Changelog News

Developer news worth a LIVE viewing

Hello, there! 👋

Question: what are you up to at the end of July?

Hopefully, you’re up for joining us in Denver for a LIVE show on stage at the Oriental Theater! Learn all about it right here and get your ticket(s) quick… there’s only 100 seats available.

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎙️ wsl.exe – cat hello.cs

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. 🎥 VIDEO

♻️ The ‘developer replacement’ hype cycle

Danilo Alonso has seen it all before:

Every few years, a shiny new technology emerges that promises to make software developers obsolete. The headlines follow a predictable pattern: “The End of Coding,” “Anyone Can Build Apps Now,” or my personal favorite, “Why Your Five-Year-Old Will Be Programming Before Learning to Read.”
The executives get excited. The consultants circle like sharks. PowerPoint decks multiply. Budgets shift.
And then reality sets in.

In this post, he counts the rotations of the ‘endless carousel of replacement promises’, from the no-code/low-code revolution, to the cloud revolution, to the off-shore revolution, to the current ai-coding-assistant revolution. Then he finishes up with an explainer on why the “AI will replace developers” crowd have it all wrong:

Code is not an asset—it’s a liability. Every line must be maintained, debugged, secured, and eventually replaced. The real asset is the business capability that code enables.
If AI makes writing code faster and cheaper, it’s really making it easier to create liability. When you can generate liability at unprecedented speed, the ability to manage and minimize that liability strategically becomes exponentially more valuable.
The skill that survives and thrives isn’t writing code… It’s architecting systems. And that’s the one thing AI can’t do.

😑 The Who Cares Era

Dan Sinker was disheartened to learn of a story published in the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot:

the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.
The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic f***up in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

Dan is calling this the Who Cares Era, where “completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.” But it doesn’t have to be this way. Dan’s CTA:

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

🧢 A lightweight proof-of-work captcha

Cap looks like a solid alternative to the typical CAPTCHA solutions: reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile, etc. Instead of making humans solve complex puzzles, it requires SHA-256 proof-of-work computations. Why PoW?

Every CAPTCHA can eventually be solved, whether by AIs, algorithms or humans paid via CAPTCHA farms — this results in an endless cat-and-mouse game between attackers and defenders. The crucial difference lies in the cost imposed on attackers…
Imagine sending 10,000 spam messages costs $1, potentially earning $10 – a profitable venture. If Cap increases the computational cost so that sending those messages now costs $100, the spammer loses $90. This eliminates the financial incentive.

Cap is an open source JS implementation.It’s customizable and offers a standalone Docker image with a REST API so it can be used from any backend language.

💰 Retool Agents have arrived

Thanks to Retool for sponsoring Changelog News

We’ve all been there - copying and pasting between ChatGPT and our actual work tools like we’re some kind of human API. Well, that ends now.

Retool just launched Agents – AI that doesn’t just think, but actually works. Instead of writing you a refund policy, a Retool Agent processes the actual refund. It pulls customer data from Postgres, checks your policy docs, calculates amounts in NetSuite, updates inventory, issues credits through Stripe, and notifies customers via Twilio. End-to-end, autonomously.

Here’s the cherry on top! Retool Agents inherits every tool your team has already built in Retool. Your years of internal tooling instantly becomes your AI workforce’s toolkit. And you can watch them work in real-time with complete transparency – no black boxes.

Companies like AWS and Databricks have already automated over 100 million hours of work using Retool. That’s nearly $5 billion in labor value.

Stop being the middle-person between AI and your systems and check out Retool Agents today at retool.com/agents. It’s in public beta and ready for you to try out.

🎨 The future is colourful and dimensional

Michael Flarup on the return of texture, depth, and expressiveness in UI:

Flat design is over. The future is colourful and dimensional.
Those aren’t my words. They’re Brian Chesky’s, CEO of Airbnb, after what can only be described as a landmark redesign of the platform. A redesign full of whimsical, animated, 3D icons and warm, tactile surfaces.

I couldn’t be more excited by this new direction! On our recent Friends with Resend’s Zeno Rocha, I asked him where the trends in web design were headed because, quite frankly, I’m done with this (Linear-inspired) “black shiny everything” phase.

Michael is here for it too, but he also thinks we need some new language for the design shift lead by Airbnb, because it’s not skeuomorphism… he’s calling it “diamorphism”, which is defined as “a growing tendency toward intentional dimensionality—layered, tactile, digital-first, and full of character.”

I don’t know if the term will stick, but I couldn’t be happier that the winds are blowing in this direction. I’m super-curious to see what Apple unveils at WWDC next week with their big (rumored) redesign…

✅ An open source alternative to Trello

At its core, Trello’s “list of lists” is a very powerful organizational tool. Unfortunately, all the cruft that accumulated around those lists of lists over the years soured me on the product. Kan (cool domain alert: kan.bn) looks today a lot like Trello looked back when I first fell in love with it. Also it’s open source, self-hostable, and easy to start on their cloud.

🧩 Decomplexification

Daniel Stenberg shares some recent work refactoring complexity out of Curl:

Of course, refactoring a complex function into several smaller and simpler functions can be anywhere from straight forward to quite complicated. A refactor in the name of simplification that might be hard. An oxymoron and one that of course might shake things up and could potentially rather add bugs than fix them.

Daniel charts his progress using cyclomatic complexity scoring.

🧑‍⚖️ The case for using a web browser as your terminal

Hackers have been putting web browsers in our terminals forever (👋 lynx!), but Achille Lacoin makes the case that doing it the other way around is much more interesting:

I don’t really have a usecase for native apps anymore. All of the apps I use are web-based, so it make sense for me to use a web browser as my only opened app. Instead of having a bunch of window with their own set of tabs, I can manage everything from a single one.
However, as a developer, it is unthinkable to not have a terminal emulator app opened to run commands, manage and edit files, or interact with remote servers. Ideally, I would like those two remaining apps to be merged into a single one.

🎰 The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

A helpful reminder from Allison Morrow at CNN Business, in the wake of Anthropic’s CEO stating that AI will could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs:

If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it’s going to ruin the global economy, you’d be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality.
Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

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

Wednesday: Amanda Silver, CVP for Microsoft’s Developer Division
Friday: Steve Yegge, AI Babysitter for Sourcegraph

Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & I’ll see you in Denver? 💚

–Jerod