Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
I can't believe PowerShell is actually good
Corbin Davenport of The Spacebar admits he underestimated PowerShell after Bash scripting frustrations, showing how its native data types, easy web API parsing, and .NET objects made a real scripting job, migrating old Tumblr posts with their metadata, far easier.
10 min · 2,286 words
Cloudflare is rewriting everything in Rust
Sylvain Kerkour traces Cloudflare's shift from C and Lua NGINX modules to Rust after CloudBleed, covering Pingora, FL2 and the NGINX termination rewrite, a critique of its open-source posture, and how avoiding .unwrap() could have prevented the November 18, 2025 outage.
5 min · 1,102 words
Why I'm no longer updating this repository
Paul Battley explains why he is archiving all his Ruby gems: Ruby was once designed for programmer joy and for humans, but with Rails controlled by a figure he opposes and Ruby itself now developed and repositioned around LLM agents, he no longer wants to contribute to a commons being strip-mined to feed AI.
2 min · 436 words
It's still OK to enjoy programming
Chris Kiehl pushes back on the doom about AI and programming: work economics may have changed, but programming for fun on weekends, from a buggy Breakout clone to Agda-style type tricks in Java and recursion schemes, needs no economic justification, and the pressure not to enjoy it fades once you disconnect.
2 min · 472 words
Gentoo developer Michał Górny asks Python package maintainers not to adopt uv-build as their build backend, arguing that its size and Rust toolchain requirement break builds on less common architectures and downstream distributions, while its benefits over backends like flit-core or hatchling are minimal.
3 min · 579 words
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Julik Tarkhanov responds to DHH's RailsWorld vibe-coding keynote, arguing that celebrity disinterest in Rails does not obligate the community to abandon it, and framing a freer, post-celebrity chapter for Ruby.
13 min · 2,998 words
The reverts will continue until morale improves
PostgreSQL committer Peter Eisentraut reflects on the unusually large wave of feature reverts after PostgreSQL 19 entered beta, why quality bar and unfinished design led to cutting ~8–10 significant features, and what that means for PostgreSQL 19 and 20.
5 min · 1,145 words
Clojure in the Age of Language Models
Yogthos argues that as LLMs make writing code cheap, the valuable skill is high-level reasoning about data and design — and that Clojure's declarative, data-oriented, REPL-driven style fits both agents and humans, with Jolt potentially removing the remaining friction.
6 min · 1,283 words
David Heinemeier Hansson follows up his Rails World talk telling programmers to put down the pencils: coding agents are now good enough that writing most code by hand is no longer economically viable, AI is more like gaining capable new coworkers than another tool, and programmers who refuse to collaborate with agents are the ones who should worry.
2 min · 382 words
Jonas Schäfer argues that LLM quality has improved enough that “AI output is bad” no longer works as a blanket objection—quality arguments lost, so the harder fights are about labor, ecology, control, and what we still choose to do ourselves.
9 min · 2,037 words
Vibe Coding Isn't the Problem. Ownership Is.
I had an interesting conversation today about “vibe coding” and whether it’s appropriate to contribute AI-generated code to open-source projects.
3 min · 725 words
Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.
Thirty years of voluntary funding schemes haven't paid open source maintainers because asking doesn't scale. The real money already flows — to JFrog, Docker, Sonatype — at the registry layer. The fix: registries charge companies for supply (they already do), then route a slice automatically to the maintainers who make that supply worth having.
23 min · 5,396 words
How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
Are you steering towards AI burnout? Afraid of loosing your job to someone with little programming skills, no aspirations to quality, and a huge Claude account? Disappointed about the code quality in your projects, or worse in “your” own code? This is for you. There are significant and legitimate ethical concerns about frontier LLMs run by big tech companies, these have been discussed at length, I’m aware and agree, this post is not about them. Please don’t mistake me for a pro-LLM techbro. Also: Since people have mistaken my texts for LLM-generated before, I’ll tell you…
13 min · 3,046 words
The Bottleneck Moved From Writing Code to Proving It
AI made writing code cheap; the scarce work is now proving it. A practitioner essay on verification as the new bottleneck for agent systems and engineering teams.
4 min · 926 words
# No more issues Written on 2026-09-04 An interesting change at Laravel yesterday: they disabled the ability to create issues on a number of repositories and instead encourage people to create pull-requests instead: To be clear: this is only the case for Laravel packages like Soc
4 min · 919 words
Lombok is Still Relevant in the Age of Java Records
Swaranga Sarma, a Java developer who has used Project Lombok for about 15 years, rebuts common arguments against it (weird bugs, compiler hacks, Records making it obsolete, future JDK breakage) and explains why its benefits still outweigh the costs, with delombok as an easy exit.
4 min · 1,007 words
A short opinion piece arguing constructors should never throw, do async work, or perform side effects; parsing, connecting, and validation belong in factory methods or explicit lifecycle methods so object construction stays simple and predictable.
2 min · 397 words