The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - AI is stifling tech adoption (News)

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Declan Chidlow proposes that AI is stifling tech adoption, Ariel Salminen shares 17 pieces of advice she's learned about leading successful product teams, Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTok, the React team sunsets Create React App & Ruben Schade says boring tech is mature, not old.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday, February 17th, 2025. If you listen to our shows and you haven't joined our totally free Zulip community, let's fix that bug. It's always more fun to discuss things you've heard with friends. And the commentary around our recent episodes has been so good. See for yourself by following the link in the newsletter and sign up today at changelog.com slash community.

OK, let's get into the news. AI is stifling tech adoption. Declan Cidlo proposes that quote, the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs

and system prompt influence. End quote. I've been worried about this very thing ever since I first realized its possibility. During our conversation with Elixir creator, Jose Balim last January, Declan says, I have noticed a bias towards specific technologies in multiple popular models and have noted anecdotally

in conversation and online discussion, people choosing technology based on how well AI tooling can assist with its usage or implementation. While it has long been the case that developers have considered documentation and support availability when choosing software, AI's influence dramatically amplifies this factor in decision making, often in ways that aren't immediately apparent and with undisclosed influence." I'd sure hate to live in a world where the overwhelming majority of new software projects are written in Python and TypeScript just because LLMs are best at outputting Python

and TypeScript. Not that there's anything wrong with that. With Python at least. Snooch. Leading Successful Product Teams Next, leading successful product teams. Arielle Salmanin shares 17 pieces of advice she's learned about leading successful product teams after two decades in the web industry and eight plus years building design systems. Quote, running a design system team has some minor differences compared to a more traditional product team setup, but there's still enough overlap that all of these rules can be considered universal and applied to almost any product team out there." Ariel's entire list rings of wisdom, but the last three items were absolute bangers, in my opinion.

Number 15. Don't be afraid to throw things away. Number 16. Shipped is better than perfect. And number 17, but should it be number one? Be kind, y'all, be kind. WikiTalk is a testament to internet creation. Benj Edwards tells the story of WikiTalk, an endless Wikipedia feed to fight algorithm addiction, which was created in the most internety way that a thing could be created.

Quote, the original idea for WikiTalk originated from developer Tyler Angert on Monday evening when he tweeted, insane project idea, all of Wikipedia on a single scrollable page. Bloomberg Beta VC James Cham replied, even better, an infinitely scrolling Wikipedia page based on whatever you are interested in next. Then Angert coined wikiTalk in a follow up post. Early in the next morning at 1228am, writer Grant Slatton quote tweeted the wikiTalk in a follow-up post. Early in the next morning at 1228am, writer Grant Slatton quote tweeted the wikiTalk discussion and that's where Gamal came in.

I saw it from Slatton's quote retweet. He told ours. I immediately thought, wow, I can build an MVP and this could take off. Gamal started his project at 1230am and with help from AI coding tools like Anthropix, Claude, and Cursor, he finished a prototype by 2 a.m. and then posted the results on X. Someone later announced WikiTalk on Y Combinator's Hacker News where it topped the site's list of daily news items." An idea jumps through five people and multiple LLMs to its creation and worldwide distribution. In just 90 minutes, we live in trying times for sure, but we also live in amazing times. It's now time for sponsored news.

Meet the people shaping the future of engineering. Here's Lauren Bennett from Temporal. The difference between a backend that hums and one that crumbles under pressure isn't a lucky break. It's engineering. The best solutions don't come from you working in isolation, staring at logs or fretting over your codebase. They come from people wrestling with real-world scaling problems, learning through failure and designing for a future that isn't yet written."

At Replay 2025, those engineers will take the stage to tell you how they're pushing workflow orchestration, durable execution and Modernization efforts forward Lauren outlines some of the talks that will be given and they look great Here's a few that caught our attention one building systems that can't afford to fail two sales force migrating a monolithic cloud with temporal and three resilience reliability and real-time response You can read case studies, watch talks online, and even swap war stories on Slack, but nothing replaces being in the room

with the minds who've already solved the problems you're facing. Thanks to Temporal for sponsoring ChangeLog news, and definitely check out Replay 25 by following the link in the newsletter. Sunsetting Create React app. Here's Matt Carroll and Ricky Hanlon from the React team. Quote, today we are deprecating Create React App

for new apps and encouraging existing apps to migrate to a framework. We're also providing docs for when a framework isn't a good fit for your project or you prefer to start by building a framework yourself. End quote. Their official stance going forward is you should start with a framework,

but I do appreciate that they have a page dedicated to how to build your own framework if for no other reason than you can quickly grok all the things frameworks provide out of the box. Boring tech is mature, not old. Here's Ruben Shade, quote, I have talked before about how I think NetBSD is boring and that it's among the highest forms of praise I can give tech as a sysadmin and architect. But I have never elaborated why that is."

On this week's upcoming show with Tailscale co-founder David Croshaw, Adam thought he might offend David by telling him that Tailscale has become boring in his eyes. David took that as high praise. As would I. Rubin says quote, boring tech behaves in predictable ways. It's a well trodden path others have evaluated, optimized, troubleshot and understood. Using tech that has been subjected to all those people hours of use means you're less likely to run into edge cases, unexpected behavior or attributes and features that lack documentation or community

knowledge. End quote. Rubin isn't saying there's no room for innovation. His overarching point is that it pays to make informed decisions and that oftentimes the understood, reliable, boring tech will get you there over something new, shiny or propped up with marketing spin. That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter to get the links and even more stories worth your attention. Such as Hector Martin resigning as a SAHI Linux lead, Rust Owl, a tool that visualizes ownership and lifetimes in Rust, and the story of an undergrad who upended a 40-year-old

computer science principal. Sign up today at changelog.com slash news. We had some great episodes last week. Scroll back in your feed for Arun Gupta on fostering open source culture. One listener said, Love the discussion and I love the garden analogy at the end. And also you'll find Jimmy Miller on Discovery Coding. AJ Carrigan liked it enough to call the episode beautiful. So that's cool. We also have some great episodes coming up. On Wednesday is David Krosha joining us to discuss how he programs with LLMs and on Friday Adam and

I discuss the news, including a great post on changing your mind as a developer over the years. Have a great week, leave us a 5 star review if you dig our work, and I'll talk to you again real soon.