The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The move faster manifesto (News)

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Brian Guthrie lists his seven rules for moving faster in software, Continuous-Claude-v2 is a context management system for Claude Code, Gas Town is Steve Yegge's multi-agent orchestrator for Claude Code, Paul Dix sees a great engineering divergence in 2026, and Mattias Geniar thinks web development is fun again.

What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, January 5th, 2026. Well, that was a nice break. Two weeks away and I didn't write a lick of code. Who writes code anymore, honestly? I did take time to have CodCode refresh the old blog and logged all your awesome book recommendations for everyone to peruse, there's more than 30 to pick from. Okay, let's get in to this week's news.

The Move Faster Manifesto. Brian Guthrie has worked in the software industry for over 20 years at organizations big and small. He's been a consultant, a line engineer, a director, a founder, and a CTO. Brian frequently gets asked, how to move faster in software. He says it's easier to describe than it is to do, which many things are, and then goes on to provide his rules for moving fast they are one it is possible to move fast and fast matters two fast is measured by what other people see three you can be both fast and good four it is everyone's responsibility to move fast five moving fast takes courage six busy is not fast and seven change fast or die each of those seven rules are detailed in his linked post A context management system for ClaudeCode. The problem.

When Claude Code runs low on context, it compacts or summarizes the conversation. Each compaction is lossy. After several, you're working from a summary of a summary of a summary. Signal degrades into noise. The solution, clear, don't compact, save state to a ledger, wipe context, resume fresh. And an implementation of that solution written in Python is linked up in the newsletter. A multi-agent orchestrator for Claude Steve Yeggie's Gastown project has similar goals to the previous one

but approaches the problem the way Steve often does by turning it up to 11. Here's what life looks like without Gastown. Agents forget work after restart. Manual coordination is required. Four to ten agents is chaotic. And the work state is in agent memory. But with Gastown looks like this.

Work persists on hooks, survives crashes, compaction and restarts. Agents have mailboxes, identities, and structured handoffs. You can comfortably scale to 20 or 30 agents. And work state is in beads, which is a get-backed ledger. I have no idea how this plays out in practice, but comfortably scale to 20 to 30 agents is a check I'd love to see somebody try to cash. My favorite idea of Steve's here is that once you have Gastown all set up,

you talk to the mayor, and they create convoys, dispatch workers, and coordinate everything. Who runs Gastown? You know who? Say. Master Blaster. It's now time for sponsored news. 100 million builds, 968 years saved. Depot just published their 2025 recap and the numbers are staggering.

They accelerated over 100 million builds last year, saving engineering teams about 8.5 million hours of build time. That's 968 years reclaimed for actual. development work. What's impressive is they maintain performance to scale. Despite an 8x increase in build volume, average build times actually improved from three minutes and 11 seconds down to exactly three minutes. At peak, they're handling over 2,000 builds per minute. The team shared some hard-won insights too. External dependencies like Docker Hub and GitHub remain challenging. Webhook delivery isn't guaranteed, and third-party reliability varies. Their response? Better observability

tools, usage dashboards, and GitHub actions analytics to give teams visibility into what's actually happening. Looking ahead, they're building a custom build engine, enhance GitHub actions runners with improved caching, and stronger reliability protections against upstream outages. They also noted something we're all feeling. AI coding tools are shifting the bottleneck from writing code to getting it integrated and deployed. Read the full recap at depot.dev or by following the link in this week's ChangeLog Newsletter. And thanks to Depot for sponsoring. news. 2026, the Great Engineering Divergence.

Here is Influx DBCTO, Paul Dix. Quote, once coding speed jumps, everything around it becomes the constraint. Your throughput gets capped by whatever is slowest, clarifying requirements, reviewing changes, validating correctness and performance, getting to production safely, and operating what you shipped. In 2026, the Great Engineering Divergence will be determined by who raises that ceiling end-to-end. end quote. If Paul is right, the most effective software teams at the end of 26 will be wildly more productive than even the most effective software teams from the beginning of 25. How does the world change in that new reality? Paul has some ideas and some advice on how to think about software development in 2006. Web development is fun again. Matias Genniar looks back longingly at the simpler days of web dev and then rejoices that AI has entered the chat because it levels the playing field for him by making the complexity. of each domain matter a lot less.

Quote, there's mental space for creativity in building software again. My head isn't constantly full of build pipelines, testability concerns, code patterns, unfixed bugs. I'm confident I can cover that with help from AI. It still needs to be done, but it's done so much faster and it no longer feels overwhelming.

That leaves room to experiment with UI and UX to try ideas and throw them away. To add small quality of life improvements I couldn't justify before because there was always something more urgent. It's also not the typing of code that I really enjoy, nor is it the syntax or structure or boilerplate that's required to build anything. It's the fact that you get to build something out of nothing. Writing code was just how you got there, and with today's tooling, that saves a ton of time.

AI really has made web development fun again, end quote. This certainly isn't everyone's experience, but I'm hearing it from more and more developers every week. That is the news for now, but go and subscribe to the changelog newsletter for the full scoop of links, worth clicking on such as Mole deep cleans and optimizes your Mac E-H-TML is extended HTML for real apps and software taketh away

faster than hardware giveth. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. We have some great episodes coming up on Wednesday. Sid Zabrandage joins us to share his cancer journey and his work after GitLab. And on Friday, the one and only Matt Ryer is on ChangeLog and Friends

doing what only Matt can do. Have a great week, like, subscribe, and five-star review of the show, if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again. Real soon.