The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Google's new protocol has AI agents talkin' (News)

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Google announces an open protocol for AI agent collaboration, Datastar is an Alpine.js / htmx love child, Matthias Endler documents things he finds common in the best programmers, turns out Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days & Zev is a CLI that helps you remember (or discover) terminal commands using natural language.

What's up nerds. I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, April 14th, 2025. Security researchers have discovered a way that hackers might weaponize GitHub Copilot and Cursor to insert malicious code that might bypass typical code reviews, calling it virtually invisible to developers and security teams. So, your most trusted coding assistant could also be an unwitting accomplice

to some particularly gnarly attacks. Is it time to update the old adage? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but your AI is closest. Okay, let's get into the news. Google's new protocol has AI agents talking. If our agentic future is to someday arrive, we're gonna need a way for my agent to call your agent

so we can do lunch. Google thinks they've developed a good way of achieving that with their A2A protocol. It's quote, a collaborative way to help agents across different ecosystems communicate with each other. Google is driving this open protocol initiative for the industry because we believe this protocol will be critical to support multi-agent communication

by giving your agents a common language, irrespective of the framework or vendor they are built on." They have more than 50 technology partners agreeing to work together to further develop this protocol, and they see it as complementary to MCP, not in competition with it. According to Google, MCP provides helpful tools and context to agents, while A2A empowers developers to build agents capable of connecting with any other agent. That being said, Anthropic, who developed MCP,

is not listed as a technology partner, and I can't help but think there'll be quite a bit of overlap between the two protocols as things progress. DataStar, the hypermedia framework. If Alpine.js and HTMX had a love child, DataStar might be it. Quote, include DataStar with a single 14.5 kilobyte file and start adding reactivity to your front end immediately.

Write your backend in the language of your choice. Official SDKs are available to get you up and running even faster or you can send server sent events directly from your backend." The backend SDKs must implement Datastar's SSE protocol, which looks simple enough. This is an impressive effort at first brush. The one thing I can't find is evidence of Datastar being used in production anywhere. Maybe I missed it? The team has confidence in the framework though, saying quote,

We are so confident that Datastar can be used as a JavaScript framework replacement that we challenge anyone to find a use case for a web app that DataStar cannot be used to build. The Best Programmers I Know Matthias Endler takes a crack at answering a similar question to the one I posed to Justin Searles on a recent friends. Quote, I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself, what does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common? Here's a sampling of Matthias' list of things great devs do, cherry picked for the

ones I agree with most. Read the reference. Break down problems. Never stop learning. Have patience. Keep stop learning. 4. Have patience. 5. Keep it simple. Mathias' patience section most closely aligns with the one thing that Justin and I both agreed is compulsory to becoming a great developer. Perseverance. It's now time for sponsored news.

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maintainable application. Defaulting this architecture delivers 27% faster load times on average. 2. Confirming production readiness gets easier thanks to enterprise deployment controls that enable structured governance, collaboration, and testing for secure, reliable app releases. Three, multi-instance releases is now in private beta. A simple manifest file designates consistent app version releases across multiple environments, enabling structured promotion from dev to production.

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Change Log News. Linus Torvalds built Git in 10 days. As if it weren't already impressive, today I learned the initial version of Git was hammered out in a mere 10 days back in April 2005. It's also interesting to note that Linux's success wasn't enough to rid Linus of his imposter syndrome. Quote, while he's proud of having created Linux, what makes him happy about Git is not that it's taken over the world, it's that we all have self-doubt, right?

We all think, are we actually any good? And one of the self-doubts I had with Linux was it was just a re-implementation of Unoubt, right? We all think, are we actually any good? And one of the self-doubts I had with Linux was it was just a re-implementation of Unix, right? Can I give you something that isn't just a better version of something else? Git proved to me that I can. Having two projects that made a big splash means that I'm not a one-trick pony, end quote.

This article by Steven Von Nichols is a great little peek into the history of Git to celebrate its 20 year anniversary. My only gripe is that the section called Why has Git been so successful doesn't even mention the impact that GitHub had on Git's adoption. Before GitHub, it wasn't clear if Mercurial or Git would be the community's DVCS of choice. After GitHub, well, we're living in it. A simple CLI to help remember commands.

Zev is a Python-based CLI tool that helps you remember or discover terminal commands using natural language. For example, you might type out, show all files in this directory with human readable sizes. And Zev will present you with three options. Option 1, l-LH. Option 2, DU-SH-STAR. And option 3, find.-maxdepth1-typef-execls-lh.

Left curly brace, right curly brace. Plus, easy for you to say. You can then select the one you want to use and copy it to your clipboard for pasting. How does it achieve this magic? With the OpenAI API. What'd you expect? You can also point it at a llama though, so that's nice.

That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on. Such as… Atuin scripts. Shareable. Syncable. Shell snippets. a gallery of awesome 404 page designs, and get blame but for file trees. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com slash news.

Last week on the pod, we talked with Stefan Euen all about restate and the era of durable execution functions, and we sat down with Richard Moodt from the Square Developer Podcast to discuss how we helped them produce an awesome show and the recent hype around MCP servers. Listen to those if you haven't yet and stay tuned for this week's upcoming shows. On Wednesday, it's Anthony Eden, founder of DnSimple. And on Friday, Nick Nisi, founder of the unofficial TypeScript fan club. Have a great week.

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