The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Devin's Upwork "side hustle" exposed (News)

Episode Date: April 15, 2024

YouTuber "Internet of Bugs" breaks down why AI "software engineer" Devin is no Upwork hero, Redka is Anton Zhiyanov's attempt to reimplement Redis with SQLite, OpenTofu issues its response to Hashicorp's Cease and Desist letter, Brian LeRoux introduces Enhance WASM & PumpkinOS is not your average PalmOS emulator.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, April 15th, 2024. For a limited time only, I'm trading Changelog sticker packs for thoughtful five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Send evidence of a new review on any of our pods to jared at changelog.com. That's J-E-R-O-D at changelog.com with a mailing address, and I'll hook you up with the goods. Let's do this. Okay, let's get into the news.

Devin's Upwork side hustle exposed. YouTuber Internet of Bugs posted a lengthy breakdown exposing Devin's creators, Cognition Labs, for falsifying claims about their world's first AI software engineer. Devin was pitched as a fully autonomous software developer and one of the more impressive demos showed it completing and getting paid for freelance jobs on Upwork. Sound too good to be true? It did, to Internet of Bugs, who says, quote, I broke down the Devin Upwork video frame by frame, and here I show what Devin was supposed to do, what it actually managed to do instead, and how bad a job of that it did. On the whole, that's not surprising given the current state of generative AI, and I wouldn't be bothering to debunk it except,

1. The company lied about what Devin could do in the video description, and 2. A lot of people uncritically parroted the lie all over the internet, and 3. That caused a lot of non-technical people to believe that AI might replace programmers soon. End quote. Devin really did garner a lot of attention, also known as money, because of that demo. We talked about it on our shows, with a healthy amount of skepticism, I think. But I'm thankful their claims have been debunked, and I hope we all give Cognition Labs the side-eye from here on out. Exaggerating your development capabilities?

Maybe Devin really is human after all. Redis re-implemented with SQLite. Redka is Anton Zianov's attempt to re-implement in Go the good parts of Redis with SQLite while remaining compatible with the Redis API. The goal is to support five core Redis data types, strings, lists, sets, hashes, and sorted sets. This is cool because so many devs, and tools for devs, already know and love Redis's API, but the project's legal woes and administration needs, which aren't that complex, but one more moving part,

are not ideal. SQLite, on the other hand, is entirely open source and the most deployed in-process database in the world. Redka is slower than Redis, two to six times by early benchmarks, but that's no big surprise considering the relational backend, and it can still do 22,000 writes per second and 57,000 reads per second, which is nothing to shake a stick at. OpenTofu responds to HashiCorp's cease and desist. Last week's big story was HashiCorp's nastygram sent to Open Tofu and the question of whether or not they've forked up

by copying copyrighted Terraform code in an attempt to maintain future parity. The Open Tofu team has now issued their response, which includes a lengthy source code origination document and a three-page letter written by their lawyer with this sentence in bold text. Quote, To my client's knowledge, none of the Terraform code subject to the BUSL has been improperly copied,

incorrectly sourced, or used for any purpose. End quote. Your move, Hashi. It's now time for Sponsored News. Say the date. On April 30th, our friends at Tailscale are doing a webinar covering how to connect to your AWS resources easily and securely, which lets you simplify AWS connectivity by using Tailscale to reduce the complexity of managing secure remote access to the Amazon resources that power your organization. Thank you. TailNet. Achieve high availability failover, seamlessly connect across availability zones, and deliver persistent resource monitoring and session recording to support compliance goals.

Reserve your spot today by following the link in your chapter data and in the newsletter. Thanks to TailScale for supporting our work by sponsoring Changelog News. Introducing Enhance OASM. Brian LaRue says, quote, Web components are the browser-native way to extend HTML, but as a primarily browser-based technology, they are defined with JavaScript, which limits them to either rendering solely client-side, which has janky performance, poor SEO, and is not optimally accessible, or within a server-side JavaScript runtime,

which isn't always an option for shops that use other backend runtimes. Enhance Wasm unlocks server-side rendering web components for any backend runtime. End quote. Pretty cool. You write standard web components and then deploy them with any backend, like Rails, Django, Node, WordPress, etc. Enhance Wasm is an open-source initiative, and they're looking for collaborators to join them on this mission. Oh, and Brian has agreed to join me on an upcoming JS Party episode to discuss this effort in depth. Pumpkin OS is a re-implementation of Palm OS.

This is not your average Palm OS emulator. There's no Palm OS ROMs required. It is a full-on re-implementation of PalmOS that runs on modern architectures like x86, ARM, etc., and can run M68K PalmOS apps. It currently runs as a normal application on a host operating system, but efforts to strip down the underlying things is underway. As far as I can tell, this project is purely for the joy of it. That being said, it's written in C, so honestly, how much joy could there possibly be? Just kidding. Regardless, if you have Palm OS nostalgia and or the desire to hack on some low-level code,

check out Pumpkin OS. That's the news for now, but this is episode number 90, so that means it's time once again for some changelog plus plus shout outs. Shout out to our newest members, Nathan N, Luke P, Addison G, Sonny B, Dominic S, Stephen B, Richard W, Eric N, and Christian B. We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard earned cash. If changelog plus plus is new to you, that's our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail, and get shoutouts like the ones you just heard. Have a great week. Don't forget that five-star review if you want some free stickers, and I'll talk to you again real soon.