The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Full-breadth developers for the win (News)

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Justin Searls describes the "full-breadth developer" and why they'll win because AI, Cloudflare comes up with a way publishers can charge crawlers for access, Hugo Bowne-Anderson explains why building AI agents fails so often, the Job Worth Calculator tells you if your job is worth the grind, and Sam Lambert announces PlanetScale for Postgres.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, July 7th, 2025. Good news about our upcoming Denver Live show. Not only will Breakmaster Cylinder be in attendance, BMC is now officially performing some fresh and some classic ChangeLog beats on stage 30 minutes prior to our 10am start. So if you were planning on arriving just before 10, get your ear holes to the Oriental Theater a little bit earlier. And if you haven't bought your ticket yet, you now have one more reason to get in on

it. They're 15 bucks cheap and free for changelog++ members. Head to changelog.com slash live. What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Okay, let's get into this week's news. Full-breath developers for the win. Much like myself, Justin Searles turned the corner on generative coding tools.

Quote, it may not map to any particular splashy innovation or announcement, but everyone agrees generative coding tools crossed a significant capability threshold recently. It's what led me to write this. In just two days, I've completed two months worth of work on PosseParty." Justin explains how he did it, but the key insight is this. He embodies the entirety of the problem solution space.

He is both product Justin and programmer Justin. If you were to split him in two, it would have taken weeks, not days. In this post, Justin coins the term full breadth developer and describes why he thinks full breadth devs will be the big winners of the AI upheaval. He also disambiguates my frequent call to move up the value chain. Quote, a lot of developers are feeling scared and hopeless about the changes being wrought by all of this. Yes, AI is being used as an excuse by executives to lay people off and pad their margins. Yes, how foundation models were trained was unethical and probably also illegal.

Yes, Hustle Bros are running around making BS claims. Yes, almost every party involved has a reason to make exaggerated claims about AI. All of that can be true and it still doesn't matter. Your job as you knew it is gone. If you want to keep getting paid, you may have been told to move up the value chain. If that sounds ambiguous and unclear, I'll put it more plainly. Figure out how your employer makes money and position your ass somewhere directly in between the corporate bank account

and your customer's credit card information. Cloudflare experiments with pay-per-crawl. Many content creators are rightfully concerned about LLMs crawling their sites and scraping their hard-produced content. Up until now, the options have been limited to a binary let them do it or don't let them do it.

Enter Cloudflare. Quote, we believe your choice need not be binary. There should be a third, more nuanced option. You can charge for access. Instead of a blanket block or uncompensated open access, we want to empower content owners to monetize their content at internet scale. We are excited to help dust off a mostly forgotten piece of the web. HTTP response code 402."

By leveraging the 402 payment required status code, CloudFlare has devised an experimental pay per crawl system where publishers control their monetization strategy, crawlers authenticate via the web bot auth protocol and indicate their payment agreement via headers, and Cloudflare acts as the settlement layer. I love seeing smart people throw their ideas into the web arena like this. Will it work?

I have no idea. Does it stand a chance? I think it might. Stop building AI agents. Hugo Bone Anderson is frustrated by seeing the same pattern after advising dozens of teams building LLM powered systems. Quote, Everyone reaches for agents first.

They set up memory systems. They add routing logic. They create tool definitions and character backstories. It feels powerful and it feels like progress. Until everything breaks. And when things go wrong, which they always do, nobody can figure out why. Was it the agent forgetting its task? Is the wrong tool getting selected? Too many moving parts to debug? Is the whole system fundamentally brittle?

Hugo learned this the hard way by building a research crew of 3 agents, 5 tools, and perfect coordination on paper. The system, like others he'd built, failed spectacularly, leading Hugo to create this flowchart about should I use an agent, where the hint is… probably not. This post is about what Hugo learned from those failures, including how to avoid them entirely. It's now time for sponsored news. Free AI code reviews in VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. CodeRabbit just launched AI powered code reviews

directly inside VS Code with support for Cursor, Windsurf, and more on the way. Now you can code, review, and commit all without leaving your IDE. It's a seamless review and flow experience. CodeRabbit doesn't just help you can code, review and commit all without leaving your IDE. It's a seamless review and flow experience. CodeRabbit doesn't just help you write code. It catches AI slop too. Hallucinations, code smells, logical errors, missing unit tests.

They all get flagged in real time with configurable rules. Even better, code reviews in your IDE are free. CodeRabbit gives you senior engineer level reviews in your IDE are free. CodeRabbit gives you senior engineer level reviews in your IDE for free. If you've been waiting for AI reviews that feel like part of your workflow, this is the one to try. Learn more at coderabbit.ai

or follow the link in the newsletter. Once again, that's coderabbit.ai. Calculate the actual value of your job. Is your job worth a grind? This job worth calculator calculates a job value rating based on your salary, work hours, commute time, environment, and more. It does international salary comparison with purchase price parity conversion across 190 plus countries.

It lets you customize it with personal factors like education level and work experience. And then it generates a shareable, downloadable job analysis report for you. It's open source and on the web. Find the link in the newsletter. Announcing PlanetScale for Postgres. Here's Sam Lambert, PlanetScale CEO announcing that the Vitesse cloud provider is adding Postgres

to its shortlist of supported databases. Quote, PlanetScale has been successful hosting some of the world's largest relational databases, so why are we building for Postgres? The reason is simple. Customer demand. End quote. This is fascinating in the wake of Subabase recently hiring Vitesh co-creator Sugu Sugamaranay which I still don't know how to pronounce but we'll have him on the show soon so I'll

find out for sure, to help them build Multigress which is Vitesh for Postgres. On that topic Sam says quote, Vitesh is one of PlanetScale's greatest strengths and has become synonymous with database scaling. Contemporary Vitesitesse is the product of Planet Scale's experience running at extreme scale. We have made explicit sharding accessible to hundreds of thousands of users and it is time to bring this power to Postgres. We will not, however, be using Vitesse to do this." So, Planet Scale, which is historically all about Vitesse and MySQL,

plans on bringing Vitesse-like sharding to Postgres, but not with Vitesse itself. Meanwhile, SuperBase is working on pretty much the same thing with some of the team that built Vitesse in the first place. Imagine what they could create if they teamed up on this initiative, but something tells me that's never gonna happen. Quick disclaimer, I am a small investor in SuperBase because I wanted to make a bet on the future of Postgres and their Postgres maxis. Maybe I should invest in Planescale now too. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to our changelog newsletter for the full scoop

of links worth clicking on such as… The email startup graveyard Backlog.md A New Developer Dictionary Definition for Scrum And our award-worthy, unordered list of interesting links. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. Have a great week, like, subscribe, and leave us a 5 star review if you dig our work. And I'll talk to you again real soon.