The great software quality collapse

The Dead Internet Theory dies, Geoffrey Litt tries to code like a surgeon, Matt Sephton thinks spreadsheets are great for UI design, Nate Meyvis advocates for front-end maximalism, Hemant Pandey thinks 9-5 employment is a great option for most, David Miranda compares React to Backbone in 2025.

Csaba Okrona lays out exactly what Flow is (then shows you how to engineer your way back to it), a smart vacuum turned against an innocent hacker, Matz and the Ruby core team step up to steward RubyGems, Simon Willison things Claude Skills could be bigger than MCP, and Luke Plant looks at technical debt from a more positive perspective.

Denis Stetskov describes how we've "normalized catastrophe" in the software industry, Meta is officially handing React and React Native over to a foundation, The New Stack reports on GitHub's Azure migration priority, Miguel Grinberg benchmarks Python 3.14, and The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman published his take on AI art.

Abner Coimbre makes a compelling case why our biggest technical talent should abandon for-profit social platforms, Noah Brier creates a Claude Code and Obsidian starter kit, Bharath Natarajan documents the Vercel vs Cloudflare fight, Toolbrew is a well-designed website brimming with common utilities, and Yusuf Aytas analyzes why over-engineering happens.

Andrew Churchill thinks companies should really be hiring junior engineers, Addy Osmani announces Chrome DevTools MCP, GitHub lays out a roadmap to fend off npm attacks, Jerry Liu builds an app that generates a timeline of your day's activities, and Sean Goedecke attempts to define "good taste" in the context of software engineering.

Adolfo Ochagavía believes we're approaching the problem of configuration from a flawed starting point, Annie Mueller hits us with a wakeup call about how she reads beginner tutorials, Brian Kihoon Lee spends some time meditating on taste, Namanyay thinks vibe coding is coders braindead, and Can Elma speculates on why AI helps senior engineers more than juniors.

Zach Gates quantifies the value of automating things, Albania's new prime minister names an AI "minister" to his Cabinet, Eckart Walther launches Really Simple Licensing (RSL) along with some big names on the web, Vishnu Haridas praises UTF-8's design, and Justin Searls disagrees with last week's headline story about AI coding tools and shovelware.

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.

Dominik Meca is infuriated by Next.js, Josh Bressers explains why open source is just one person, Huon Wilson describes the usefulness of "Copy as cURL", Herman Martinus re-licenses Bear, and Nawaz Dhandala unpacks why dependency bloat is such a pervasive problem.

Elon Musk and xAI take on Microsoft, DHH ships version 2 of Omarchy (his love letter to Linux), Glyn Normington on managing developer's block, Mitchell Hashimoto declares that all Ghostty contributions must disclose AI tooling, the United States government takes a 10% stake in Intel, and Adam Derewecki thinks we should do things that don't scale, then don't scale.