The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Dave Kerr created hacker laws, and now he finds himself reviewing agent-written code for them. Back on the show after six years, Dave names what he sees limiting teams today: keeping everyone’s mental model in sync with what’s actually been built. Adam declares it Kerr’s Law on the spot. We get into why Dave’s team treats code review as a deliberate slowdown, how Shellwright lets agents bring evidence to a pull request, and what living with bipolar disorder has taught Dave about noticing when the excitement of these tools stops being healthy.

Craig Kerstiens returns to talk about the ever-expanding world of Postgres: a deliberately boring core, a thriving extension ecosystem, and pg_lake bringing DuckDB and Iceberg into the mix. We dig into the pain of ETL, what Craig is watching in Postgres 19, the impact of AI on open source maintainers, and why the database still has plenty of room to grow.

This week I'm talking with Zeno Rocha, CEO of Resend, about scaling "boring" email to 3 million users, the secret Go rewrite behind it, and building for agents. We cover pricing.md, MCP, spam gangs, and why Resend keeps what's next for email.

Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, joins Adam to explain how a 40-hour weekend project became a viral open source hit and the foundation of an enterprise AI company. Gavriel describes the security concerns that led him to build a small, container-isolated alternative to OpenClaw, why he released it under the MIT license, and why the project's community and credibility are more valuable than keeping its code private. They explore the shift from writing code to architecting the environments in which agents work, NanoClaw's "skills over features" approach, the approval and governance layers required inside large companies, and a future where every worker manages agents without surrendering human judgment. They close with the technical simplicity behind NanoClaw, containers, TypeScript, SQLite, and a two-database design, and Adam's case for durable Agent Flow artifacts that keep organizational context from disappearing into chat.

This week I'm joined by Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal.com. What if the majority of open source repositories are already compromised and we just don't know it yet? That's the theory Peer brings to the table this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph to the point that a 16-year-old can vibe hack a power station just as easily as their mom can vibe code an iOS app, why the reporting culture that has kept open source safe all these years is collapsing under AI generated noise, Cal.com's move to fork its own codebase and take the sensitive parts private, and the eye opening reality that shipping "$1 of AI tokens for pennies on the dollar" is now a common startup business model.

Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki "do-over" of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.

Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can't resist trying, the real credit card token backed by an actual bank partnership, Breadcrumbs (their brand-new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries), a live demo where a hardware Canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in ten years quietly passed $22.5 million in ARR.

This week I'm talking with Max Stoiber, currently working on ChatGPT's plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI. We discuss the hundreds of open source projects nobody remembers alongside the big ones like react-boilerplate and styled-components, how Spectrum became part of GitHub and eventually helped shape GitHub Discussions, the founder growth that came from building Stellate, the GraphQL cache that turned into a dual acquisition by Shopify and The Guild, and why ChatGPT apps feel like a new surface for software.

This week I'm talking with Matt Carey about Code Mode and how most of us have been thinking about MCP all wrong. Matt works on the Agents SDK and MCP at Cloudflare — we discuss how server-side Code Mode lets one MCP server expose all ~2,500 Cloudflare API endpoints in about 1,000 tokens of context, the dynamic Worker loader that runs model-written code safely in a V8 isolate, Matt's own workflow with Claude, where memory fits into the future of agents, and his Zaggy git wrapper that keeps agents from force-pushing his repos.

This week I'm talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped Swamp 900 times in four weeks, why he brought User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testing back from the 90s, why software architecture (and domain-driven design) suddenly matters more than knowing how to write code, the live demo where I pointed Swamp at my Proxmox box and watched it write its own automation (blew my mind!!), and why he'll never accept a pull request to Swamp, ever.

Bitwarden's CLI got hit by the Checkmarx supply-chain campaign, TypeScript 7.0 beta lands with the Go-rewritten compiler running ~10x faster than 6.0, and pgBackRest lost its maintainer of thirteen years leaving anyone running production Postgres with a real dependency-trust task this week. We've also got Ubuntu 26.04 LTS shipping with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, and Matz dropping Spinel as an AOT path that takes Ruby to native binaries. This week was a good reminder that the tools we depend on are all moving at once. Security, performance, and maintenance aren't isolated threads.

Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s the argument Amelia is making today. We discuss the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard, the epic redesign of developer tooling in this agent-first world, the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI, why Intent treats a workspace as their core primitive not a chat thread, the tradeoffs between one-worktree-per-agent vs. one-worktree-per-task, and why she thinks prototyping just got easier but finishing got harder.

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.