The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Next.js is infuriating (News)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Dominik Meca is infuriated by Next.js, Josh Bressers explains why open source is just one person, Huon Wilson describes the usefulness of "Copy as cURL", Herman Martinus re-licenses Bear, and Nawaz Dhandala unpacks why dependency bloat is such a pervasive problem.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is change log news for the week of Monday, September 1st, 2025, but recorded on Tuesday because Labor Day. If you need an uplifting story that displays the human spirit, triumphing over tyranny, look no further than your local Taco Bell drive-thru. My favorite fast food chain has been forced to rethink their AI ordering system after one heroic patron crashed it by ordering 18,000 waters. Now that's what I call high-quality H2O. Okay, let's get in to this week's news.

NextJS is infuriating. Dominic Mecca finally decided to write a blog post because anger is the best motivator and he's angry at NextJS. Quote, the Next.js devs have a vision, and it's either their way or the highway. Note that if it was just the middleware, I wouldn't be sitting here, wasting away my weekend, ranting about a React framework, believe it or not, I've got better things to do. It's constant pain you encounter daily when working with NextJS, end quote. After ranting some more, Dominic points to the issue tracker and calls it a dumpster fire,

which I looked at it too, and have a hard time to screen with him. Hacker News commenters had a field day with this post. Top comments, there were over 400 as I read this, vehemently agree with him. I'd summarize the core complaint as too many layers of abstraction with a sprinkle of not enough extensibility and a dash of Versel-based feature roadmap. Open source is one person. Josh Bressers was offended by the Register's recent story titled Putin on the Code. DoD reportedly relies on utility by a Russian dev.

Quote, if you're not real smart, it seems like. pointing out that an open source project is written by one person in a country you don't like is a bad thing. It could be, but it also could be that the software running the whole effing planet is written by one person in a country, but we have no idea which country. It's not the same person, mind you, but it is one person, end quote. Josh goes on to point out with receipts that almost all open source is literally one person. Quote, a project exists called ecosystems that catalogs a lot of open source. Most of it, I would guess, but not all. They currently have 11.8 million open source projects in their database. So what do we mean by one person is open source?

What I mean is, if we look at the projects that ecosystems is tracking, how many have a single person maintaining that project? It's about 7 million projects, end quote. He also looks at NPM package downloads and found that of the projects with over 1 million downloads this month, which is a proxy for usefulness, about 6,000 of them have solo maintainers, while 6,800 of them have more than one maintainer. That's almost half. Why Copy as Curl is so useful?

In the linked article, Juan Wilson does an excellent job describing the usefulness of web browser dev tools as copy as curl functionality, and how best to work with its output to get stuff done. Quote, copy as curl gives bulky curl CLY invocation that captures almost exactly what the browser sent to the server, explicitly including all headers, authentication information, and any request data in a directly executable way. Being executable means it can be used to easily replay the request as the browser

sent it. End quote. Juan says this is great for unambiguous communication with other people and easily editing and running debugging loops because it's executable and easily modified in a shell script. There are, of course, downsides to using this technique pervasively, such as accidentally sharing secrets in paced output and verbosity, because the output can sometimes be quite large. It's now time for sponsored news. Bring your own agent to Zed. You shouldn't have to settle for subpar editing environments in order to use the AI agent of your choice. Zed is a high-performance open-source code editor built for flow, collaboration, and speed. and they just launched the agent-client protocol, ACP,

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and thanks to our friends at Zed for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Bear is now source available. Bear, a privacy first, no-nonsense, super fast blogging platform, was MIT licensed until yesterday. Herman Martinus, Bear's creator, explains why he decided to change it. Quote, unfortunately over the years, there have been cases of people. forking the project in the attempt to set up a competing service. And it hurts. It hurts to see something you've worked so hard on for so long, get copied and distributed with only a few hours of modification. It hurts to have poured so much love into a piece of software to see it turned against you and threaten your livelihood. It hurts to believe in open source, and then

be bitten by it. End quote. He decided to adopt the elastic license, which is almost identical to the MIT, but with the stipulation that the software cannot be provided as a hosted or managed service. Herman cites six other projects that have made a similar change in the past few years and concludes this, quote, we're entering a new age of AI-powered coding, we're creating a competing product only involves typing, create a fork of this repo, and change its name to something cool, and deploy it to an EC2 instance. While Bayer's code is good, what makes the platform special is the people who use it and the commitment to longevity. I will ensure the platform is taken care of,

even if it means backtracking on what people can do with the code itself. The hidden costs of dependency bloat. Noaz, Dandala, unpacks why dependency bloat is such a pervasive problem. Quote, dependency bloat has become the silent productivity drag on software projects. It's not just about the size of your node modules folder or the length of your requirements.com. It's about the hidden costs that compound over time.

making your code base harder to maintain, your applications less secure, and your development process slower and more frustrating. End quote. I like some of his advice on how to prevent dependency bloat in the first place. One, question every addition. Two, regular dependency audits. Three, embrace minimalism. Four, monitor your attack surface. And five, foster a culture of ownership. These steps, of course, can be taken too far. The inn. to dependency hell's Yang is not invented here syndrome. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the change log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as a new kind of Ruby Management Tool, Vim Master, and Martin Fowler on LLMs and Software Dev.

Get in on the newsletter at changelog. News. We have some great episodes coming up this week. On Wednesday, Jim Meznik from Exo Ruby tells us how he's organizing six conferences this fall. And on Friday, Christian Roka from Charm is with us talking C-LIs, Tuis, and your new coding bestie. Have yourself a great week. Like, subscribe, and leave us a five-star review if you dig the show. And I'll talk to you again real soon.