Changelog News

A project by some random person in Nebraska

Jerod again! 👋

The Hacker of the Week™️ award goes to Gábor Nyéki, who is running a website off nine Neovim buffers on his old ThinkPad. Yup, Gábor wrote a Neovim plugin in Lua that serves HTTP requests from open buffers. It has zero dependencies and runs faster than Nginx. What have you coded lately? 😉

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Biocomputing on human neurons

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is leading the way in biocomputing at FinalSpark where she is working on the next evolutionary leap for AI and neuron-powered computing. It’s a brave new world, just 10 years in the making. We discuss lab-grown human brain organoids connected to electrodes, the possibility to solve AI’s massive energy consumption challenge, post-silicon approach to computing, biological vs quantum physics and more. 🎥 VIDEO

🤬 Cursor’s problem isn’t just Cursor’s problem

Base on their usage/growth, which has been astounding, Cursor has product-market fit (PMF), But have they also found business-model–product fit (BMPF)? Most likely not. The discrepancy: subsidies

Cursor has relied on a subscription model that historically allowed for “unlimited” use. That’s a fixed revenue, variable cost setup. Insurance companies are the canonical example and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users. Hypergrowth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage but revenue doesn’t, you’re not selling software, you’re underwriting risk.

The question is whether or not Cursor can transition to sustainable revenue without losing their users, and since they don’t own/control their frontier models, their cost of goods sold (COGS) are pinned to OpenAI and Anthropic. That’s a problem. They must change their pricing model to scale with their costs. Then they’ll have the answer to the burning question that should nag all VC-backed founders:

Do I have demand for my product—or for my subsidies?

And a corollary for those of us who use/consume VC-backed dev tools to ask ourselves:

Do I actually want this product—or just its subsidies?

✅ A .txt file beats every todo app

Alireza Bashiri tried ‘em all: Notion, Todoist, Things 3, OmniFocus, Asana, Trello, Any.do, TickTick. He even built his own (unfinished) todo app once. After years of todo app hopping, he’s back where he started: todo.txt

My productivity journey started like everyone else’s. I’d devour blog posts about getting things done or spot a cool app and think “this is it, this will finally organize me.” I’d burn hours building the perfect system, creating categories, tags, projects, labels. Setting it up felt like work.
Then reality hits. The app wants $9.99/month. The sync breaks. The company sells out and dies. Or worse - I waste more time managing the system than working.

I gave up on todo apps many moons ago. In fact, here’s me in 2010 documenting my minimally awesome todos system that centered around a plaintext file. I don’t use that anymore, but I’m still on the plaintext (markdown) kick. I have friends that swear by specific apps and ways they’ve figured out to use them, but to me it seems like they spend more time managing their systems than they spend actually getting stuff done. Alireza had a similar experience:

I’m more productive now than when I had all those fancy apps. Turns out the best productivity system is the one you actually use. And I use this one because there’s nothing to figure out. It’s just a list.

🥷 Building my offline AI workspace

Manish (and friends) wanted everything local – no cloud, no remote execution.

With so many LLMs being open source / open weights, shouldn’t it be possible to do all that locally? But just local LLM is not enough, we need a truly isolated environment to run code as well.

What they came up with was a combo of ollama (for local models), assistant-ui (frontend), Apple’s container tool (sandboxed vm runtime), coderunner (orchestration), and Playwright (browser automation). The end result looks pretty nice!

This is more than a just an experiment. It’s a philosophy shift bringing compute and agency back to your machine. No cloud dependency. No privacy tradeoffs. While the best models will probably be always with the giants, we hope that we will still have local tools which can get our day-to-day work done with the privacy we deserve.

💰 Vibe coding at work

Thanks to CodeRabbit for sponsoring Changelog News

Vibe coding is fun. You’re in flow, ideas are pouring out, code ships fast. But those sessions often come with a side of “surprise” technical debt.

CodeRabbit’s latest post makes the case for vibe coding with guardrails. Their AI reviews run in flow — code, review, commit — all inside your IDE. It’s like having a senior engineer pair with you in real-time: flagging bugs, smells, and missed tests before they snowball.

We use CodeRabbit here at Changelog. Check our PRs — it’s our last mile defense against merging bad code… vibed or not.

Learn more at CodeRabbit.ai.

📝 A WYSIWYG editor that’s just a textarea

OverType looks SWEET! The author calls it an “under-engineered solution.” I call it a breath of fresh-air. It works by rendering a preview pane behind the textarea and keeping the two elements perfectly aligned.

It’s a rich markdown editor that’s really just a textarea. The key insight was that once you solve the alignment challenges, you get everything native textareas provide for free: undo/redo, mobile keyboard, accessibility, and native performance.

OverType is 45KB total, takes minutes to understand, minutes to customize, and at the end of the day… it’s just a textarea. More like this, please!

💼 Bring your .rc files with you when you ssh

sshrc works just like ssh, but it also sources the ~/.sshrc on your local computer after logging in remotely. That may not seem like much, but it’s actually super cool.

You can use this to set environment variables, define functions, and run post-login commands. It’s that simple, and it won’t impact other users on the server - even if they use sshrc too.

This is a killer setup for folks who share a server with multiple users or manage multiple servers and don’t want to configure each environment individually. The best part? It’s just a shell script and clocks in at less than 100 lines. Simplicity FTW, again!

🎙️ Oxide is crossing the chasm

Bryan Cantrill returns in the wake of Oxide Computer Company’s $100M Series B. Bryan tells us how he’s avoiding an appearance on Silicon Valley (ding), why their uniform compensation is working, where Oxide fits in the AI datacenter, what scaling to 50+ rack orders looks like, and more. (GitHub has no CEO and saving Intel)++ 🎥 VIDEO

📧 Everyone knows what an email address is, right?

Hot on the heels of last week’s yaml quiz comes Sam Rose with an email address quiz that’ll stretch your regexen (and RFC knowin’) skills to their limits. I scored 15/21. Slightly above average! Can you best me?

🐀 Tech Debt? I don’t believe it exists

Throughout David Adrian’s career, he’s been an engineer complaining about tech debt, a manager prioritizing (and deprioritizing) addressing tech debt, and a product manager, where he inspires the creation of new tech debt. But!

I’ve landed on the best way to think about tech debt is that it doesn’t really exist. This is not to say that every codebase is immaculate. Instead, I like to think of the world as “the thing you are trying to do”, and three other things:
Things causing problems now.
Things that will be causing problems soon.
Things that are not causing problems

🤑 A curated gallery of pricing page designs

The difference between good pricing pages & great ones often comes down to design choices. Great pricing pages convert visitors into customers through thoughtful design, clear messaging, and strategic user experience choices. Here you can take a look at a curated collection of pricing page examples to inspire your next design.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now, but if you want more: here’s a bonus clip from our Bryan Cantrill episode talking about Thomas Dohmke stepping down as GitHub’s CEO.

Have yourself a great week,
forward this to your AI agent (who might dig it),
and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod