The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - An escape route from YAML hell (News)

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Adolfo Ochagavía believes we're approaching the problem of configuration from a flawed starting point, Annie Mueller hits us with a wakeup call about how she reads beginner tutorials, Brian Kihoon Lee spends some time meditating on taste, Namanyay thinks vibe coding is coders braindead, and Can Elma speculates on why AI helps senior engineers more than juniors.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, September 22nd, 2025. I would have published this week's episode earlier, but I got distracted trying to prove to Neal, from the awesome Neal.fun website, that I'm not a robot. I made it as far as level 14, but it took me far too long to find. find Waldo. You? Okay, let's get in to this week's news. An escape route from Yammel Hell. Adolfo, Otrigavilla, believes we're approaching the problem of configuration from a flawed starting point. Quote, we are failing to see that configuration files are actually user interfaces and that they

should be treated as such. Once you start thinking of configuration files as user interfaces, it suddenly makes sense to demand an excellent user experience for working with them. End quote. What might configuration software look like if our tools were rooted in the configuration is UI paradigm? In this post, Adolfo doesn't go so far as to present an all-encompassing theory of what configuration software could look like in a perfect world, but he does shout out one particular project that he thinks is a big step in the right direction. Case on. How a non-dev reads beginner tutorial.

Annie Mueller hits us with a wake-up call about how she, as a non-developer, reads the tutorial you, a developer, wrote, for her, a beginner. Here's a sample. Quote, I first started doing very simple thing, too, with Snarfus. But the more I used it, the more I saw the potential. Despite the jaggle of the chromis, it's really multipurpose. And that's what led me to Argyling, the pentafor, with the quagmire, instead of the hoopistank. I know, crazy.

But it was kind of working and actually a lot of fun. until I hit a big roadblock. The fisterfunk will not talk to the shamrock portal or even send beat boops back to the snarfus. Of course, you know what that means now. The entire hoop tunnel is clogged with grimillions. Unacceptable. End quote.

You already get the idea, but click through for even more snarfuses, beat boops, and ding-dongs. Taste is humanity's last edge over AI. Brian Cahoon Lee spend some time meditating on taste along many dimensions. If it truly is humanity's last edge over AI, then we should define and understand it for all that it is.

Brian says taste is art, parsimony, and the field behind the goalposts into which the goalposts are constantly being shifted. Taste is cultural distillation, its governance, and it's able to be refined. But how? He has some ideas about that as well. It's now time for sponsored news. Code Reviews with Context The code review process has a history of being challenging for teams. It's where the work meets integration and ultimately solves customer problems. The process can go back and forth nitpicking syntax, style, or patterns, but without business

requirements, deployment dependencies, or organizational knowledge, it's only half the story. That's why CodeRabbit shipped MCP server integration. Until now, you could only bring context from linear, Jira, or CircleCi. Now you can pull in any MCP server, Confluent docs, Datadog metrics, Slack discussions, even your internal tools. Instead of a shallow syntax check, CodeRabbit compiles all that context into reviews that understand what your code is actually trying to accomplish.

This makes CodeRabbit the first AI code review platform that orchestrates context across your entire development ecosystem. And for our friends who need integration at the coding agent level, CodeRabit's CLI and VS code integration does just that. Teams can now enjoy code reviews that see the whole picture, not just the diff. Learn all about it at coderabbit.aI or get your direct link to the blog post in this week's newsletter. Vibe coding is creating brain dead coders.

Nominye confesses to using Claude code to write all of his code for him and he thinks it's making him worse at the thing he's loved to do for 12 years. Quote, I can clearly see how AI coding is rewiring our brains. It makes developers crave instant gratification instead of deep understanding and reduces us to gamblers who pull levers for the next hit of working code. If this is happening to me, someone who learned to code in the pre-AI era, what's it going to do to junior developers who've never known anything else? End quote.

That's a good question. It's probably too early to know, but I suspect the long-term impact of this change will be catastrophic. Now, Mungay argues that when you vibe code, you get dopamine from the wrong source. He used to get two dopamine hits. One when he figured something out, and a second when he got it to work. Now the AI figures everything out, and he's left with a shallow pleasure of things working. He knows the difference because it's changed from how he used to feel. But there's an entire generation of developers upcoming who will never have known anything else.

Why does AI mostly make seniors stronger? This post by Canelma pairs nicely with the previous one. Quote, the early narrative was that companies would need fewer seniors, and juniors together with AI could produce quality code. At least that's what I kept seeing. But now, partly because AI hasn't quite lived up to the hype, it looks like what companies actually need is not junior people. plus AI, but senior plus AI, end quote.

Kahn's explanation for why this is playing out is that AI coding tools are good at things that juniors are generally good at, like cranking out code, trying different implementations, validating things, etc., and bad at things seniors are generally good at, like code review, system architecture, spotting security issues, etc. The end result, in his eyes, quote, instead of democratizing coding, AI right now has mostly concentrated power in the hands of experts. expectations did not quite match reality. We will see what happens next.

I am optimistic about AI's future, but in the short run, we should probably reset our expectations before they warp any further. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as

How to Stop Functional Programming, and React 1 by default, killing front-end innovation. Get in on the newsletter at changelog. News. We have some great episodes coming up this week. We visited our friends at Oxide Computer Company during their annual internal conference, and we're shipping you a bunch of great conversations on both Wednesday and

Friday. Have a great week. Like, subscribe, and leave us a five-star review if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.