Astral is joining OpenAI, which says a lot about where the center of gravity is moving for developer tools, LiteLLM got hit by a nasty supply-chain attack, and OpenCode blew up as the latest serious open source swing at the coding-agent stack. We’ve also got Rust doing a very public reality check on its own pain points, WorkOS pushing AuthKit into CLI auth, Ryan Lizza using AI to build an open source TurboTax alternative, and a fresh httpx fork that turns open source maintenance drama into a real dependency story. If nothing else, this week was a good reminder that tools, trust, and control all move together.

Adam talks with Tailscale co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer David Carney about where Tailscale is headed next: TSIDP, TSNet, multiple tailnets, and Aperture. They get into clickless auth (via TSIDP), TSNet apps, multiple tailnets for isolation and control, and Aperture, Tailscale’s private AI gateway for API key management, observability, and agent security.

This week’s been wild — Iran bombed AWS data centers to take down Claude, OpenAI dropped GPT-5.4 (and it’s seriously good for coding), and living brain cells are literally playing DOOM. We’ve also got a heartfelt take on what it feels like to be a 10x engineer in the age of AI, plus some cool new tools like Handy for speech-to-text and web haptics. Oh, and new MacBook Pros with M5 Pro and M5 Max are up for pre-order. Try not to impulse buy (or do).

Adam and Jerod get into the news, Jerod officially retires from the pod (and Changelog), plus a bonus for our Changelog++ subs!

Burke Holland works on GitHub Copilot by day and codes with his AI agents always. Early January, Burke posted about how Opus 4.5 changed everything. We were all still buzzing from the holiday-season 2x usage bump Claude gave us, and Opus 4.5 felt like a genuine step function in capability. Burke and I get into all the details. Opus 4.5 may have started the fire, but GPT-5.3 Codex is certainly living up to the hype.

Wes McKinney on the mythical agent-month, install Peon Ping to employ a Peon today, Andreas Kling explains why Ladybird is adopting Rust, Cloudflare has a new MCP server that’s quite efficient, and Elliot Bonneville thinks the only moat left is money.

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 very good whiteboards (and more) with tldraw’s high-performance web canvas.

Along the way, we discuss the excitement/fear we share about keeping our agents busy, how SDK and infra companies are affected differently by agentic software than SaaS companies, how Steve is approaching the coming era of internal tooling, what will happen when we equip LLMs with an infinite canvas, and more.

Peter Steinberger joins OpenAI, ZeroClaw is “claw done right”, MimiClaw runs on a $5 chip, Steve Yegge on managing the AI Vampire, and the day the telnet died.

Our ol’ friend, Brett Cannon, is back to talk all things Python. But first! Star Wars, Machete Order, Lost, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, Murderbot, Ted Lasso, Project Hail Mary, David Attenborough, perpetual voice rights, and the AI uncanny valley.

Paul Dix joins us to discuss the InfluxDB co-founder’s journey adapting to an agentic world. Paul sent his AI coding agents on various real-world side quests and shares all his findings: what’s going to prod, what’s not, and why he’s (at least for a bit) back to coding by hand.

Update: He’s back to letting the AIs write code, but with a lot more oversight. For now…

Mitchell Hashimoto’s trust management system for open source, Nicholas Carlini has a team of Claudes build a C compiler, Stephan Schwab recounts the history of attempted developer replacement, NanClaw is an alternative to OpenClaw, and Sophie Koonin can’t wrap her head around so many people going so hard on LLM-generated code.

Amal Hussein returns to tell us all about her new role at Istari, what life is like outside the web browser, how she’s helping ambitious orgs in aerospace, what the SDLC looks like in 2026, and a whole lot more. Wait, moon vacuums?!

In May of 2025, Docker launched Hardened Images, a secure, minimal, production-ready set of images. In December, they made DHI freely available and open source to everyone who builds software. On this episode, we’re joined by Tushar Jain, EVP of Engineering at Docker to learn all about it.

Jason Willems believes the tech monoculture is finally breaking, Don Ho shares some bad Notepad++ news, Tailscale’s Avery Pennarun pens a great downtime apology, Milan Milanović explains why you can only code 4 hours per day, and Addy Osmani on managing comprehension debt when leaning on AI to code.

We discuss the buzz around Clawdbot / MoltBot / OpenClaw, how app subscriptions are turning into weekend hacking projects, why SaaS stocks are crashing on Wall Street, and what it all means.

As the creator and long-time maintainer of ESLint, Nicholas Zakas is well-positioned to criticize GitHub’s recent response to npm’s insecurity. He found the response insufficient, and has other ideas on how GitHub could secure npm better. On this episode, Nicholas details these ideas, paints a bleak picture of npm alternatives like JSR, and shares our frustration that such a critical piece of internet infrastructure feels neglected.

Clawdbot drives Mac Mini sales, Swizec Teller on the future of software engineering being SRE, Daniel Stenberg decided to end curl’s bug bounty program, zerobrew takes some of the best ideas from uv and applies them to Homebrew, and Phil Eaton on LLMs and your career.

Techno Tim joins Adam to dive deep into the state of homelab’ing in 2026. Hardware is scarce and expensive due to the AI gold rush, but software has never been better. From unleashing Claude on your UDM Pro to building custom Proxmox CLIs, they explores how AI is transforming what’s possible in the homelab. Tim declares 2026 the “Year of Self-Hosted Software” while Adam reveals his homelab’s secret weapons: DNSHole (a Pi-hole replacement written in Rust) and PXM (a Proxmox automation CLI).

Damien Tanner (founder of Pusher, now building Layercode) is back for a reunion 17 years in the making. Damien officially returns to The Changelog to discuss the seismic shift happening in software development. From the first sponsor of the podcast to frontline builder in the AI agent era, Damien shares his insights on why SaaS is dying, why code review is a bottleneck (and non-existent for some), and how small teams can now build giant things.

Armin Ronacher thinks AI agent psychosis might be driving us insane, Dan Abramov explains how AT Protocol is a social filesystem, RepoBar keeps your GitHub work in view without opening a browser, Ethan McCue shares some life altering Postgres patterns, and Lea Verou says web dependencies are broken and we need to fix them.

Gerhard is back for Kaizen 22! We’re diving deep into those pesky out-of-memory errors, analyzing our new Pipedream instance status checker, and trying to figure out why someone in Asia downloads a single episode so much.

Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft’s GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz’ 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!

Linus Torvalds pushes AI generated code, Jordan Fulghum thinks this is the year of self-hosting, FracturedJson formats for compact / human readability, Scott Werner believes a flood of adequate software is coming, and Sean Goedecke explains why generic software design advice is useless.

We’re joined by Sid Sijbrandij, founder of GitLab who led the all-in-one coding platform all the way to IPO. In late 2022, Sid discovered that he had bone cancer. That started a journey he’s been on ever since… a journey that he shares with us in great detail. Along the way, Sid continued founding companies including Kilo Code, an all-in-one agentic engineering platform, which he also tells us all about.

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.

Our 8th annual year-end wrap-up is here! We’re featuring 8 listener voicemails, dope Breakmaster Cylinder remixes & our favorite episodes of the year. Thanks for listening! 💚

Ajay Kulkarni from Tiger Data (Co-founder/CEO) is on the pod this week with Adam. He asked him to get vulnerable and trace his path to becoming a CEO. They dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and explore how founder values end up forming company culture (whether you intend them to or not). From his enterprise days to building Timescale (and the rename to Tiger Data), we cover the whole journey — even the haters, because haters gonna hate. Here’s where it gets really interesting: Agents in the database! Not the hype. The real thing baby. They get into how fast you can go from idea to shipped these days, what it actually means to talk to your database, and the whole API/CLI/MCP/Skills movement.

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!

Alex Kretzschmar joins Adam for a trip down the Linux rabbit hole – Docker vs Podman, building a Kubernetes cluster, ZFS backups with zfs.rent, bootc, favorite Linux distros, new homelab tools built with AI, self-hosting Immich, content creation, Plex and Jellyfin, the future of piracy and more.

We’re joined by Zipline cofounder / CTO, Keenan Wyrobek. Zipline is on a mission to build the world’s first logistics system that serves all people equally via their fleet of autonomous drones that started in Africa delivering medical supplies and can now deliver packages (up to 8 lbs) directly to your door. They’ve solved a lot of gnarly technical and regulatory challenges along the way. We go deep with Keenan. We hope you’ll find this one fascinating.