The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Everyone is talking about MCP (News)

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Vibe coding is the new vibe, AI engineers are all taking about MCP, Tom Usher wants you to kill your algorithmic feeds, Curiositry shares his troubleshooting expertise, Nikola Ðuza thinks we should keep blogging for the LLMs & James Stanier answers the question, should managers still code?

What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday, March 10th, 2025. Vibe coding is the valley's buzzword du jour for the uninitiated. It's like pair programming with an AI, where it writes all the code, and your only job is to make sure it doesn't harsh your vibe, dude. Then when it's finished, you post a demo to social media, declare software engineering dead, throw the barely usable final product away, and code up some more vibes. Okay, let's get into this week's news.

Everyone is talking about MCP. Okay, probably not everyone is talking about MCP, but it's certainly a burgeoning topic amongst the AI engineering crowd. So I figured it's at least worth a primer here. MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, which was first announced by the Anthropic team last November.

It's an open protocol to standardize how applications provide context to LLMs. Quote, think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI apps. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data sources and tools." The linked X thread lists out a bunch of things people are building and announcing around MCP, most of which look like demo quality wares, but there's certainly some potential here.

If we are going to have an agentic future, we need good ways to equip AI agents with the context they need to accomplish their tasks. MCP might become the way we achieve that, or perhaps just a step along the way. Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think. Here's Tom Usher. Quote, the creators of TikTok, Instagram, etc. have gained control over exactly what we see, and what we see strongly influences how we think. They know their feeds make us angry, they know the negative effects on our mental health,

particularly that of teens, and they know that they have an influence on our opinion. With the power to shape what we see comes the power to shape what we believe, whether through deliberate manipulation or the slow creep of algorithmic recommendations. Engagement is fueled by outrage and outrage breeds extremism. The result is a feedback loop that isolates users, reinforces beliefs, and deprioritizes opposing viewpoint." Being able to form our own opinions is more important than ever. Do you want to take back control of how you think? At the end of this post, Tom gives you five things you can do without going cold turkey off social media altogether. Troubleshooting never goes obsolete.

In an industry where it's too easy to invest time in skills that don't last, I love when people share their expertise on things that have stood the test of time. Here's curiosity doing just that. Quote, realizing that I spend more time troubleshooting than I do building or doing, and that the skill of troubleshooting can be honed separately from the domain it's applied to, I decided to try to figure out how to improve my troubleshooting skills,

and as a result, my effectiveness in multiple domains. The way I do it, troubleshooting mostly boils down to scratching my head, Googling the error message, and thinking up and testing hypotheses to narrow the search space. But I frequently catch myself making errors I have made before, so here's what I try to remember when I'm troubleshooting to keep myself on track and avoid dead ends." That last paragraph is an extreme simplification.

This essay is brimming with specific, high-quality advice. Check it out. Link in the newsletter. It's now time for sponsored news. New Temporal capabilities from Replay 2025. The biggest event of the year for Temporal just wrapped up. Replay 2025 in London is where teams learn about evolving legacy systems, modernizing infrastructure, and building scalable, durable software to power today's top businesses.

Here is what they announced. Temporal is open source, so you can easily self-host it, but many teams are operating at scale and they rely on Temporal Cloud to give them an easier, faster, more scalable way to run Temporal. You can now automate migrations with zero downtime. The new tooling is in pre-release

and they're seeking early users. High availability can now offer another nine to multiple region replication and same region replication, allowing you to asynchronously replicate your workflows to a namespace in a secondary or same region and will automatically fail over if necessary to keep your apps online with a 99.99 SLA.

They also released new and updated capabilities to improve your DX online with a 99.99 SLA. They also released new and updated capabilities to improve your DX with Temporal. Temporal Ruby SDK is now available in pre-release and is at full feature parity with the other Temporal SDKs. You can now use Ruby to write workflows and activities. And Temporal Nexus is now generally available. Nexus lets you connect Temporal applications across and within isolated namespaces. Check the link in the newsletter for all the announcements and thank you to Temporal for sponsoring ChangeLog news.

Write blogs so LLMs have something to read. Why create content in the age of AI slop? Nikola Duzha has a dystopian answer to that question. Quote, LLMs are getting better and better, but they all need some kind of input to be trained on. And that's where we, content creators, come in. The world needs human touch for now. The AI needs some human touch. The LLMs need to be trained on the good stuff. That's why we need to keep writing, recording, and creating." This is giving me strong Matrix vibes. Spoiler alert, you know the Matrix,

where the machines only reason to keep us alive is to harvest us for energy. So they create a digital world to keep our minds busy while they feed on our bodies. But maybe I'm the only one getting Matrix vibes. I do agree with Nicola on this point. Quote, in the sea of generated content, the custom, handmade, locally produced content will always stand out.

It's the human touch that will make the difference. Furthermore, blogs and writing will highly unlikely die. To write is a way of getting your thoughts calm, organized, and composed. Certain humans will always need to write, no matter how easy it is to generate content with AI. In that sense, blogs with human touch will always have a place." End quote.

Always is a strong word, but I do believe there will be a market for human-crafted content for the foreseeable future, just like there's still a market for handcrafted goods hundreds of years after the industrial revolution. Should managers still code? James Stainier takes a crack at this age-old question. Quote, the short answer is that it depends exactly

on what you mean by coding. I think that there is a big difference between being in the code and writing code. All managers should be in the code, but not all managers should be writing code." End quote. James spends some time digging into the nuances of the question and how exactly he wants

his engineering managers to be in terms of their relationship with the code base. Should they be able to write code? Should they be able to do code reviews? Should they be able to debug and triage production issues? Stuff like that. It's a good one, check it out in the newsletter. That's the news for now,

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