The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Why AI coding claims don't add up (News)

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Mike Judge breaks down why he doesn't believe the AI coding claims add up, the folks behind Cactoide create an open source alternative to Meetup / Eventbrite, Ryan Farley tells the story of how RSS beat Microsoft, Dominik Szymański ditched Docker for Podman (and thinks you should too), and Stripe announces a new layer 1 blockchain called Tempo.

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, September 8th, 2025. A shorter-than-usual episode this week and no new pods because Adam and I are flying to California to hang with the Oxy team during their annual internal conference. We hope to have some sweet content for you on the backside of this trip. Fingers crossed, I'll get a chance to shout in their data center. What I'm going to do is not recommended. This is not supported. Do not try this at home.

Okay, let's get into this week's news. Why AI coding claims don't add up. Mike Judge, no, not that Mike Judge, has been coding for 25 plus years. He was an early adopter of AI coding and a fan until a couple months ago. Now he's mad, furious even. Quote, I read the meter study and suddenly got serious doubts. In that study, the authors discovered that developers were unreliable narrators of their own productivity. They thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower.

This shocked me because I had just told someone the week before that I thought AI was only making me about 25% faster, and I was bummed. It wasn't a higher number. I was only off by 5% from the developer's own incorrect estimates, end quote. That study left him unsettled, so he put himself to the test. For six weeks, he tested his own productivity with and without AI. What he found was really disappointing. Quote, I discovered that the data isn't statistically significant at any meaningful level,

that I would need to record new data points for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. I can say definitively that I'm not seeing any massive increase in speed, as in 2x, using AI coding tools, end quote. That got Mike thinking, is he the only one, or are we all delusional? To answer that, he asked a simple question. Quote, if so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software as a service apps, we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution.

We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. End quote. That question sent him further down the rabbit hole. Click through for receipts. Cactoid wants to be the ultimate RSVP platform. I've been prompting the open source community to kill meetup for years. It looks like the folks behind Cactoid are taking a crack at it. Quote, quote, like the Cactoid, like the Cactoid. practice, great events bloom under any condition when managed with care. Cactoid helps you streamline RSVPs, simplify coordination, and keep every detail efficient, so your gatherings are resilient, vibrant, and unforgettable, end quote. They've started off simply, which is great, you can create an event in seconds,

get a unique URL to share, and people can use that link to RSVP to the event. No accounts, no waiting. Is that too simple? Perhaps yes. especially if it gets popular, which always brings abuse. But for now, it's refreshing. Go ahead, create an event, and share it with friends. The story of how RSS beat Microsoft.

Here's Ryan Farley, writing for button down. Quote, not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS's competing standard. Adam versus RSS 2.0, that they barely registered the rise and fall of the information and content exchange, ICE specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names. I had never even heard of the ICE specification, which predated RSS by almost exactly a year, and was philosophically almost a complete opposite approach.

Thankfully, simple and open, beat out, complex, and closed. Eventually, Google killed RSS by shuttering Google Reader, but that's not the whole story either. Quote, all RSS had to do to weather ice, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next was keep things simple and let users build their own feeds, filters, lists, and aggregators. Like email, it probably won't make anyone a billion dollars or reshape entire industries, but it will always be wholly yours. And if that isn't nice, I don't know what it is. It's now time for sponsored news. Use Augment C-L-I for automated code review.

What if you could run a full code review from the command line? No pull request, no waiting. Just a well-done code review by a senior level engineer with full context of all the changes. That's exactly what Augment C-L-I makes possible. It hooks straight into your repo and runs the same deep reasoning you'd expect from a reviewer, but instantly and on demand. Why does this matter?

Code review isn't just about catching bugs. It's about catching bugs and security concerns early. The CLI shifts review left, letting you see what Augie thinks before you ever open a PR. That means faster feedback loops, fewer back-and-forth comments, and a smoother handoff to your team. It's a provocative idea.

What if automated review at the CLI became as routine as calling Git Status? Learn more at Augmentcoe.com. the link to the blog post is in our companion newsletter. Ditching Docker for Podman. Dominic Sizamansky is old enough to remember when Vagrant looked like a promised land where every development environment would look the same. Then came Docker.

Quote, Docker wasn't just a tool. It fundamentally changed how we thought about application development and deployment. Having a repeatable, separated environment from your local system was refreshing and looked like a superpower. End quote. After many years of Docker use, Dominic's thoughts on Docker began the change. Quote, along the way, the quiet Docker Damon running in the background felt less like a

comfortable constant and more like a ticking bomb, end quote. The long-running Damon, Dominic believes, is Docker's security downfall, so he went looking for alternatives, enter Podman. Quote, beyond the obvious Damon advantages, Podman brings some genuinely clever features that make day-to-day container work more pleasant, such as. system D integration that doesn't suck. Kubernetes alignment, that's not just marketing. And the Unix philosophy, done right, end quote.

If that's enough to get your attention, I have good news. Dominic says switching from Docker to Podman was almost seamless. Stripe announces a new Layer 1 blockchain. Developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s, Tempo is a new payments-focused blockchain that supports all major stable coins. But why? Quote, stable coins enable instant, borderless, programmable transactions, but current blockchain infrastructure isn't designed for them. Existing systems are either fully general or trading

focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real-world payments, end quote. Tempo will be EVM compatible, but it isn't meant to displace other general-purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, etc. Because it's entirely focused on high-volume payment use cases. That being said, high volume payment use cases that route around the banks and credit card companies stranglehold on transfer fees are, so far at least, the killer app of general purpose blockchains. We'll have to wait and see how this plays out. Tempo has been announced, but it's not yet public. There is an invite-only test net at the moment, and it will be validated by a diverse group of independent entities at launch. In other words, it'll only be as decentralized as

Stripe wants it to be before they transition to a permissionless model. That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on, such as Cloudflare's AI Insights, spec kit by GitHub, and package managers are evil. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.com. Have a great week, like, subscribe, and five-star review us if you dig the show. and I'll talk to you again real soon.