What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is changelognews for the week of Monday, October 13th, 2025 I'm getting back into reading not audible not eat ink. I'm talking physical books held in my physical hands scanned by my physical eyeballs Cue Olivia Newton John and her iconic white headband I need your recommends please comment with the best book you've read in the last 10 years fiction nonfiction whatever Okay, let's get into this week's news the great software quality collapse Dennis Stetskov describes how we've normalized catastrophe in the software industry quote we've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a calculator Leaking 32 gigabytes of RAM barely makes the news. This is about AI the quality crisis started years before chat GPT existed AI just weaponized existing incompetence and quote Dennis has been tracking software quality metrics for three years in this post He cites nine plus examples from across the industry where memory consumption has lost all meaning and system level failures have become routine What exactly is to blame not one single factor?
But Dennis says the abstraction tax compounds exponentially like this quote modern software is built on towers of abstractions each one making development easier While adding overhead today's chain is react to electron to chromium to docker to Kubernetes to VM to manage DB to API gateways And each layer adds only 20 to 30% but compound a handful and you're at 2 to 6x overhead for the same behavior That's how a calculator ends up leaking 32 gigabytes not because someone wanted it to but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users Started complaining and quote Dennis says we need to ask ourselves some hard questions when did we accept that a calculator leaking 32 gigabytes is normal? How many abstraction layers are actually necessary and what happens when we can't buy our way out anymore click through for his proposed path forward and the bottom line It can't be all bad can it the new home for react and react native? Meta is officially handing react and react native as well as supporting projects like JSX over to a foundation quote The react foundations mission is to help the react community and its members the react foundation will maintain reacts infrastructure Organize react comp and create initiatives to support the react ecosystem the react foundation will be part of the Linux foundation Which has long fostered a vendor neutral environment for open-source projects and quote meta isn't abandoning the projects at least not yet They've committed to a five-year partnership with the newly formed foundation including three plus million dollars in funding and dedicated engineering support GitHub prioritizes Azure migration over features. Here is Frederick Lardonoise apologize on the pronunciation reporting for the new stack quote with GitHub CEO Thomas Don Quay leaving the company this August and GitHub being folded more deeply into Microsoft organizational structure GitHub lost that independence now according to internal GitHub documents the new stack has seen the next step of this deeper integration into the Microsoft structure is moving all of GitHub's infrastructure to Azure even at the cost of delaying work on new features and quote not at all surprised by this But I'm certainly disappointed my first thought we can walk and chew gum at the same time Why not do both quote while GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure Our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed end quote yikes This is terrible optics for Azure even a Microsoft-owned entity struggles to migrate to it and has to pull people off other features to make the transition even happen I've said it a few times this year.
I'll say it again. GitHub is primed for disruption. Where will that disruption come from? I'm not sure but we'll know it when we see it.
It's now time for sponsor news Claude Sonnet 4.5 versus Opus 4.1 Code Rabbit just ran a head-ahead between Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1 and the results are fascinating Sonnet 4.5 isn't just faster It's cheaper and in many real-world dev tasks smarter But here's the paradox even with stronger reasoning and better latency most teams still default to bigger slower models out of habit The hidden gem code rabbit's data shows sonnet 4.5 matches Opus level performance on code reviews debugging and refactors and a fraction of the cost It's a reminder that more tokens don't always mean more value This opens the door for teams to run cheaper faster better AI-assisted reviews and maybe rethink what top tier really means Get all the details at toadrabbit.ai and read the full blog post by following the link in this week's companion newsletter And you can find that at change vlog.news slash 165 Python 3.14 is here. How fast is it? Python 3.14 with the free threaded now officially supported was released on October 8th, 2025 So Miguel Grinberg put it through its paces But first a warning quote running these benchmarks is fun and that's why I do it But it is really impossible to build an accurate performance profile of something as complex as the Python interpreter Just for running a couple of silly little scripts have a look at my benchmark But consider it just one day at point and not the last word on Python performance End quote okay with that out of the way what did Miguel find click through for the individual benchmarks? But his conclusions were one C Python 3.14 appears to be the fastest of all the C pythons two It's JIT interpreter doesn't appear to provide any significant speed gains three It's free threading interpreter is faster for CPU heavy multi-threaded apps and for pipi is insanely fast that last bullet point was the main thing I noticed when scrolling through the results while 3.14 beats previous versions Pipi blows all C pythons out of the water while competing with node and rust alternatives Let's talk about ai art the oatmeal's Matthew M in published a take on ai art that's making the rounds Maybe you haven't seen it yet quote when I consume art it evokes a feeling good bad neutral whatever when I consume ai art It also evokes a feeling good bad neutral whatever until I find out that it's ai art Then I feel deflated grossed out and maybe a little bit bored end quote I'm not so sure about grossed out But deflated and bored both track with how I felt when realizing a piece of art is actually ai art But on the other hand I've also seen some pretty imaginative stuff and had a lot of fun bringing my own imaginations to life too I've hemmed and I've hot about ai art But I'm starting to think the right approach is to adapt my stance on other ai tools Which is use ai to help you think not to think for you take that and apply it to the wonderful world of art and create expression And it's use ai to help you make art not to make art for you That's the news for now But go and subscribe to the change log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth looking on such as Notes on switching to helix from them a memory upgrade for your coding agent and a rust-based CLI utility to a box Get in on that newsletter at changelog.news Last week on the pod have been you join me to discuss beats past and future and Joe's Aveline told us all about Tydewave his new direction for ai developer tooling find those in your feed and stay tuned this week When Deepak Singh from AWS's Kiro team joined us on Wednesday and on Friday change login friends with Justin Searles and Mike McQuaid Have a great week like subscribe and five-star review us if you did the show and I'll talk to you again real soon