Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

The big news from last week was TypeScript’s compiler Go rewrite, but it happened so early in the week (and made such a big splash) that it feels silly covering it here. Adam and I did do a quick reaction video about it, which may be a new thing we do regularly.

Oh, and I’m trying something entirely different for News on YouTube… taking you with me IRL! Each week it’ll be something new: trimming an apple tree, hiking to a waterfall, playing pickle ball, stuff like that. Give one a watch and let me know what you think!

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 Reaching industrial economies of scale

Beyang Liu, the CTO & co-founder of Sourcegraph, is back on the pod. Adam and Beyang go deep on the idea of “industrializing software development” using AI agents, using AI in general, using code generation. So much is happening in and around AI and Sourcegraph continues to innovate again and again. VIDEO

😑 Our interfaces have lost their senses

When linking you to an article, I often use descriptors like thorough, insightful, or poignant. This piece by Amelia Wattenberger, though, deserves an entirely different set of adjectives. Her central premise is the following:

All day, we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we’re more than just eyes and a pointer finger. We think with our hands, our ears, our bodies.
The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something richer—something that moves with us, speaks our language, and molds to our bodies?

Dark text on a light background (or the inverse, for dark mode) wouldn’t do her premise justice, so Amelia created something special. Something that I’ll describe as colorful, tactile, and, yes, poignant.

🎛️ A spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster

The pitch for xlskubectl (terrible name, obviously), is amazing: “You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses.”

Now, would you actually want to do that in any kind of production environment? Probably not, but this is a fun project and it brought forth two thoughts I’d like to pass on:

Kubernetes exposes a robust API. That makes it far more useful/malleable than otherwise
People absolutely love spreadsheets. (I’m using the word love, here.)

🫠 Cursor told me I should learn to code

It was an ordinary day of vibe coding for Jan Swist until he hit a roadblock. Cursor wouldn’t go through 750-800 lines of code for him, so he asked it why. The response was… concerning:

I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.
Reason: Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities.

I’m not gonna lie, I kinda agree with Cursor on this one!

(It turns out there’s a good explanation why this happened. No, Jan is not Patient Zero in the robot uprising. I just found the whole situation hilarious and figured you might, too.)

💰 Retool makes AI apps too easy

Thanks to Retool for sponsoring Changelog News

Use Retool AI to build truly useful AI apps on top of your data in minutes. Not weeks or months.

If you want to build a chat app for your support team, chat is offered as a UI component, then you plug in an API key to a public model like ChatGPT or Claude (or even a private model). To ensure the chat answers correctly, you can point Retool at docs to crawl or upload content files to get vectorized. No need to configure embeddings or setup a vector store. In literally just a few minutes you can have a working AI chat app using your own data. From there, Retool’s permission controls make it too easy to configure who gets access to and share it with your world.

Chat bots are just one example. Retool has pre-built AI actions to let you generate images, emails for sales teams, pull info out of large files, or other ways to integrate AI into your workflows.

Learn more at retool.com/ai to watch a video demo or to get started.

🙌 An open source alternative to Notion

Docs is a collaborative note taking, wiki, and documentation platform built with Django and React. As a result of a joint effort from the French and German governments, it is MIT-licensed with the following note in the README:

While Docs is a public driven initiative our license choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell and contribute to the project.

Very cool initiative! But is it any good? I signed in to the demo (use test.docs@yopmail.com, I'd<3ToTestDocs) and kicked the tires for a few minutes… seems legit. Self-hostable, too!

🎣 Access your entire server infra from your desktop

XPipe is a new type of shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command-line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. So if you normally use CLI tools like ssh, docker, kubectl, etc. to connect to your servers, you can just use XPipe on top of that.

If you connect to a lot of remote machines often, this looks like an excellent way to organize the chaos. It’s cross-platform, has complete SSH support, and full-on file system management with lots of bells & whistles.

🎙️ Friends on the frontend

John Long joins Adam to explore his usage of AI, design tools and the stack he prefers. They talk Next.js vs Rails, maintaining open source, building websites with Framer, their mutual love for Figma & more. VIDEO

🤓 A collection of MCP reference implementations

Last week I gave you a primer on Model Context Protocol. This week I refer you to the following:

The servers in this repository showcase the versatility and extensibility of MCP, demonstrating how it can be used to give Large Language Models (LLMs) secure, controlled access to tools and data sources. Each MCP server is implemented with either the Typescript MCP SDK or Python MCP SDK.

🌅 Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS

ICANN:

As of 28 January 2025, the Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP) will be the definitive source for delivering generic top-level domain name (gTLD) registration information in place of sunsetted WHOIS services. RDAP offers several advantages over WHOIS including support for internationalization, secure access to data, authoritative service discovery, and the ability to provide differentiated access to registration data.

TIL this has been a long time coming. RDAP has been offered by ICANN-accredited registrars since 2019. They may be sunsetting the WHOIS service, but I’ll continue calling it WHOIS until the sun sets on my career…

⌛️ The good times in tech are over

Sean Goedecke on the tech industry’s “vibe shift” away from treating us as “special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic”:

The biggest thing to internalize is that companies now are actually trying to focus. In 2015, there was a lot of appetite to do everything at the same time: building out new product lines, transitioning from a product to a platform, making significant open-source contributions, working on a top-tier developer experience, and so on. In 2025, most of these initiatives have been abruptly defunded in order to put more resources into a handful of bets that the company executives actually care about.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

📚 The Developer’s Dictionary

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up this week:

On Wednesday: Ilya Grigorik from Shopify
On Friday: Justin Searls from Breaking Change

Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod