What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday February 23rd 2026 today. We have some changelog news news. This is my final episode starting next week My good friend Adam Sakoviak will be taking care of you. Yes, after 13 years 1042 podcasts 452 newsletters and countless friends made along the way it is time for a change I will write more about the decision in the future on my blog and we'll discuss it together on Friday's friends episode Which will also be my last until then thanks for logging with me and definitely don't unsubscribe I'm sure Adam's changelog news will be great.
Okay, let's get in this week's news. The mythical agent months Wes McKinney has been wondering what many of us have been wondering quote among my inner circle of engineering and data science friends There is a lot of discussion about how long our competitive edge as humans will last We'll have good ideas and lots of them still matter as the agents begin having better ideas themselves and quote for now Wes feels needed but with things changing so rapidly he wonders how much software engineering's past will inform software engineering's future with that in mind He decided to revisit one of his and my favorite books on the topic Fred Brooks is the mythical man month In so doing Wes discovered that the books themes are still highly relevant in agent software and that its follow-up No silver bullet predicts the exact problem. He's having in his agent engineering quote the accidental complexity is no problem at all anymore But what's left is the essential complexity, which was always the hard part agents can't reliably tell the difference and quote thought broken stuff Definitely worth a read employ a peon today I clicked the copy to clipboard button on the brewing stall command approximately 0.3 seconds after landing on this peon ping website What could possibly be so compelling quote game character voice lines the instant your AI agent finishes or needs permission? It works with cloud code codex cursor open code hero windsurf anti gravity and more never lose flow to a silent terminal again And quote with 95 plus sound packs and counting.
There's a game character voice in here for everyone I sampled a bunch but I'm sticking with a default Warcraft 3 orc peon for now ready to work give it a try There is a zero percent chance. This won't bring some joy to your work life Ladybird adopts rust one popular segment of our ladybird pod with Andreas cling and Chris Wonstrath was when Andreas told us They were leaning towards swift as their C++ replacement well well well how the turntables quote we previously explored swift But the C++ interop never quite got there and platform support outside the apple ecosystem was limited rust is a different story When we originally evaluated rust back in 2024 We rejected it because it's not great at C++ style object-oriented programming the web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor with garbage collection deep inheritance hierarchies and so on rust's ownership model is not an actual fit for that But after another year of treading water, it's time to make the pragmatic choice Rust has the ecosystem and the safety guarantees we need both Firefox and chromium have already begun introducing rust into their codebases And we think it's the right choice for ladybird to it's now time for sponsor news What spec driven development gets wrong spec driven development has a decay problem design docs go stale soon after they're written and nobody gets Rewarded for keeping them current that was annoying before and now it's getting dangerous AI agents are following stale specs confidently Executing plans misaligned with assumed reality without ever flagging the drift Here's what Amelia Watenberger product lead for intent for augment code says in this post quote every documentation first initiative in software has failed for the same Reason it asked developers to do continuous maintenance work that nobody sees and nobody rewards end quote Augments answer is bidirectional spec maintenance agents don't just read the spec they write back to it What happens when an agent discovers an existing auth context it wires into that and updates the plan if agents can write code They can update the spec this only works when the agent actually understands your entire code base That's exactly what augments context engine is built to do It opens the door for specs that get more accurate over time not less learn more at augment code calm or follow the link to the full blog Post in the companion newsletter cloud flares new code mode technique MCP is for now at least the standard way AI agents use external tools But it sure does fill up the models context window with a lot of cruft to combat this cloud flare came up with code mode Which rhymes so you know it's good quote code mode is a technique we first introduced for reducing context window usage during agent tool use Instead of describing every operation as a separate tool Let the model write code against a typed SDK and execute the code safely in a dynamic worker loader the code acts as a compact plan The model can explore tool operations compose multiple calls and return just the data It needs end quote as a result of this cloud flare created a new MCP server for their entire API Quote with just two tools search and execute the server is able to provide access to the entire cloud flare API over MCP while consuming Only around a thousand tokens the footprint stays fixed no matter how many API endpoints exist end quote This is a good example of what I've been talking about a lot recently the models are getting marginally better But the traditional software engineering around the models squeeze out huge wins by equipping them better and better The only mo left is money. Here's Elliot Bonaville quote every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something a tool Assass a newsletter and app that does a thing the other app does but slightly differently they posted on hacker news Nobody clicks this is not new What's new is the scale and AI can wake up or whatever it does at 3 a.m. And ship 12 of these before breakfast creation used to be the scarce thing The filter now attention is most of us are on the wrong side of that trade and quote Elliot says the effort It takes to build something that's trending down But the time we collectively have on this earth is fixed in a world where attention is at a premium and sloppa bounds Attracting attention to your creation means you better have a head start or a lot of money or both quote the uncomfortable version If you're not already moving you might never take off the cost of acting like this is true when it isn't is you move fast And spend money you didn't need to spend the cost of acting like this isn't true when it is that's permanent end quote Elliot's take is more dumory than I believe is warranted today, but I can't blame him He ships something new last week and he's trying to attract attention to it That's the news for now But I like to take a moment to sincerely thank each and every one of you for reading listening Somebody links commenting and just supporting my work all these years It's been something special Have yourself a great week reach out and stay connected with me if you like my work and I'll talk to you again someday