Nate Meyvis takes up a question AI skeptics keep raising: if AI-assisted coding is so powerful, where is the wave of new, good software? Several of his answers hold up well, particularly that approval chains don’t speed up and that much new software is private. What he doesn’t address is the question itself.
Terence Eden paid strangers to follow his README and found a dozen things wrong with it. Most of them a disciplined authorial pass would have caught first. A few, nothing but a reader catches.
Psychologically, almost every listener decides what you mean before you finish saying it, and decades of writing advice can’t fix that, because that's an aspect of the listener and the advice is aimed at the speaker. A language model is the first listener that takes instructions... and that gives us a way to fix the way we interact with the models.
Testcontainers, a project that uses OCI to provide, well, containers for testing for modules, has a reuse feature that lets a multi-module Maven build share one Postgres container across all test JVMs. This requires creating a separate database per JVM to maintain isolation and avoid migration conflicts.
BCN now runs on three front ends, a new Primate landing page, animated mastheads, and a backend that is finally becoming the stream aggregator it was meant to be.
Nolan Lawson explores why developers often build custom solutions instead of using native APIs, largely looking at JavaScript, but it's something that shows up in most languages and environments, for good reason.
Alex Martsinovich argues that agentic coding causes four unavoidable harms - slop, alienation, deskilling, and team breakdown — but these aren't technological inevitabilities, they're the results of specific choices about how to use AI coding tools.
Kerry Ivan Kurian's 'Exponential Failure' says AI agents multiply parts faster than they improve them, so projects fail by arithmetic. He's right about the math and wrong about the fix: the answer isn't fewer parts, it's parts you can describe.
Paul Parks has released PUDL, the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language," a specification and toolkit for applying consistent and usable application design for applications.