The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Just enough automation (News)

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Zach Gates quantifies the value of automating things, Albania's new prime minister names an AI "minister" to his Cabinet, Eckart Walther launches Really Simple Licensing (RSL) along with some big names on the web, Vishnu Haridas praises UTF-8's design, and Justin Searls disagrees with last week's headline story about AI coding tools and shovelware.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, September 15th, 2025. If you think Roombas are cool, wait until you get a load of dusty robotics, Roomba for the construction industry. Instead of vacuuming the floor, it drives around printing the construction floor plan on the bare slab. Such a simple concept that will remove so much inefficiency in the construction process. I love it. Okay, let's get into this week's news.

Just enough automation. I used to try to automate pretty much everything. Eventually I learned there are some things that just aren't worth it. But where exactly is that line? Zach Gates tried to quantify it after a few iterations he came up with this equation. Long-term value equals the value of the task times the number of iterations for the task minus the effort of automating the task

minus maintenance costs minus documentation costs minus mistake costs plus or minus long-term effects sometimes the biggest challenge is predicting the actual effort of automating the task we devs tend to underestimate that forcing ourselves to learn the hard way

but if you can get that number right maybe this equation will help you decide whether or not to automate your next repetitive task. Albania welcomes its first AI overlord. Look out, corrupt Albanian politicians. There's a new AI-generated minister in town, and her name is Diella. Quote, Albania's Prime Minister on Friday tapped an artificial intelligence-generated minister to tackle corruption and promote transparency and innovation in his new cabinet, end quote.

Diella will be a member of the cabinet, according to Prime Minister, Eddie Rama, but needless to say, not everybody is on board with the idea, but maybe that doesn't matter, quote, lawmakers will vote on the new cabinet, but it was unclear whether Rama will ask for a vote on Diella's virtual post. Legal experts say more work may be needed to establish Deella's official status, end quote. I'm all for tackling corruption and promoting transparency, but is today's state-of-the-art AI even close to ready for that? So far, thankfully, it seems Dialla's work has been more akin to a digital librarian. Quote, Diella, depicted as a figure in a traditional Albanian folk costume,

was created earlier this year in cooperation with Microsoft as a virtual assistant on the E-Albania Public Service Platform, where she has helped users navigate the site and get access to about 1 million digital inquiries and documents. Really simple licensing for the AI-first Internet. RSS co-creator Eckert Walther, along with some big names on the web, like Tim O'Reilly, Schema.org's RV Gooha, Simon Wistow, from Fastly, to name a few, have designed a new open standard for licensing content in a machine, readable form. Really simple licensing, or RSL, is similar to Cloudflare's paper crawl idea, but with more forms of compensation. Also, the ability to license non-public content like books, videos, and datasets, and a bigger community behind it. Reddit, Cora, Wikihau, the MIT Press, and more organizations have committed support to the standard.

The technical bits aren't that complicated. There's a new XML namespace for RSL with elements publishers add to their RSS feeds to specify content licensing requirements. Consumers use the RSL Open License Protocol, OLP, to acquire access to the content from a license server specified in the feed. There's a list of open licensed servers linked up in the newsletter, but you can also operate your own. It's now time for sponsored news. Remote Agent Sandboxes on Depot. One of the biggest pain points of AI coding agents is the local setup tax. Every time you spin one up, it's fight in your environment, your dependencies, your laptop fans, not fun.

Depot's answer is Remote Agent Sandboxes. Instead of wrangling clog code on your machine, you get a clean, consistent sandbox in the cloud. No setup, no drift, just a fresh environment every time. Why does this matter? Because reliable context is the difference between, wow, that agent's useful, and ugh, it broke again. Sandboxes give Claudecode a stable home to reason about your repo, test changes, and run reviews without trashing your dev setup. Learn more and try it for yourself at depot.dev slash blog or check the newsletter for the link to the full post. UTF8 is a brilliant design.

Vishnu Haritas has a lot of nice things to say about UTF8 encoding. Quote, the first time I learned about UTF8 and coding, I was fascinated by how well thought and brilliantly it was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts and still be backward compatible with Aski, end quote. The backwards compatibility with Aski is the most impressive part in Vichnu's eyes, and he goes on to explain how it works in detail.

He even built a U.T. UTF8 playground to visualize and play around with the encoding, link in the newsletter. I agree with Vishnu on its brilliant design, but my favorite thing about UTF8 is that it's so good that I don't really think about string encoding anymore. I just don't have to. If you're at all interested in how UTF8 got so brilliant, Rob Pike told the tale of how it was designed in front of his eyes on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September 1992. Again, link in your newsletter. I've got your shovelware right here. Justin Searle disagrees with last week's headline story by Mike Judge that argued we'd be seeing a whole lot of shovelware if AI coding tools were making us as productive as we think they are.

Justin's retort, quote, suggesting that AI generated code is a nothing burger because we haven't yet been drowned in shovelware just four months after coding agents became remotely useful. Get out of here. I talked to a manager the other day whose team was given cart. Blanche to burn through all the anthropic tokens they want, and for whom not a single developer touched the account in the month of August, end quote. Justin also points to some vibe-coded shovelware of his own to counter Mike's assertion. Quote, it took about a day of wall time to build and another calendar day for me to tighten up with feedback. I spent probably a grand total of three hours staring at computers in the

furtherance of this project. Would have taken me weeks to build by hand, and more importantly, it wouldn't have been built at all. I wouldn't have bothered. That is the news for now, but go and subscribe to our ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as. Dotter is a dot file manager and templator.

Askenema has been rewritten in Rust and hosting a website on a disposable vape. Get in on the newsletter at changelog. News. Have yourself a great week. Like, subscribe. and five-star review us if you dig the show and I'll talk to you again real soon.