What up nerds? I'm Jared, and this is change blog news for the week of Monday, May 19, 2025 I may sound a little different than usual because I'm in a hotel in Seattle And I'm shipping this out a little later than usual because Adam and I spent the morning attending the Microsoft build 2025 keynote where Satinadella and company mentioned AI agents 187 times. Yes, I counted That excludes mentions of co-pilot MCP or models which would have ballooned the count even more because I'm only a man Not a machine the good news. There was at least one cool non-agent announcement.
Okay, let's get into the news Windows subsystem for Linux is open source The announcement that WSL is now finally open source garnered perhaps the biggest applause break of the entire build keynote turns out opening the source of a beloved Developer tool slash platform at a developer conference is an easy win from the announcement post quote WSL could never have been what it is today Without its community even without access to WSL source code people have been able to make major contributions that led to what WSL is now This is why we are incredibly excited to open source WSL today We've seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to source code And we can't wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project end quote Windows subsystem for Linux is one of the coolest things Microsoft has built this decade and having it out there in the open makes it even cooler hyper typing How low scan furlough describes an inherent trade-off in type scripts type system stricter types are safer But often more complex he calls this phenomenon hyper typing Which is quote where libraries in pursuit of perfect type safety end up with overly complex types that are hard to understand produce cryptic errors And paradoxically even lead to unsafe workarounds and quote Paolo argues that simpler types or even type generation often lead to a more practical and enjoyable developer experience despite being less perfect Turns out perfect really is the enemy of good even in type script. I'm going back to using my brain Alberto Fortin is taking a step back from heavy LLM use while coding why quote one morning I decided to actually inspect closely what's all this code that cursor has in writing It's not like I was blindly prompting without looking at the end result But I was optimizing for speed and I hadn't actually sat down just to review the code I was just building building building so I do a coding review session and the horror ensues and quote I won't list all the horrors here. You can probably guess what they are. Here's Alberto's experience after stepping back quote Since I've taken a step back debugging has become easier Maybe I'm not as fast, but I don't have this weird feeling of I kind of wrote this code But I actually have no idea what's in it.
I'm still using LLM's But for demo things like rename all occurrences of this parameter or here's some pseudocode. Give me the go equivalent It's now time for sponsor news Everything you need to know about vibe coding vibe coding love it or hate it is here to stay Everyone has an opinion about it and retools Keenan cop and Haver does a good job explaining the trans potential and risks with developers in mind Quote we're vibe coding enables non-engineers to create without learning the code Experienced engineers are freed up to focus on advanced problem solving and relieved of undifferentiated heavy lifting such as changing the entire app Sculler team rebuilding a data table for the 100 time or implementing a known algorithm in new language Think of the flow state you could achieve or the creativity You could harness if you could just remove these kinds of tasks from your project end quote The reality as we both know isn't so straightforward Keenan goes on to lay out the security concerns the team Whiting consistencies and the tech that that vibe coding can produce thanks to Keenan for the great write-up and to retool for sponsoring changelog News check them out at retool calm coding without a laptop Did you know you can run a full desktop Linux environment on your phone not some clunky virtual machine and not an outright OS replacement Like Ubuntu touch or post-market OS just native arm 64 binaries running inside a little charude container on Android pretty cool The pseudonymous hacker who blogs at hold the robot calm had a two-week trip coming up where they needed to work And they got obsessed with the idea of leaving their laptop at home and just using their phone So they added a folding keyboard and some air glasses the whole setup cost six hundred and three six bucks And here's four reasons why they still like the idea after trying it on for a bit one It really does fit in your pockets. No bag. Nothing to carry two.
I can use it outdoors in bright sunlight I wrote most of this blog post sitting at a picnic table in a park screen glare and brightness is not an issue Three I can fit into tight spaces this setup was infinitely more comfortable than a laptop We're on a plane some coffee shops also have narrow bars that are too small for a laptop But not for this and for the phone has a cellular connection, so I'm not tied to Wi-Fi that said there are plenty of pain points too Check the link in the newsletter for the full story Microsoft wants this to be the HTML of the agent web the most interesting segment of today's build keynote in my eyes was when CTO Kevin Scott took the stage to discuss the open agentic web and Microsoft's commitment to it He emphasized the importance of protocols and Microsoft's support of MCP Then he compared MCP to HTTP and said we need an HTML equivalent to sit on top That's when he introduced NL web as Microsoft's attempt at defining the HTML of the agentic web quote NL web is a collection of open protocols and Associated open-source tools its main focus is establishing a foundational layer for the AI web much like HTML revolutionized document sharing to make this vision Reality NL web provides practical implementation code not as a definitive solution But as proof of concept demonstrations showing one possible approach end quote This is early days and things are moving fast sounds like a great time to get involved That's the news for now, but go and subscribe to the changelog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on such as a Leave your check in three instructions cat slash Etsy slash hitter com and an online museum of internet artifacts Get in on the newsletter at changelog calm slash news Have yourself a great week like subscribe and leave a surprise to review if you dig the show and I'll talk to you again real soon