Very important agents (Friends)

Nick Nisi joins us to dig into the latest trends from this year and how they're impacting his day-to-day coding and Vision Pro wearing. Anthropic's acquisition of Bun, the evolving JavaScript and AI landscape, GitHub's challenges and the AMP/Sourcegraph split. They dive into AI development practices, context management, voice assistants, Home Assistant OS and home automation, the state of the AI browser war, and we close with a prediction from Nick.

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, stops by to help us explore his tech predictions for 2026 and beyond. Will companionship be redefined by consumer robots? Will quantum-safe become the only safe worth talking about? Is this the dawn of the renaissance developer? We're infinitely curious why Werner came to this particular set of conclusions. Are you?

Matheus Lima on what makes senior developers actually senior, Tega Brain created a browser extension for avoiding AI slop, Andrew Kelley moves Zig from GitHub to Codeberg, Matias Heikkilä says there's no free lunch for vibe coding, and your SSD data at rest might be at risk.

Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more.

Let's hear how Wikipedia actually works from long-time Wikipedian, Bill Beutler! Bill has been heavily involved with this "8th wonder of the modern world" for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Beutler Ink –a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations. We discuss: the official (and not so official) rules, the editor cabal (which isn't one), the business model (which really isn't one), how an edit sticks (or not), how AI chatbots threaten the future of the site (or don't), and a whole lot more.

Cedric Chin says comparisons of our current AI *maybe-bubble* to the dot-com bubble and the 2008 GFC are limiting, Matthew Prince does a post-mortem on last week's Cloudflare outage, "hl" is a fast / powerful log viewer for humans, Enthusiast Guy's Continuum 93 is a fantasy computer emulator, and a list of things that aren't doing the thing.

Practical AI co-host, Chris Benson, joins us to discuss the latest advancements in AI, drones, home automation, and robotic swarming tech. Chris defines "swarm" with detail/precision and it turns out that what most people are calling a swarm today is NOT a swarm!

Spencer Chang caught our attention with the alive internet theory website, but he creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. Spencer's experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and flourishing for years to come.

Nilo Stolte explains why Zig is "a totally new way to write programs", George Mack gives twelve actionable ways to be more creative, Mario Zechner shares his findings on using MCP vs Bash tools, Josh Collinsworth compares creating AI art to medieval alchemy, LibrePods unlocks AirPods features for Android, and our first ever Changelog News Classifieds.

Do you like director's commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week's News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React's seemingly perpetual dominance, and more.