# ByteCode.News

> Programming news and technical writing.

## Latest posts

- [Andrew Lombardi: Unit Tests are Not the Enemy](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/andrew-lombardi-unit-tests-are-not-the-enemy): Andrew Lombardi wrote "Unit Tests are Not the Enemy" as a response to seeing people proud to remove verification from their codebases. That's removing the bad fire alarms, not addressing the fire, and he has suggestions for actually doing it all well.
- [Arcana Reads Everything, and Then Some](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/arcana-reads-everything-and-then-some): Stephane Bury has released Arcana, a Java CLI/library that extracts an amazing array of archive types, including ZIP, 7z, RAR, TAR, CAB, MSI, ISO 9660, and XAR, and many, many more.
- [Alberto Denia: Code is Clay Now](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/alberto-denia-code-is-clay-now): Alberto Denia's artisan and engineer are a good lens on agentic coding: an artisan keeps his fingers on the code, and an engineer relies on the factory to make bricks. Both work, at different scales.
- [Kristen Maevyn: The Decoherence Trap](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/kristen-maevyn-the-decoherence-trap): Kristen Maevyn's essay "The Decoherence Trap" names the cost a system accrues when it holds several valid but mutually incompatible models, so every change becomes a job of translating between them and guarding against side effects.
- [The Zig project is going nowhere](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/the-zig-project-is-going-nowhere): Zig keeps improving as a programming language. Unfortunately, its management increasingly seems determined to make it a bad choice for the people who actually want to use it.
- [There Is No Irrelephant](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/there-is-no-irrelephant): Mike Jackson wants the blind men and their elephant retired as a lesson in systems thinking, and his reasons are good. The parable's flaw is its narrator, who stands outside the world he describes and always has.
- [Pele: a reimplementation of Mermaid](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/pele-a-reimplementation-of-mermaid): Pele, Obsidian's new Mermaid graph renderer, has no DOM dependency and no runtime dependencies, which means it runs on GraalJS on a stock JDK, as well as being a very nice drop-in replacement for client-side Mermaid.
- [Emergent design, outside the codebase](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/emergent-design-outside-the-codebase): Emergent design says architecture should flow from how something is used rather than from how it was dictated. Inside a codebase, that’s tests pulling the structure into shape. Across codebases it’s something older: a narrow substrate, a caller nobody expected, and a universe that stops exactly where the primitives do.
- [The geometric model of maintenance](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/the-geometric-model-of-maintenance): In "The Geometric Model of Maintenance," someone finally checked the “one month of code, ten days of maintenance” rule against real git history. The number holds up. What it’s made of is worth a look, and so is what you’d need to measure before it tells you anything about your own code.
- [Nate Meyvis: Where is all the new, good software?](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/where-is-all-the-new-good-software): 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: I Paid People to Try and Follow My README](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/i-paid-people-to-try-and-follow-my-readme): 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.
- [Listening Too Fast](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/listening-too-fast): 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 and Reuse](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/testcontainers-and-reuse): 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.
- [Updates for ByteCode.News](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/updates-for-bytecode-news): 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.
- [Why don't more developers "use the platform"?](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/why-dont-more-developers-use-the-platform): 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.
- [Four Horsemen, or Four Decisions?](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/four-horsemen-or-four-decisions): 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: Exponential Failure](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/10/kerry-ivan-kurian-exponential-failure): 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.
- [PUDL: the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language"](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/pudl-the-pleasantly-usable-design-language): Paul Parks has released PUDL, the "Pleasantly Usable Design Language," a specification and toolkit for applying consistent and usable application design for applications.
- [Git 2.56 released: staging improvements](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/git-2-56-released-staging-improvements): Git 2.56 has been released, with some major improvements in rebasing support.
- [midden: Heap Dumps from the Command Line](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/midden-heap-dumps-from-the-command-line): Midden is a single-binary heap dump analyzer for the JVM, written in Rust. Tested against two deliberate leaks and checked against MAT, it found both and got the sizes right, from a shell prompt rather than a workstation, and very quickly.
- [Helidon 27 Released: Version Tracks the JDK](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/helidon-27-released-version-tracks-the-jdk): Helidon 27 is out, and it ties its version number to the JDK release cycle, including for LTS support. Helidon is Oracle's microservice library, released under the ASL 2.0 license; this version has some feature upgrades and separates the MicroProfile support apart from Helidon proper.
- [Make Truth Cheaper than Reputation](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/make-truth-cheaper-than-reputation): Sunil Pai's “senior engineer death spiral” describes what happens when engineers start managing perception instead of reporting reality. The deeper problem may not be individual pride or fear, but organizations that make uncomfortable information too expensive.
- [What if the Z80 had a REPL?](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/what-if-the-z80-had-a-repl): Kenta Cho built a Z80 REPL: type an instruction, execute it immediately, and watch the machine state change. It's eight years old, still delightful, and a neat example of what happens when good tooling makes experimentation cheap.
- [It's Been a Bit!](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/09/it-s-been-a-bit): ByteCode.News has been quiet for a month. Part of that is ordinary life, but part is something more familiar: the point where everything happening in technology starts to look the same. Here’s what happened, and what BCN is changing to get moving again.
- [Jason Lee, on JReleaser](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/jason-lee-on-jreleaser): A release to Maven Central used to cost more than the code being released. Jason Lee's JReleaser walkthrough shows what replaced that process: one Maven profile, one command.
- [Am I better because of AI?](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/am-i-better-because-of-ai): A recent discussion on how AI was used effectively made me wonder what "effective" or "better" meant, because there's no way to test the alternative any more to compare. I still don't know how to characterize my own results, but I think it makes me better because it gives me a chance to work out who I am and what I mean to say, but not really how to say it.
- [Because It's Not Fun Enough](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/because-it-s-not-fun-enough): Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.
- [The Floor and the Multiplier](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/08/the-floor-and-the-multiplier): Sean Goedecke argues that domain expertise is the real prompting skill. He's describing two quantities as one: a floor, available to anyone who can describe what acceptance looks like, and a gain that multiplies whatever you bring.
- [Xberg 1.0 released: document extraction for a world of tooling](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/07/xberg-1-0-released-document-extraction-for-a-world-of-tooling): Xberg 1.0 has been released. Xberg is a document extraction engine, describing itself as a "document intelligence framework." It's written in Rust, with fifteen generated language bindings, and a very descriptive data model that provides a *lot* of flexibility.
- [Identifying the Actors: What a Byline Actually Certifies](https://bytecode.news/posts/2026/07/identifying-the-actors-what-a-byline-actually-certifies): There's no standard for marking AI contribution, and there can't be, because contribution isn't a scalar. What readers actually want is attestation, and that's what a byline always was. The question was never whether a machine touched the text. It's whether anyone was behind the controls.

## Everything else

- [Sitemap](https://bytecode.news/sitemap.xml): every post's address, all 118 posts
- [RSS feed](https://bytecode.news/feed.xml) and [Atom feed](https://bytecode.news/feed.atom): the posts, newest first
- [Podcast feed](https://bytecode.news/podcast.xml): the posts that have a recording
- [Tags](https://bytecode.news/tags): the posts by subject

## Sections

- [Logs](https://bytecode.news/logs): the public chat channels' logs, by channel and day; a day can be filtered to one conversation
- [Atlas](https://bytecode.news/atlas): the site's tags as a map, where tags used together share a region
- [Factoids](https://bytecode.news/factoids): short shared reference entries