The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The code, prose & pods that shaped 2025 (News)

Episode Date: December 15, 2025

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I’ve reviewed the 49 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

What's up nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, December 15th, 2025. Can you believe this is already our final news episode of the year? Thanks for listening and reading along in 2025. Just like the prior two years finale, this episode diverges from our traditional fair. I reviewed the 49 previous editions and picked, in my humble opinion, the coolest code, the best pros, and my favorite episode of the show from each month. Enjoy. In January, big AI data center investments are big. People see Spotify's ghost artists

and deep seek R1, shocks and Oz. The coolest code is printer cow, which transforms any USB thermal printer into a networked, HTTP-powered, API endpoint, so any service can send print jobs to it. If that's not cool, I don't know what is. Best prose goes to, It's Time to Bring Back Personal Computing. Benj Edwards deftly describes how surveillance

capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past. I didn't know it at the time, but this article started a theme of coverage for us that continues to this day. my favorite episode in January, from open source to acquired with Ashley Jeff's. I almost picked Alicia White on the world of embedded systems, but hearing Ashley Jeff's journey building and selling benthos to Red Panda was just too much fun. That guy's a character.

Next up, February. The Deep Seek freakout subsides. The JavaScript trademark war heats up, and Microsoft does topo conductors. Coolest code goes to touch grass. Reese Kentish wanted to change the habit of reaching for his phone in the morning. and doom scrolling away for an hour, so he built an app to help him do just that. I didn't install it, but the fact that he made it, I respect that. Best Pros AI is stifling tech adoption. Another trend this year was AI agents choosing tools on our behalf, which Declan Chidlow called,

early on. Quote, the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs and system prompt influence. And my favorite episode, discovering discovery coding. Fire up a repel, grab your favorite Stephen King novel, and hold on to the seat of your pants. Jimmy Miller returns to reveal why, at least for some of us, discovery coding is where it's at. In March, vibe coding is the buzzword de jure. Everyone is talking about MCP, and TypeScript goes go. Coolest code, X-Pipe. If you connect to a lot of remote machines often, X-Pipe 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. Best pros? Our interfaces have lost their senses. Amelia Wattenberger didn't merely write an absolute banger with this one. She created a work of art. 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? End quote. And my favorite pod, Antirez returns to Redis. Any day you get to sit down and pick the brain of Redis creator Salvatore San Felipe. It's a very good

day indeed. Here comes April. Hackers weaponize coding agents. Google's A-to-A rivals MCP. And change log beats throws an after-party. The coolest code is nerd log, a fast, remote-first, multi-host Tooie Log Viewer with timeline histogram and no central server, loosely inspired by gray log slash Gabana, but without the bloat, pretty much no setup needed either. Best Pros How to Build an Agent, in which Thorsten Ball proves that it's not difficult to build a fully functioning code editing agent by walking us through the process step by step. This post was so good it forced us to have Thorson on the show again. And my favorite pod, hello Matt World. Every episode we make with Matt Ryer gets crazy, but this one where Matt decided we should each get to make up

a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule was over-the-top nuts. Matt is scheduled to return to change logging friends in early January, by the way. That brings us to May. WSL is open source. Zed gets agentic and entry-level jobs get wiped out. The coolest code goes to Internet Artifacts. Neal Agarwal from Neal. Fun has put together a virtual museum of Internet artifacts, including a map of ARPANET, the first spam email, the first smiley, the first MP3, the first online pizza delivery website, which was probably earlier than you're thinking, and much more. The best pros is I'd rather read a prompt. Clayton Ramsey, a PhD student at Rice University, grades other students' assignments, and regularly sees chat GPT copy pasta. So he

wrote this article as a plea to everyone, not just his students, all of us. Quote, don't let a computer write for you. I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into. End quote.

And my favorite pod, Dull, Dirty or Dangerous, in which we sit down with Scott Hanselman at Microsoft Build 2025 to discuss open sourcing all the things, cool stuff Windows can do, where we want and don't want AI to fit into our lives, building arcade cabinets, and so much more. In June, Apple redesigns it all.

Vitesse is coming to Postgres, and Michael Rogers passes away. The coolest code is ClaudeCode usage monitor, a beautiful real-time terminal monitoring tool for Cloud AI token usage with advanced analytics, machine learning-based predictions, and rich UI. Track your token consumption, burn rate, cost analysis, and get intelligent predictions about session limits. The best pros, write to escape your default setting.

Writing is hard, painful even. In the past, I've likened publishing an essay to birthing a child. They're both laborious journeys mired in contractions, heavy breathing, and occasional screams. My wife, who birthed six healthy children on our behalf, finds the analogy lacking, and she deserves to. I'd come up with a better one, but writing is hard. I guess my point is, sometimes we need motivation to do hard things. If you need some reasons to write, this posts for you. And my favorite pod in June, adventures in babysitting,

Coding agents. Steve Yeghi joins us, fresh off a vibe coding bender, so productive, he wrote a book about it. Steve tells us why he believes the IDEE is dead, why babysitting AI agents is more fun than coding, when vibe coding might take over the enterprise, how software devs should approach coding agents and what it all means for society. It's now time for sponsored news. Your LLM is recommending Varchar 255. That's a problem. AI coding assistants are great at scaffolding apps, but they're quietly creating Postgres technical debt, bar chart 255 instead of text, serial instead of Big Int generated always as identity,

missing foreign key indexes, timestamp instead of timestamp TZ. These mistakes pass tests but become expensive problems at scale. Tiger Data's approach to Agentic Postgres tackles this head-on with three key pieces, a CLI, an MCP server, and agent skills. The MCP server lets clog code, cursor, and other AISP, assistance, manage your databases directly. No more contact switching between terminal, browser, and IDE just to check a connection string or run a query.

The real magic is in the agent skills, though. Opinionated guidance modules written by senior engineers that automatically teach your AI best practices for schema design, migrations, and optimization. The killer feature, documentation search. Their MCP server enables semantic search across Postgres versions, 14 through 18, and timescale DB docs, grounding AI decisions in version-specific, expert docs,

rather than training data with outdated cutoffs. No more AI suggesting features that don't exist in your Postgres version. They've also built database forking and zero-copy clones for testing migrations or spitting up staging environments. You only pay for changed blocks, making it practical to fork production for every feature branch. Check out the post at tigurdata.com slash blog or follow the direct link in the newsletter. And thanks to Tiger Data for sponsoring change law.

news. July. Intel is in serious trouble, a human best's open AI's best coding model, and we do a live show in Denver. The coolest code, job worth calculator. Is your job worth the grind? This job worth calculator calculates a job value rating based on a salary, work hours, commute time, environment, and more. The best pros, the game genie generation. Ernie Smith refreshed his 2015 piece about Game Genie in honor of its 35th anniversary. I loved everything about this piece, but I'm also in the core demographic for Game Genie nostalgia, so your mileage may vary.

Quote, July 1990, a full 35 years ago, was supposed to be the coming out party for one of the best accessories ever created for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It made games easier, sure, but it also made them more interesting. It presented a new way of thinking about the games that you brought home.

But Nintendo didn't like it, and the company sued. That device eventually, emerged, and despite the legal battle, it became a defining part of what made the NES great, end quote. And my favorite pod, Try Harder, Ultra Think. Nick Nisi joined us to discuss all the windsurf drama, his new agentic lifestyle, whether or not he's actually more productive, the new paper that says he maybe isn't more productive, the reckoning that he sees coming and why we might be the last generation of Code Monkeys. In August, GitHub says farewell to having a CEO. O'Marchy 2.0 takes off, and Intel gets bailed out by U.S. taxpayers. Coolest code. Overtipe, a rich, markdown editor that's really just a text area. The author calls it an under-engineered solution. I call it a breath of fresh air.

It works by rendering a preview pane behind the text area and keeping the two elements perfectly aligned. Best pros goes to enough, the math in the headlines. Ben Stansell does the math on the gobsmacking amount of money floating around Silicon Valley these days and how everyone does the math to see how much everyone else is worth. Ben concludes, quote, we don't do the math to measure ourselves. We do the math to compare ourselves, end quote. And my favorite pod in August, Kisen. Pipley is live. Garehard calls Kaysen 20, the one where we meet. Rightfully so, it's also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipley live on stage with friends. This was a highlight of the year for me, for sure. Next up September. Ruby drama percolates. Askenema gets rewritten in Rust,

and AI coding claims don't add up. Coolest code, Vimmaster. This in-browser game teaches core Vim motions and editing commands through short, focused levels. Best pros? Just enough automation. I used to try to automate 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. The long-term value equals the value of the task times the number of iterations of the task, minus the effort of automating the task, minus maintenance costs, minus documentation costs, minus mistake costs, plus or minus any long-term effects. And my favorite pod, Inside Oxide. Brian Cantrell and Steve Tuck, the co-founders of Oxide, are on the pod live

to tape from the stage at Oxcon. Adam and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. The best part was this onstage discussion with Brian and Steve. It's October, NPM is under siege. AWS brings the web down with it, and AI writes too many articles. The coolest code is Clodcidion, a pre-configured obsidian vault structure that's designed to work seamlessly with Claude Code as an AI-powered second brain. Obsidian and Claude Code, two great tastes that are even better together. Best pros, the oatmeal's Matthew Inman, says, let's talk about AI art. Quote, when I consume art, it evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral, whatever. When I consume AI art,

it also evokes a feeling. Good, bad, neutral, whatever. Until I find out that it's AI art, then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bored. End quote. I've hemmed and hot about AI art, but I'm starting to think the right approach is to adapt my stance on other AI tools, which is, use AI to help you think, not to think for you, and apply it to the wonderful world of art and creative expression. Use AI to help you make art, not to make art for you. And my favorite pod in October, there will be bleeps. Mike McQuaid and Justin Searles, join me in the wake of the Ruby Gems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money and open source, what sustainability really means for our community, making a career out of open source or not,

and more. In November, the Alive Internet Theory lives. FDE is a growing role, and Cloudflare brings the web down with it. Coolest code, Continuum 93, an emulator of a classic retro computer that never existed before and is designed for retro games programming in native assembly code. Continuum 93 was recently open-sourced, runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, all 64-bit Raspberry Pies, and Steam Deck, and is created by a guy whose handle is Enthusiast Guy. So you know it's good.

The best pros. The overlooked power of URLs. URLs can do so much, but we don't always use them to their full potential. In this article, Akhmad Alfie explains how URLs are even more than UI. They're state containers. Quote, we've built increasingly sophisticated state management libraries like Redux, MobEx, Zustend, recoil, and more. They all have their place, but sometimes the best solution is the one that's been there all along. end quote. And my favorite pod in November, do repeat yourself.

Sean Gedicki joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry-driven development, what is good taste in software engineering, where a gentic coding will take our industry, why, getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News. Lastly, December, Zig moves off GitHub. Warner Vogels predicts the future, and Bunn joins Anthropy. topic. The coolest code stack tower. This is what happens when you take an ex-KCD joke too literally. Quote, I'd seen it dozens of times, but for whatever reason, I looked at it differently

this time. It's not just a joke about fragile infrastructure. It's actually a better way to visualize dependencies. End quote. Best pros? Vanilla CSS is all you need. Rob Zolkos does a deep dive into three apps from 37 signals that eschew modern build tools. Quote, I cracked open the source code for Campfire, Writebook, and Fizzy, and traced the evolution of their CSS architecture. What started as curiosity became genuine surprise. These are not just consistent patterns. They are improving patterns. Each release builds on the last, adopting progressively more modern CSS features while

maintaining the same no-build philosophy, end quote. And my favorite episode, in December, so far, the inner workings of Wikipedia. We hear how Wikipedia actually works from longtime Wikipedian, Bill Buehler. That's the news for this year. I hope you enjoyed the 49 issues slash episodes that we brought to you each Monday. We are always tinkering, and this year was no exception. In 2025, we started a video version, added the developer's dictionary column, and experimented with classifieds.

Please leave a comment and let us know what you like, what you dislike, and what we could do better next year.