The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Agent psychosis: are we going insane? (News)

Episode Date: January 19, 2026

Armin Ronacher thinks AI agent psychosis might be driving us insane, Dan Abramov explains how AT Protocol is a social filesystem, RepoBar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening a browser, Ethan McCue shares some life altering Postgres patterns, and Lea Verou says web dependencies are broken and we need to fix them.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 19th, 2026. After nearly 10 years, the JQuery team has released a new major version, 4.0. Of that library, so good, it still runs on about 71% of all websites. Many of the breaking changes are removing features, more proof of its transcendence. I'm calling it, JQuery. it's the goat. Okay, let's get into this week's news. Agent Psychosis. Are we going insane?

Here's Armin Ronature, quote, many of us got hit by the agent coding addiction. It feels good, we barely sleep, we build amazing things. Every once in a while, that interaction involves other humans, and all of a sudden we get a reality check that maybe we overdid it. The most obvious example of this is the massive degradation of quality of issue reports and poll requests. As a maintainer, many PRs now look like an insult to one's time, but when one pushes back, the other person does not see what they did wrong. They thought they helped and contributed and got

agitated when you close it down. But it's way worse than that. I see people develop parisocial relationships with their AIs, get heavily addicted to it, and create communities where people reinforce highly unhealthy behavior. How did we get here and what does it do to us? End quote. We are all trying to grapple with what is perhaps the most dramatic change the software world has ever undergone. In this post, Armand grapples with it right out there in public. I appreciate him for doing that. He's been a thought leader for many years, and it's comforting to know that even folks like him are struggling to see this new world clearly. A social file system. Dan Abramov starts this excellent article by praising the portability and effectiveness of the files paradigm. Quote,

apps and formats are many to many. File formats let different apps work together without knowing about each other. End quote. Then Dan goes on to describe how the files paradigm could apply to social apps like Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, GitHub, and TikTok. But this is no hypothetical. It's literally how the at protocol works, which Dan calls a social file system. Quote, I've previously written about the at protocol in Open Social,

looking at its model from a web-centric perspective. But I think that looking at it from the file system perspective is just as intriguing, so I invite you to take a tour of how it works. A personal file system starts with a file. What does a social file system start with? Repo bar puts GitHub at a glance from your menu bar. Repo bar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening the browser. Pin the repos you care about and get a clear, glanceable dashboard of CI releases traffic and activity right from the macOS menu bar.

Repo bar works with GitHub Enterprise, but it doesn't work with Linux or Windows. No big deal. Fire up an agent and you could have this idea ported to your OS of choice in a few hours, top. or have it fork and add multi-platform support. It's now time for sponsored news. Your agent's dependency choices are a liability. Coding agents are good, but they don't know when a dependency is compromised. That's a liability teams want to avoid, but how.

Agents are great at writing code that works, but they're pulling dependency recommendations from training data that's stale and outdated. That package version copilot just suggested might have a known vulnerability that was disclosed six months after the model's knowledge cutoff. Your code compiles, but your security posture does not. That's why teams are choosing Sonotype Guide to select the best open source components from the start and maintain the safest dependency versions. Sonotype Guide is an MCP server that integrates directly with your AI coding assistant.

So when you're generating code, the dependency recommendations come from Sonotype's live component intelligence, not frozen training data. They've been the trusted resource behind Maven Central for over 15 million developers, and now that same component knowledge can feed directly into your AI. workflow. You can use Sonotype Guide with Clod, Cursor, and other assistants that support MCP. Explore the product for yourself. It's free to start. No credit card required. Learn more at sonotype.com or follow the link in the newsletter to read all about it. Life altering postgres patterns. Believe it or not, Ethan McHugh does not think that title is clickbait. He's found the set of things shared in his

linked post so valuable that they have indeed altered he and his co-workers' lives for the better. Here's the list. Use UUID primary keys. Give everything created at and updated at. On update restrict, on delete restrict. Use schemas. Enum tables. Name your tables singularly. Mechanically named join tables. Almost always soft delete. Represent statuses as a log. Marks special rows with a system ID. Use views sparingly and JSON queries. I agree with most of these, but plural table names for the win. Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them? Leah Vruz says, quote, Dear JAS ecosystem, I love you,

but you have a dependency management problem when it comes to the web, and the time has come for an intervention. End quote. The topic of that intervention, we all know what it is. Quote, in healthy ecosystems, dependencies are normal, cheap, and first class.

Dependency free is not a badge of honor. And yet, the web platform has outsourced this fundamental functionality to third-party tooling. As a result, code reuse has become a balancing of tradeoffs that should not have existed in the first place. end quote she doesn't think incremental improvements can get us out of this mess that we're in suggesting

one radical solution that she isn't entirely sure will work in the end this post is a call to action for the community quote to browser vendors to standard groups to individual developers let's fix this that is the news for now but go and subscribe to the change log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on such as cloud flare acquires astro dead internet theory again and why senior engineers, let bad projects fail. Get in on the newsletter at changelog. News. Have yourself a great week, like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.