Just enough automation (Changelog News #161)

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.

Jim Remsik has lived on the bleeding edge (but also the heart's center) of the Ruby world for decades. This fall, he's organizing six (yes, SIX) XO Ruby confs all around the United States. On this episode, Jim joins us to reminisce about the early days of Ruby and Rails, share what he's learned from so many years of organizing events, and invite all of us to join him on his upcoming 7500 mile road trip.

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.

Arun Gupta, now a "free agent" after his surprise exit from Intel, joins us to discuss how he's dealing with his first job hunt since the 1990s. Along the way, we talk about agentic coding strategies, what GPT-5's release implies about the future, and more. (US buys 10% of Intel)++

Our friends at Cult.Repo launched their epic Python documentary on August 28th, 2025! To celebrate, we sat down with Travis Oliphant –creator of NumPy, SciPy, and more– to get his perspective on how Python took over the software world. Stick around for the twist ending! We set aside Python and dissect Travis' big idea to make open source projects financially sustainable through direct investment.

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.

Our Changelog & Friends proof-of-concept with Mat Ryer has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Originally recorded: 2023-02-08 Mat joins us for some good conversation about some Git tooling that's been on our radar. We speculate, we discuss, we laugh, and Mat even breaks into song a few times. It's good fun.

The epic show with Adam Jacob has been remastered! Now with full-length video on YouTube. Adam goes solo with Adam Jacob for an epic pod into his journey to get to System Initiative. From SysAdmin at 8 years old, to discovering Linux and working for Mom-and-pop ISPs, to open source changing his life and starting Opscode and building Chef. Buckle up and enjoy.

Cursor has a big problem, Alireza Bashiri thinks plaintext beats todo apps, Manish built an offline AI workspace, OverType is a WYSIWYG markdown editor that's just a textarea, and sshrc lets you bring your config with you to remote machines.