In light of the major, ongoing AWS outage... I hope you're not having a terrible start to your work week

Changelog NewsDeveloper news worth your attention

Hello, there! 👋

In light of the major, ongoing AWS outage… I hope you’re not having a terrible start to your work week. But if Downdetector is anywhere near accurate, those hopes are all but dashed.

Venmo, Amazon, Pinterest, Roblox, etc, etc

Every time AWS goes down, I’m reminded of the quip: “Turns out ‘the cloud’ is just some building in Virginia.”

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Spec-driven development with Kiro

We’re joined by Deepak Singh from the Kiro team. Kiro is AWS’s attempt at building an AI coding environment to take you from prototype to production. It does that by bringing structure to your agentic workflow with spec-driven development. Their aim: the flow of AI coding, leveled up with mature engineering practices. 🎥 VIDEO HERE 👀

Art for the episode: Smiling faces. Title text. That kind of stuff.

👨‍🔬 The science behind developer flow states

In an excellent piece designed to help engineering leaders and developers understand flow states and how to reclaim them, Csaba Okrona lays out exactly what Flow is:

Flow, as defined in the research, is “a psychological state of complete immersion and engagement in an activity.” For developers, it’s that magical zone where code seems to write itself, complex problems unravel naturally, and hours pass in what feels like minutes.

Then he enumerates the three major blockers to flow:

  1. Insufficient cognitive challenge
  2. Situational barriers
  3. Internal factors

And then shows you how to engineer your way back to Flow. Most of us can’t get this done entirely on our own. In that case, forward this to your boss!

🦾 The day my smart vacuum turned against me

Let’s do this one “teaser trailer” style:

Deep within the robot’s startup scripts, I discovered the smoking gun.

Inside the /etc/init.d/ directory, one script had been modified to prevent the main application from launching. This wasn’t a glitch; it was an intentional command…

Someone—or something—had remotely issued a kill command.

Are you sufficiently teased?!

🏋 Ruby core team takes on RubyGems, Bundler

Ruby creator, Matz, shares some much-needed news for the Ruby community after the recent debacle (that we discussed in-depth on last Friday’s show):

RubyGems and Bundler are essential official clients for rubygems.org and the Ruby ecosystem, bundled with the Ruby language for many years and functioning as part of the standard library.

Despite this crucial role, RubyGems and Bundler have historically been developed outside the Ruby organization on GitHub, unlike other major components of the Ruby ecosystem.

To provide the community with long-term stability and continuity, the Ruby core team, led by Matz, has decided to assume stewardship of these projects from Ruby Central. We will continue their development in close collaboration with Ruby Central and the broader community.

💰 Zed for Windows when? Windows nowThanks to Zed for sponsoring Changelog News

The wait is over. Zed for Windows is here!

For a long time, Windows devs have been asking the same question: Windows when? Well, now. The Zed team just dropped a native Windows build, built from the ground up with the same speed, multiplayer editing, and buttery-smooth experience that Mac and Linux users have been bragging about.

Why’d they do it? Because great tools shouldn’t care what OS you’re on. Zed’s mission has always been about fast, collaborative coding — and now, that magic extends to the world’s largest community of developers.

So whether you’re pair-programming with your Mac-using teammate or just want an editor that feels instant on Windows, Zed’s ready.

Learn more and install Zed for Windows at zed.dev

🔝 Claude Skills could be bigger than MCP

Simon Willison is pretty excited about Anthropic’s recent announcement of Claude Skills – a simple Markdown system that teaches Claude how to do new things.

Claude Code is, with hindsight, poorly named. It’s not purely a coding tool: it’s a tool for general computer automation. Anything you can achieve by typing commands into a computer is something that can now be automated by Claude Code. It’s best described as a general agent. Skills make this a whole lot more obvious and explicit.

Simon goes on to explain how Skills compare to MCP, why he likes them better, and how Skill sharing might make this year’s MCP rush “pedestrian by comparison.” In the end, it’s all about simplicity.

Skills are Markdown with a tiny bit of YAML metadata and some optional scripts in whatever you can make executable in the environment. They feel a lot closer to the spirit of LLMs—throw in some text and let the model figure it out.

🧠 Knowledge creates technical debt

Luke Plant looks at everyone’s favorite software-solutions-as-things-you-sometimes-acquire-on-credit metaphor from a different perspective, which may serve to cast it in a more positive light than usual:

The “pile of technical debt” is essentially a pile of knowledge – everything we now think is bad about the code represents what we’ve learned about how to do software better. The gap between what it is and what it should be is the gap between what we used to know and what we now know.

Thinking of tech debt in this manner feels more like an opportunity gained by learning stuff vs a liability you have to pay off. And who doesn’t love a good opportunity?!

You can refuse to take that opportunity if you want, but it’s a tragic waste of your hard-earned knowledge – a waste of the investment you previously made in learning – and eventually you’ll be losing money, and losing out to competitors who will be making the most of their knowledge.

🎙️ There will be bleeps

Mike McQuaid and Justin Searls join me in the wake of the RubyGems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money in open source, what sustainability really means for our community, making a career out of open source (or not), and more. Bleep! 🎥 VIDEO HERE 👀

Art for the episode: Smiling faces. Title text. That kind of stuff.

🤩 nanochat’s delightfully simple frontend

Andrej Karpathy’s latest project provides a full ChatGPT-style LLM (including training, inference and a web UI) in ~8k lines of Python. The whole thing is cool and interesting, but I’m linking to the web UI frontend because it’s a great example of building something super useful with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sometimes just a few “onclick” handlers is all you need, ya know?

/via Simon Willison

😬 Why your boss isn’t worried about AI

Boyd Kane:

After 40 years of persistent badgering, the software industry has convinced the public that bugs can have disastrous consequences. This is great! It is good that people understand that software can result in real-world harm. Not only does the general public mostly understand the dangers, but they mostly understand that bugs can be fixed. It might be expensive, it might be difficult, but it can be done.

The problem is that this understanding, when applied to AIs like ChatGPT, is completely wrong. The software that runs AI acts very differently to the software that runs most of your computer or your phone.

🎨 What if we used color for more than just syntax highlighting

Fascinating take by Hillel Wayne, as per usual:

Color carries a huge amount of information. Color draws our attention. Color distinguishes things. And we just use it to distinguish syntax.

Nothing wrong with distinguishing syntax. It’s the “just” that bothers me. Highlighting syntax is not always the most important thing to us.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now, but we have some great episodes coming up!

  • Wednesday: Ellie Huxtable talkin’ Atuin Desktop
  • Friday: Kaizen 21 with Gerhard Lazu

Have yourself a great week,
lips of knowledge are a precious jewel,
and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod