The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Our interfaces have lost their senses (News)

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Amelia Wattenberger bemoans the computer's great flattening, the Learnk8s team lets you manage your cluster from a spreadsheet, Jan Swist gets a surprising response from Cursor, the French and German governments team up for an open source Notion alternative & XPipe lets you access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, March 17th, 2025. The big news from last week was TypeScript's compiler Go Rewrite, but it happened so early in the week and made such a big splash that it feels silly covering it here. Adam and I did do a quick reaction video about it, which may be a new thing we do regularly. Speaking of new things, I am trying something entirely different for news on YouTube. I'm taking you with me.

IRL. Each week it'll be something new. Trimming an apple tree. Hiking to a waterfall. Playing pickleball. Stuff like that. Give one a watch. And let me know what you think.

Okay, let's get into the news. Our interfaces have lost their senses. When linking you to an article, I often use descriptors like thorough, insightful, or poignant. However, this piece by Amelia Wattenberger deserves an entirely different set of adjectives. Her central premise is the following. Quote, all day we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we're more than just eyes and a pointer finger.

We think with our hands, our ears, our bodies. The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something richer? Something that moves with us, speaks our language, and molds to our bodies?" Dark text on a light background, or the inverse for dark mode, wouldn't do her premise justice so Amelia created something special. Something that I'll describe as colorful, tactile and yes, poignant.

Check it out. A spreadsheet to control your Kubernetes cluster. The pitch for XLS Cube Cuttle, which is a terrible name, is amazing. Here it is. You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses.

Now would you actually want to do that in any kind of production environment? Probably not. But this is a fun project and it brought forth two thoughts that I'd like to pass on. One, Kubernetes exposes a robust API that makes it far more useful and malleable than it would be otherwise. And two, people absolutely love spreadsheets. I'm using the word love here, and I mean it. Love, spreadsheets, they really do.

Cursor told me I should learn to code. It was an ordinary day of vibe coding for Jan Swiss until he hit a roadblock. Cursor refused to go through 750 to 800 lines of code for him, so he asked it why. The response was... concerning. Quote, I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fate effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This

ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly. The reason it gave for the refusal? Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities." I'm not going to lie, I kind of agree with cursor on this one. It turns out there's a good explanation why this happened. No, Jan is not patient zero in the robot uprising. I just found the whole situation hilarious and I figured you might too. It's now time for sponsored news.

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Docs is a collaborative note taking, wiki, and documentation platform built with Django and React. As a result of a joint effort from the French and German governments, it is MIT licensed with the following note in the readme. Quote, while Docs is a public driven initiative, our license choice is an invitation for private sector actors to use, sell,

and contribute to the project. End quote. Very cool initiative, but is it any good? I signed into the demo and clicked the tires for a few minutes. It seems legit and it's self-hostable too. Link to that demo and the credentials are in the newsletter. Access your entire server infra from your desktop. X-pipe is a new type of shell connection hub and remote file manager that allows you to

access your entire server infrastructure from your local machine. It works on top of your installed command line programs and does not require any setup on your remote systems. So if you normally use CLI tools like SSH, Docker, CubeCuddle, etc. to connect to your servers, you can just use XPype on top of that." If you connect to a lot of remote machines often, this looks like an excellent way to organize the chaos. Its cross-platform has complete SSH support and full-on file system management

with lots of bells and whistles. That is the news for now, but also scan that companion newsletter for even more links worth clicking on, such as a collection of MCP reference implementations, launching Rdap, sunsetting Whois, and the good times in tech are over. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com slash news. Last week on the pod, Adam went solo with BeyondLu from Sourcegraph and talked frontend

with his old friend John Long. Coming up this week, I go solo with Ilya Grigorik from Shopify and Justin Searles is back on Friday with another breaking change. Have a great week, leave us a 5 star review if you dig our work and I'll talk to you again real soon.