The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - What actually makes you senior (News)

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Matheus Lima on what makes senior developers actually senior, Tega Brain created a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, Andrew Kelley moves Zig from GitHub to Codeberg, Matias Heikkilä says there's no free lunch for vibe coding, and your SSD data at rest might be at risk.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News. For the week of Monday, December 1st, 2025, December already? I guess it's time to get ready for our eighth annual state of the log episode. We'd love for you to share your favorite moments, guests, topics, and or episodes from the past year. If your audio is used on the show, we'll hook you up with your very own Breakmaster Cylinder Remix. So please send us a voicemail at changelog.fm slash SOTL. That stands for a state of the log.

Once again, that's changelog.fm slash SOTL. Link in the newsletter. Okay, let's get in to this week's news. What actually makes you senior? Here's Matthias Lima. Quote, people love to describe senior engineers with a big checklist. architecture, communication, ownership, leadership, etc. But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there's one

core skill that separates senior plus engineers from everyone else, reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that, end quote. One of the reasons that senior engineers are worth their salaries is that they ask great questions. Questions like, what problem are we actually trying to solve? Who's the user here? and what's painful for them? What are we assuming that might be wrong?

And what happens if we're wrong and ship this anyway? Boil these kinds of questions down and they're all about reducing ambiguity, creating clarity, and then, and only then, solving the problem. So, are you a senior engineer? Mateus provide this litmus test. Quote, what happens when someone hands you something abstract slash fuzzy slash complex? Do you wait for someone else to clarify it for you? Do you start coding immediately?

and hope for the best? Or do you spend some time up front, making it concrete enough that you and your team can actually execute with confidence? Slop Evader. Tega Brain created a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome

for avoiding AI Slop. It's a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release in November of 2022. Tega says, since the public release of ChatGPT and other large language models,

the internet is being increasingly polluted by AI-generated text, images, and video. This browser extension uses the Google Search API to only return content published before November 30th, 2022, so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand, end quote. Is this a long-term, sustainable approach to avoiding AI slop? Absolutely not. Will it become an interesting cultural artifact showing humanity's last ditch effort to keep their beloved internet alive? Maybe. moves off GitHub.

Zig, creator Andrew Kelly, explains why he's taking his programming language and going home, I mean going to Codeberg. Quote, it's abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub's success is no longer driving it. Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with some kind of bloated. Buggy, JavaScript framework in the name of progress. Stuff that used to be snappy is now sluggish and often entirely broken. Most importantly, actions has inescusable bugs, while

being completely neglected. End quote. Andrew says he looks forward to fewer violations of Ziggs' strict no-L-L-LM-S slash AI policy, which he believes is at least partially due to GitHub's aggressive pushing of co-pilot to help you file issues. GitHub sponsors, on the other hand, might be a big loss for Zig's sustainability efforts. Quote, this product was key to Zig's early fundraising success, and it remains a large portion of our revenue today. I can't thank Devin Zougal enough. She appeared like an angel from heaven and single-handedly made GitHub into a viable source of income for thousands of developers. Under her leadership, the future of GitHub sponsors looked bright, but sadly for us, she too moved on to bigger and better things. Since she left, that product as well has been neglected

and has already starting to decline, end quote. Andrew asks that all current GitHub sponsors supporters consider moving their donations to every.org. It's now time for sponsor news. Stop donating your afternoons to CI. Think about how much of your day is spent waiting on CI. Push code, wait, open a PR, wait, merge to Maine, wait some more. Those minutes add up to hours every week, and these are hours you could spend actually building things. GitHub hosted runners are convenient, sure, but they're not optimized for speed. Every commit triggers a full rebuild.

Caching is hit or miss, and you're billed by the minute while you wait. Not cool. Namespace attacks this problem head on. Their runners are designed for speed, with intelligent caching that remembers what you've already built, parallel execution that doesn't serialize unnecessarily, and infrastructure tuned, specifically for CI workloads. The switch is dead simple, point your GitHub actions at namespace runners, and you're done. Teams, using namespace, report builds finishing seven times faster on average. That's not a marginal improvement, that's getting a full hour back every day. And because their pricing model is built for high-volume teams, you'll likely spend.

less too. Stop donating your afternoon to CI. Head to namespace.s.o and reclaim your time. Once again, that's namespace.com. No free lunch in vibe coding. Matias, Hakela, share some deep thoughts on the question that we're all trying to answer these days. Can vibe coding get us there? Quote, in theory, you can produce software with a single prompt, yes, but at what point does a prompt become complex enough to qualify as a project on its own right? Does the whole scheme, merely transform programming complexity into prompt engineering complexity? The way I see it is that LLMs are another step in the saga of machine-human interaction. It may even be a revolutionary step, something akin to the introduction of the graphical user interface.

This development, however, is orthogonal to complexity. Complexity is not a matter of implementation, but an inherent mathematical property of the whole engagement." Complexity, it turns out, is where the rubber meets the proverbial road. It can be managed, but not altogether removed. And you know what's good for managing complex systems? Humans wielding programming languages. Quote, serious programming languages are not obfuscations.

They are not intimidating or difficult on purpose. It's quite the opposite. These are best efforts at making an extremely complex thing as simple as possible. And however you tackle this, the same complexity will be present in one form or another and has to be managed in one way or another. Your SSD data isn't a single. as permanent as you think. Today I learned our SSD data at rest is data at risk.

Quote, unlike hard drives that magnetize spinning disks to store data, SSDs modify the electrical charge in NAND flash cells to represent zero and one. NAND flash retains data in underlying transistors even when the power is removed, similar to other forms of non-volatile memory. However, the duration for which your SSD can retain data without power is the key here. Most consumer SSDs use only TLC or QLC NAND, so users who leave their SSDs unpowered for over a year are risking the integrity of their data, end quote. In practice, this is a non-issue as long as you boot up your machine every once in a while. Also, it's not a big deal because you have a robust and recently tested backup system, right?

Right. ChangeLog News Classifieds Our new Classified section is a great opportunity to share your startup, passion project, opinion, big idea, upcoming event, or whatever, with your fellow 25,000 readers and 30,000 listeners. Feedback, welcome. Here's this week's classifieds. Augment Codes Augie now works in Z, Neovim, and Emacs, thanks to agent-client-client protocol. Learn more at augmentcode.com.

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