Today we start with some Changelog News News. This is my final issue. Starting next week, my good friend Adam Stacoviak will be taking care of you...

Changelog NewsDeveloper news with a plot twist

Jerod again! 👋

Today we have Changelog News News. This is my final issue. Starting next week, my good friend Adam Stacoviak will be taking care of you.

After 13 years, 1042 podcasts, 452 newsletters, and countless friends made along the way
 it’s time for a change. I’ll write more about this decision (and the future) on my blog, and we’ll discuss it on Friday’s Friends (also my last).

Until then, thanks for loggin’ with me and please do not unsubscribe. I’m sure Adam’s version of Changelog News will be great.

Ok, let’s get into this week’s software news.

🎧 Selling SDKs in the era of many Claudes

Steve Ruiz joins us for a deep-dive on tldraw (a very good free whiteboard) and the business he’s built selling SDKs that help others build whiteboards (and more) with tldraw’s high-performance web canvas. đŸŽ„ VIDEO HERE 👀

Art for the episode: Smiling faces. Title text. That kind of stuff.

🩄 The mythical agent-month

Wes McKinney has been wondering what many of us have been wondering:

Among my inner circle of engineering and data science friends, there is a lot of discussion about how long our competitive edge as humans will last. Will having good ideas (and lots of them) still matter as the agents begin having better ideas themselves?

For now, Wes feels needed, but with things changing so rapidly he wonders how much software engineering’s past will inform software engineering’s future. With that in mind, he decided to revisit one of his (and my) favorite books on the topic: Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month. In so doing, he discovered that the book’s themes are still highly relevant in agentic software and that its follow-up, No Silver Bullet, predicts the exact problem Wes is experiencing in his agentic engineering.

the accidental complexity is no problem at all anymore, but what’s left is the essential complexity which was always the hard part. Agents can’t reliably tell the difference.

Thought provoking stuff


đŸ‘č Employ a Peon today

I clicked “copy to clipboard” on the brew install command approximately 0.3 seconds after landing on this website. What could possibly be so compelling?!

Game character voice lines the instant your AI agent finishes or needs permission. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Kiro, Windsurf, Antigravity, and more. Never lose flow to a silent terminal again.

With 95+ sound packs and counting, there’s a game character voice in here for everyone. I sampled a bunch, but I’m sticking with the default Warcraft III Orc peon for now. Give it a try! There’s a zero percent chance this won’t bring some joy to your work/life.

🩀 Ladybird adopts Rust

One popular segment of our Ladybird pod with Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath was when Andreas told us they were leaning towards Swift as their C++ replacement. Well, well, well. How the turntables


We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story


When we originally evaluated Rust back in 2024, we rejected it because it’s not great at C++ style OOP. The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust’s ownership model is not a natural fit for that.

But after another year of treading water, it’s time to make the pragmatic choice. Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need. Both Firefox and Chromium have already begun introducing Rust into their codebases, and we think it’s the right choice for Ladybird too.

💰 What spec-driven development gets wrongThanks to Augment Code for sponsoring Changelog News

Spec-driven development has a decay problem. Design docs go stale soon after they’re written, and nobody gets rewarded for keeping them current. That was annoying before and now it’s getting dangerous. AI agents are following stale specs confidently, executing plans misaligned with assumed reality without ever flagging the drift.

Here’s what Amelia Wattenberger, Product Lead for Intent from Augment Code says in this post:

Every documentation-first initiative in software has failed for the same reason: it asked developers to do continuous maintenance work that nobody sees and nobody rewards.

Augment’s answer is bidirectional spec maintenance. Agents don’t just read the spec, they write back to it. What happens when an agent discovers an existing auth context? It wires into that and updates the plan. If agents can write code, they can update the spec. This only works when the agent actually understands your entire codebase. That’s exactly what Augment’s Context Engine is built to do. It opens the door for specs that get more accurate over time, not less.

Learn more at augmentcode.com.

đŸŒ„ïž Cloudflare’s new Code Mode technique

MCP is (for now) the standard way AI agents use external tools, but it sure does fill up the model’s context window with a lot of cruft. To combat this, Cloudflare came up with Code Mode:

Code Mode is a technique we first introduced for reducing context window usage during agent tool use. Instead of describing every operation as a separate tool, let the model write code against a typed SDK and execute the code safely in a Dynamic Worker Loader. The code acts as a compact plan. The model can explore tool operations, compose multiple calls, and return just the data it needs.

As a result of this, Cloudflare created a new MCP server for their entire API:

With just two tools, search() and execute(), the server is able to provide access to the entire Cloudflare API over MCP, while consuming only around 1,000 tokens. The footprint stays fixed, no matter how many API endpoints exist.

This is an example of what I’ve been talking about a lot recently: the models are getting marginally better while the traditional software engineering around the models squeezes out huge wins by equipping the models better and better.

🏰 The only moat left is money

Elliot Bonneville:

Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks.

This is not new. What’s new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast


Creation used to be the scarce thing, the filter. Now attention is. Most of us are on the wrong side of that trade.

Elliot says the effort it takes to build something is trending down. The time we collectively have on this Earth is fixed. In a world where attention is at a premium and slop abounds, attracting attention to your creation means you better have a head start, or a lot of money, or both.

The uncomfortable version: if you’re not already moving, you might never take off.

The cost of acting like this is true when it isn’t: you move fast and spend money you didn’t need to spend.

The cost of acting like it isn’t true when it is: permanent.

Elliot’s take is more doomer-y than I believe is warranted today, but I can’t blame him. He shipped something new last week and he’s trying to attract attention to it


đŸȘ A truly universal online file converter

Many online file conversion tools are boring and insecure. They only allow conversion between two formats in the same medium (images to images, videos to videos, etc.), and they require that you upload your files to some server.

This is not just terrible for privacy, it’s also incredibly lame. What if you really need to convert an AVI video to a PDF document? Try to find an online tool for that, I dare you.

Convert.to.it aims to be a tool that “just works”. You’re almost guaranteed to get an output - perhaps not always the one you expected, but it’ll try its best to not leave you hanging.

🏠 Track your house from the terminal

A terminal UI for tracking everything about your home. Single SQLite file. No cloud. No account. No subscriptions.

Micasa’s projects tab on display in a terminal

☎ Use protocols, not services

Every time we choose a service over a protocol, we opt into a system where a single company can be compelled to identify us, restrict us, or hand over our data, to their profit or out government’s advantage.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now, but I’d like to take a moment to sincerely thank each and every one of you for reading, listening, submitting links, commenting, and supporting my work all these years. It’s been something special.

Have yourself a great week,
stay connected with me if you dug it,
and I’ll talk to you again some day. 💚

–Jerod