The great software quality collapse (News)

0:28What up, nerds? Let's get physical, physical. 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 in to this week's news. The Great Software Quality Collapse. Denis 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 isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence, end quote. Dennis has been tracking software quality metrics for three years.

1:15In 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 Manageddb, 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.

1:56That'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, end 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.

2:38Quote, the React Foundation's mission is to help the React community and its members. The React Foundation will maintain React's infrastructure, organize React Conf, 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. End 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$3-plus million in funding and dedicated engineering support. GitHub prioritizes Azure migration over features.

3:15Here's Frederick Lardenoise, apologize on the pronunciation, reporting for the new stack. Quote, with GitHub CEO Thomas Domke leaving the company this August and GitHub being folded more deeply into Microsoft's 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. End quote. I'm not at all surprised by this, but I am certainly disappointed. My first thought, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

3:53Why 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 sponsored news. Claude Sonnet 4.5 versus Opus 4.1.

4:32CodeRabbit just ran a head-to-head 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? CodeRabbit's data shows Sonnet 4.5 matches Opus-level performance on code reviews, debugging, and refactors at 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.

5:16Get all the details at coderabbit.ai and read the full blog post by following the link in this week's companion newsletter, and you can find that at changelog.news.com. 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 from running a couple of silly little scripts. Have a look at my benchmark, but consider it just one data point and not the last word on Python performance.

6:01End quote. Okay, with that out of the way, what did Miguel find? Clicked through for the individual benchmarks, but his conclusions were, 1. CPython 3.14 appears to be the fastest of all the CPythons. 2. Its JIT interpreter doesn't appear to provide any significant speed gains. 3. Its free threading interpreter is faster for CPU-heavy, multi-threaded apps. And four, PyPy is insanely fast. That last bullet point was the main thing I noticed when scrolling through the results. While 3.14 beats previous versions, PyPy blows all CPythons out of the water while competing with Node and Rust alternatives.

6:40Let's talk about AI art. The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman 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've 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.

7:24I've hemmed and I've hawed 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 creative 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 changelog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on such as notes on switching to helix from vim a memory upgrade for your coding agent and a rust based cli utility toolbox get in on that newsletter at changelog.news Last week on the pod, Evan, you joined me to discuss VEAT's past and future.

8:12And Jose Valim told us all about Tidewave, 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 joins 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 dig the show. And I'll talk to you again real soon.

8:41Game on.