Changelog News

Developer news worth thinking about

Jerod here! 👋

I’m in an existential mood today, so here’s two thoughts that were impressed on me over the weekend, juxtaposed.

The first thought comes from a recent Benn Stancil essay, in which he does the math on the gobsmacking amount of money floating around Silicon Valley these days and how everyone does the math to see how much everyone else is worth. Benn concludes:

We don’t do the math to measure ourselves; we do the math to compare ourselves.

So true, but it’s just the setup. The money quote is a footnote to that sentence:

The recent grad is troubled by how much the designer who got the job they want makes; the designer is troubled by how much the engineer makes; the engineer by the researcher; the researcher by the founder that got acquired; the acquired founder by the founder who acquired them; the founder by the billionaire; the billionaire by Jeff Bezos; Jeff Bezos by Elon Musk; and Elon Musk by the recent grad.

The second thought comes from a not-at-all-recent man named Job, after receiving news that he’d lost everything to raiders and a mighty wind:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; Blessed be the name of the LORD.

Ok, let’s get into the news.

🎧 LIVE from Denver with Nora Jones!

We’re LIVE at the historic Oriental Theater in Denver, CO with Nora Jones. Nora is the founder of Jeli.io, recently acquired by PagerDuty and she’s been shaping the way we think about reliability, incident response, and human-centered engineering for years. 🎥 VIDEO

🤕 Open source regrets

A recent Hacker News “Ask HN” thread piqued my interest, maybe it will yours as well. The question:

Open source is usually seen as a win - for learning, visibility, and the community. But have you ever regretted it? Maybe it became a burden to maintain, attracted the wrong users, or got used in ways you didn’t expect. Would love to hear your experience - good or bad.

I’m about as pro open source as devs come, but only a purist would say it’s always an unadulterated win. This thread is filled with people sharing their open source regrets, which are worth hearing about. Here’s one, for instance:

When I was ~14 I open sourced a script to autoconfigure X11’s xrandr. It was pretty lousy, had several bugs. I mentioned it on a KDE mailing list and a KDE core contributor told me it was embarrassing code and to kill myself. I took it pretty hard and didn’t contribute to KDE or X11 ever again, probably took me about a year to build up the desire to code again.

That was a singular event for this person, but still: just awful. Here’s one more, which is more longitudinal:

To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I’ve invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there’s something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people closest to you are no longer around - you pause and reflect on how much energy you devoted to random strangers instead of those who shared your life. If I had invested even 1% of the time and effort I put into FOSS projects into my relationships with loved ones, they would have been so much happier. Now I’m left wondering what the hell I was doing all those years

👋 GitHub’s latest CEO says farewell

Thomas Dohmke is stepping down at GitHub CEO so he can build another startup:

Over a decade ago, my family and I made the leap to move from Germany to the United States after the sale of my startup to Microsoft. In the years since, I’ve had the privilege of working with many exceptional human beings, including Hubbers, Microsofties, customers, partners, our GitHub Stars, open-source maintainers, and developers around the world who’ve helped us shape GitHub…
Still, after all this time, my startup roots have begun tugging on me and I’ve decided to leave GitHub to become a founder again.

Thomas took the reins in 2021 when Nat Friedman stepped down after taking the reins in 2018 when Chris Wanstrath stepped down after the Microsoft acquisition. Who will take the reins next?

✌️ HTTP/2: The sequel is always worse

James Kettle breaks down HTTP/2 from a security perspective and finds it breaks down pretty easily:

HTTP/2 is easily mistaken for a transport-layer protocol that can be swapped in with zero security implications for the website behind it. In this paper, I’ll introduce multiple new classes of HTTP/2-exclusive threats caused by both implementation flaws and RFC imperfections.

James shows how these flaws enable H2-exclusive desync attacks with case studies targeting some high-profile websites.

💰 Augment Code has GPT-5

Thanks to Augment Code for sponsoring Changelog News

Augment Code has GPT-5 y’all.

Until now, Augment ran only on Claude Sonnet 4. They’ve added GPT‑5 and a Model Picker so you can select the right engine per task. Sonnet stays default; GPT‑5 is there when you want extra caution and cross‑file brainpower.

They tested both on the same coding chores. They tested single-file edits, multi-file refactors, tests, bug fixes, and found a clear trade-off:

Sonnet = speed and decisiveness
GPT-5 = completeness and stronger cross-file reasoning

This enables better task alignment. Quick tweak? Sonnet’s your go-to. Bigger refactor or careful logic rewrite? GPT-5 brings that extra context and TLC.

The picker also delivers resiliency and continuity, smarter routing, and cost-latency control. If one model slows down or drifts in quality, you can instantly switch without breaking your flow. Over time, Augment can learn your preferences and even auto-route. Sonnet for quick diffs, and GPT-5 for the heavy lifts.

Learn more and start testing GPT-5 for yourself at augmentcode.com

💥 PHP 8.5 adds pipe operator

The pipe operator “|>” is the coolest! And PHP is going to have it this November when version 8.5 ships. Some history:

The |> operator appears in many languages, mostly in the functional world. F# has essentially the exact same operator, as does OCaml. Elixir has a slightly fancier version (which we considered but ultimately decided against for now). Numerous PHP libraries exist in the wild that offer similar capability with many extra expensive steps…
The story for PHP pipes, though, begins with Hack/HHVM, Facebook’s PHP fork née competitive implementation. Hack included many features beyond what PHP 5 of the day offered; many of them eventually ended up in later PHP versions. One of its features was a unique spin on a pipe operator…

Sara Golemon started the effort to bring Hack’s pipes to PHP directly in 2016. Fast forward to 2025 and Larry Garfield finally got it done. Meanwhile, JavaScript’s pipe operator is still a stage 2 draft…

👨‍⚖️ Copyright suit could financially ruin AI industry

Many of our conversations around the future of tech after the AI upheaval have included a (sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit) big BUT. You know, like, “BUT something could happen that radically changes the AI course we’re on.”

Turns out, the largest copyright class action suit of all times might prove to be that callipygian BUT we’ve been alluding to:

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

If the appeals court denies Anthropic’s petition, they could face a $150k fine for each of those 7 million claimants (whose works span a century of publishing history.)

Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued. And that could set an alarming precedent, considering all the other lawsuits generative AI (GenAI) companies face over training on copyrighted materials..

Yikes. All eyes will be fixed on this BUT until further notice…

🎙️ Kaizen! Pipely is LIVE

Gerhard calls Kaizen 20, ‘The One Where We Meet’. Rightfully so. It’s also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipely live on stage with friends. 🎥 VIDEO

🫏 Sit On Your Ass Development

Jim Nielsen takes a play from Charlie Munger’s (legendary vice-chairman at Berkshire Hathaway) playbook:

One thing Charlie talks about is what he calls “sit on your ass investing” which is the opposite of day trading. Rather than being in the market every day (chasing trends, reacting to fluctuations, and trying to time transactions) Charlie advocates spending most of your time “sitting on your ass”. That doesn’t mean you’re doing nothing. It means that instead of constantly trading you’re spending your time in research and preparation for trading.

How does that same concept applied to web development? Jim will tell you.

🙃 You might not need tmux

Eric Bower is a huge fan of tmux and had been using it for 7+ years… until recently:

So, did I finally replace tmux? For me, the answer is a resounding yes! Once I got all of this setup on my dev machine, I haven’t used tmux or feel like a massive downgrade. I did have to adjust my normal workflow slightly, but that’s been fun. Further, I’m slowly noticing things that tmux didn’t handle well, but now, “just work”: native scrollback, terminal notifications, and terminal titles being the most notable changes.

😵‍💫 ohyaml.wtf

How good is your knowledge of yaml? Take this 22-question quiz. I did NOT fare well. Did you know yaml 1.1 treats numbers starting with 0 as octal?! I sure didn’t…

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

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

Wednesday: Dr. Ewelina Kurtys on biocomputing
Friday: Bryan Cantrill on Oxide Computer’s latest raise

Have yourself a great week,
share this with friends who might dig it,
and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod