Changelog News

Developer news from MS Build in Seattle

Jerod here! 👋

I’m sending this out a little later than usual because I spent the morning attending the Microsoft Build 2025 keynote, where Satya Nadella & Co. mentioned AI agents 187 times (I counted). That excludes mentions of “Copilot”, “MCP”, or “Models” because I’m only a man, not a machine.

The good news: there was at least ONE cool non-agentic announcement 👇

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 NATS and the CNCF kerfuffle

Derek Collison — creator of NATS and Co-founder & CEO of Synadia — 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. 🎥 VIDEO

🎁 Windows Subsystem for Linux is open source

The announcement that WSL is now (finally) open source garnered perhaps the biggest applause break of the entire Build keynote. Turns out opening the source of a beloved developer tool/platform at a developer conference is an easy win.

WSL could never have been what it is today without its community. Even without access to WSL’s source code, people have been able to make major contributions that lead to what WSL is now.
This is why we’re incredibly excited to open-source WSL today. We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project.

WSL is one of the coolest things Microsoft has built this decade and having it out there in the open makes it even cooler.

🤪 Hyper-Typing

Paolo Scanferla describes an inherent trade-off in TypeScript’s type system: stricter types are safer, but often more complex. He call this phenomenon “hyper-typing”

… where libraries - in pursuit of perfect type safety - end up with overly complex types that are hard-to-understand, produce cryptic errors, and paradoxically even lead to unsafe workarounds.

Paolo argues that “simpler types, or even type generation, often lead to a more practical and enjoyable developer experience despite being less ‘perfect’.”

Turns out, perfect really is the enemy of good. Even in TypeScript.

🧠 I’m going back to using my brain

Alberto Fortin is taking a step back from heavy LLM use while coding. Why?

One morning, I decide to actually inspect closely what’s all this code that Cursor has been writing. It’s not like I was blindly prompting without looking at the end result, but I was optimizing for speed and I hadn’t actually sat down just to review the code. I was just building building building.
So I do a “coding review” session. And the horror ensues.

I won’t list all the horrors here. You can probably guess what they are. Here’s Alberto’s experience after stepping back:

Since I’ve taken a step back, debugging has become easier. Maybe I’m not as fast but I don’t have this weird feeling of “I kinda wrote this code but I actually have no idea what’s in it”. I’m still using LLMs, but for dumber things: “rename all occurrences of this parameter”, or “here’s some pseudo code, give me the Go equivalent”.

💰 Everything you need to know about vibe coding

Thanks to Retool for sponsoring Changelog News

Vibe coding: love it or hate it, it’s here to say. Everyone has an opinion about it and Retool’s Keanan Koppenhaver does a good job explaining the trend’s potential and risks, with developers in mind:

Where vibe coding enables non-engineers to create without learning to code, experienced engineers are freed up to focus on advanced problem solving and relieved of undifferentiated heavy lifting, such as:
Changing the entire app’s color scheme
Rebuilding a data table for the 100th time
Implementing a known algorithm in a new language
Think of the flow state you could achieve, or the creativity you could harness if you could just remove these kinds of tasks from your project!

The reality, as we both know, isn’t so straight forward. Keanan goes on to lay out the security concerns, the team-wide inconsistencies, and the tech debt vibe coding can produce.

🕴 Coding without a laptop

Did you know you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone?!

Not some clunky virtual machine and not an outright OS replacement like Ubuntu Touch or postmarketOS. Just native arm64 binaries running inside a little chroot container on Android. Check it out

The pseudonymous hacker who blogs at HoldtheRobot.com had a 2-week trip coming up where they needed to work, and they got obsessed with the idea of leaving their laptop at home and just using their phone. So, they added a folding keyboard and some AR glasses.

The whole setup cost $636 and here’s four reasons why they still like the idea after trying it on for a bit.

It really does fit into your pockets. No bag, nothing to carry.
I can use it outdoors in bright sunlight. I wrote most of this blog post sitting at a picnic table in a park. Screen glare and brightness is not an issue.
I can fit into tight spaces. This setup was infinitely more comfortable than a laptop when on a plane. Some coffee shops also have narrow bars that are too small for a laptop, but not for this.
The phone has a cellular connection, so I’m not tied to wifi.

That said, there are pain points too. Click through for the full story.

🌍 MS wants this to be the HTML of the agentic web

The most interesting segment of today’s Build keynote in my eyes was when CTO Kevin Scott took the stage to discuss the “open agentic web” and Microsoft’s commitment to it. He emphasized the importance of protocols and Microsoft’s support of MCP. Then he compared MCP to HTTP and said we need an HTML equivalent to sit on top. That’s when he introduced NLWeb as Microsoft’s attempt at defining the HTML of the agentic web.

NLWeb is a collection of open protocols and associated open source tools. Its main focus is establishing a foundational layer for the AI Web — much like HTML revolutionized document sharing. To make this vision reality, NLWeb provides practical implementation code—not as the definitive solution, but as proof-of-concept demonstrations showing one possible approach.

This is early days and things are moving fast. Sounds like a great time to get involved.

🎙️ #define: I’m going pants

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. 🎥 VIDEO

📆 A leap year check in three instructions

One of my first programming classes required us to program this. I remember how hard it was for me back then, so when I saw this headline I was surprised you can achieve in just three instructions. Thankfully (for my ego), the solutions is “surprisingly complex”, but it’s a fun ride, especially if you’re into bit-twiddling.

🤫 cat /etc/itter.conf

itter.sh is your escape from the noise. It’s a micro-blogging platform accessed entirely via SSH. No web browser. No JavaScript. No endless scroll of algorithmic ‘content’. Just you, your trusty terminal, and 180 characters at a time (“eets”). Why? Because terminals are cool. Because less is more. Because sometimes, you just need to type.

🗿 Internet Artifacts

Neal Agarwal (from neal.fun) has put together a virtual museum of Internet Artifacts, including a map of ARPANET, the first spam email, the first smiley, the first mp3, the first online pizza delivery website (which was probably earlier than you’re thinking), and much more.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now! Have a great week, share Changelog News if you dig it, and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod