discuss exactly how coding agents work, recent advancements in AI tooling, Amp's uniqueness in a sea of competitors, the divide between believers and skeptics, and more.

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.

Our old friend Chris McCord, creator of Elixir's Phoenix framework, tells us all about his new remote AI runtime for building Phoenix apps. Along the way, we vibe code one of my silly app ideas, calculate all the money we're going to spend on these tools, and get existential about what it all means.

Chris Anderson joins the show. You may recognize Chris from the early days of CouchDB and Couchbase. Back when the world was just waking up to NoSQL, Chris was at the center of it all, shaping how developers think about data distribution and offline-first architecture. These days, Chris is working on Vibes.diy and Fireproof — tools that make one-shot app generation not only possible, but shareable within minutes. We talk about the origins of CouchDB, the fork that led to Membase and Couchbase, and how that long journey led to this new paradigm: Vibe Coding.

Jerod tells Adam about how bad he hates the taste of Gin, sips on some Generative A Rye (on the rocks), they open the comments section for a bit, and then land the plane talking about being alone, naked, and afraid.

Jerod is joined by Carson Gross, the creator of htmx –a small, zero-dependency JavaScript library that he says, "completes HTML as a hypertext". Carson built it because he's big on hypermedia, he even wrote a book called Hypermedia Systems. Carson has a lot of strong opinions weakly held that we dive into in this conversation.

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.

Justin Searls joins Jerod in Apple's WWDC wake for hot takes about frosty UIs. We go (almost) point-by-point through the keynote, dissecting and reacting along the way. Concentricity!

Jerod chats with Richard Feldman about Roc – his fast, friendly, functional language inspired by Richard's love of Elm. Roc takes many of Elm's ideas beyond the frontend and introduces some great ideas of its own. Get ready to learn about static dispatch, platforms vs applications, opportunistic mutation, purity inference, and a whole lot more.

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.

The ever-provocative Steve Yegge joins us fresh off a vibe coding bender so productive, he wrote a book on the topic alongside award-winning author Gene Kim. Steve tells us why he believes the IDE is dead, why babysitting AI agents is more fun than coding, when vibe coding might take over the enterprise, how software devs should approach coding agents, and what it all means for society.

We're on location at Microsoft Build 2025 with Amanda Silver, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division. Amanda leads product, design, user research, and engineering systems for some of the tools you use every day. We discuss the latest AI announcements from Microsoft at Build 2025, how AI is reshaping development tools, what's next for VS Code, TypeScript, GitHub's evolution, and even emerging editors like Windsurf that are forking the VS Code ecosystem.

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.

We bring you back to Microsoft Build 2025 to nerd out with Craig Loewen on Windows Subsystem for Linux and Mads Torgersen on leading the design of C#.

We're joined by Andreas Møller, Co-founder of Nordcraft — the team behind Nordcraft Engine, a powerful new platform designed to give web developers what gaming developers have had for years. Andreas shares what inspired them to build Nordcraft Engine, why they believe the web is overdue for a shift in how we approach designing and building for the web, ee explore how the platform works, how you can get started, and what's next for Nordcraft.

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.

We sit down with Scott Hanselman at Microsoft Build 2025 to discuss open sourcing all the things, cool stuff Windows can do, where we want (and don't want) AI to fit into our lives, building arcade cabinets, and so much more.

Preston Thorpe joins us from inside prison, where he awaits a hopeful release within the next 12 months. His journey has been anything but easy—marked by hardship and uncertainty. But over the past few years, Preston has undergone a profound transformation. He's refactored not just his skills, but his identity. Today, he proudly calls himself a software engineer and an open source contributor. In this episode, Preston shares his story of redemption, resilience, and what comes next.

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.

Welcome back to #define, our game of obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery. We've gathered some awesome friends, new and old, to see who has the best vocabulary and who can trick the everyone else into thinking that they do.

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — joins the show to dive into the origins, design, and evolution of NATS, a high-performance, open-source messaging system built for modern cloud-native systems and part of the CNCF. Derek shares the story behind NATS, what makes it unique, and unpacks the recent tensions between Synadia and the CNCF over the future of the project.

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.

Kaizen 19 has arrived! Gerhard has been laser-focused on making Jerod's pipe dream a reality by putting all of his efforts into Pipely. Has it been a big waste of time or has this epic side quest morphed into a main quest?!

Nathan Sobo is back talking about the next big thing for Zed—agentic editing! You now have a full-blown AI-native editor to play with. Collaborate with agents at 120fps in a natively multiplayer IDE.

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.

Our old friend, Zeno Rocha, returns to discuss email etiquette, the strange new world of AI SEO, the coming LLM enshittification, and SLATE Auto – the just-announced $20k modular EV truck.

Drew Wilson is back! It's been more than a decade since Adam and Drew have spoken and wow, Drew has been busy. He built Plasso and got acquired by GoDaddy. He built a bank called Letter which didn't work out...and now he's Head of Design at Clerk and back to chasing that next big thing.

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.

Join us on a journey to make believe worlds with our good friend Mat Ryer. The assignment; we each get to make up a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule. This episode is sure to delight loyal fans and especially those who enjoy Mat Ryer on the show and a good/bad song or two.

Kendall Miller is a bubbly extrovert who sticks his fingers in a lot of pies. He advises tech companies like FusionAuth, positions tech products like Civo & Tensorlake, organizes tech networks like CTO Lunches, and even sells whiskey & gin to tech people like us via his Friday Deployment Spirits brand. Kendall has learned a lot since he first entered the industry and he's eager to share what he knows, and who he knows, with the world.

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.

Nick Nisi joins us to confess his AI subscription glut, drool over some cool new hardware gadgets, discuss why the TypeScript team chose Go for their new compiler, opine on the React team's complicated relationship with Vercel, suggest people try Astro, update us on his browser habits, and more.

Anthony Eden, Founder & CEO of DNSimple, joins the show to talk about the world of managed hosting for DNS and more.

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.

Richard Moot joins us to discuss Changelog helping Square launch a developer pod and the excitement around MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers. What might it foretell about the future of human/robot relations?

Stephan Ewen, Founder and CEO of Restate.dev joins the show to talk about the coming era of resilient apps, the meaning of and what it takes to achieve idempotency, this world of stateful durable execution functions, and when it makes sense to reach for this tech.

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.