The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Linus Torvalds gets the AI coding bug (News)

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

Linus Torvalds pushes AI generated code, Jordan Fulghum thinks this is the year of self-hosting, FracturedJson formats for compact / human readability, Scott Werner believes a flood of adequate software is coming, and Sean Goedecke explains why generic software design advice is useless.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 12th, 2026. Have you heard? Stack Overflow is dead. Have you heard? Stack Overflow's revenue has doubled since 2022. The culprit on both accounts? Yeah, I don't even have to tell you. You know what it is. With a scant 6,866 questions asked last month, Stack Overflow as we once knew it is now a relic of a bygone age. Oh well, let's get in to this week's news. Linus Torvalds gets the AI coding bug.

Vibe coders rejoiced after Linus Torvalds, the S-tier hacker and infamous Kermudgeon, pushed some Python code to his audio-noise repo written by AI. The commit message, quote, this is Google anti-gravity fixing up my visualization tool, which was also generated with help from Google, but of the normal kind. It mostly went smoothly, although I had to figure out what the problem with using the built-in rectangle select was. After telling anti-gravity to just do a custom rectangle selector, things went much better. Is this much better than I could do by hand? Sure is.

End quote. Okay, who's next? Ken Thompson? 2026 is the year of self-hosting. Here's Jordan Fulgum. Quote, I've wanted to self-host a home for years, but I've always bounced off it. Too much time spent configuring instead of using. It just wasn't fun.

That changed recently because CLI agents like Claude make self-hosting on a cheapo home server dramatically easier and actually fun. This is the first time I would recommend it to Normie slash software literate people who never really wanted to sign up to become a sysadmin, and stress about uptime of core personal services, end quote. This resonates with me. I self-hosted for many years, but grew tired of the regularly scheduled minutia.

Now that I don't have to personally edit every config, schedule system updates, manage security settings, etc., etc., I'm excited about self-hosting again. Could AI agents usher in a golden age for self-hosting? It certainly seems possible. Formatting JSON for compact human readability. Quote, most JSON libraries give you, a choice between two formatting options. Minify JSON is very efficient, but difficult for a person to

read. Most beautified slash indented JSON, on the other hand, is too spread out, often making it difficult to take in quickly or to scan for specific information. End quote. Enter fractured JSON, which provides the middle ground, trying to format data like a person would. The end result is pretty great, especially if reading JSON output is relatively new to you. Eventually, your brain does the translating. You get used to it. I don't even even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. The great flood of adequate software. Here's Scott Werner, quote, someone recently said to me that there was a last time you and your friends played outside as kids and nobody knew it was the last time. That made me realize that

there was also a last time you clicked close on that Winr evaluation notice. One day you just stop seeing it. And the silence where the nag screen used to be feels louder than the nag screen ever was. There's this thing about nostalgia that nobody warns you about. One day you're ignoring Winrars 40-day trial notification for the 4,000th time, and the next day you're actually kind of missing it. End quote. Scott thinks we're about to experience a storm of Thursday afternoon projects being released to the world, not revolutionary, world-changing projects, just adequate ones. You can't design software you don't work on. Here's Sean Godecki with another banger, quote, only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process.

That's because you cannot do good software design without an intimate understanding of the concrete details of the system. In other words, generic software design advice is typically useless for most practical software design problems. Unfortunately, this is the only kind of advice you'll read in software books and blog posts. Blog posts, Sean admits, like the ones he writes on the regular. Quote, in a world where you could rewrite the entire system at will, generic software design advice would be much more practical. Some projects are like this, but the majority of software engineering work is done on systems that cannot be safely rewritten.

These systems cannot rely on software design, but must instead rely on internal consistency and the carefulness of their engineers, end quote. Be careful out there. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the change log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, get in on it at change. Angelog. News. Have yourself a great week, like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you like the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.