Why AI coding claims don't add up (News)

0:28What up, nerds? I'll get a chance to shout in their data center. What I'm going to do is not recommended. This is not supported. Do not try this at home.

0:41Okay, let's get into this week's news. Why AI coding claims don't add up. Mike Judge, no, not that Mike Judge, has been coding for 25 plus years. He was an early adopter of AI coding and a fan until a couple months ago. Now he's mad, furious even. Quote, I read the meter study and suddenly got serious doubts. In that study, the authors discovered that developers were unreliable narrators of their own productivity. They thought AI was making them 20 % faster, but it was actually making them 19 % slower. This shocked me because I had just told someone the week before that I thought AI was only making me about 25 % faster, and I was bummed it wasn't a higher number.

1:26I was only off by 5 % from the developer's own incorrect estimates. End quote. That study left him unsettled, so he put himself to the test. For six weeks, he tested his own productivity with and without AI. What he found was really disappointing. Quote, I discovered that the data isn't statistically significant at any meaningful level. That I would need to record new data points for another four months just to prove if AI was speeding me up or slowing me down at all. I can say definitively that I'm not seeing any massive increase in speed, as in 2x, using AI coding tools. End quote. That got Mike thinking, is he the only one, or are we all delusional?

2:08To answer that, he asked a simple question. Quote, if so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software as a service apps. We should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10 ,000 Tetris clones on Steam. End quote. That question sent him further down the rabbit hole. Click through for receipts. Cactoid wants to be the ultimate RSVP platform. I've been prompting the open source community to kill meat up for years.

2:50It looks like the folks behind Cactoid are taking a crack at it. Quote, like the cactus, great events bloom under any condition when managed with care. Cactoid helps you streamline RSVPs, simplify coordination, and keep every detail efficient so your gatherings are resilient, vibrant, and unforgettable. End quote. They've started off simply, which is great. you can create an event in seconds, get a unique URL to share, and people can use that link to RSVP to the event. No accounts, no waiting. Is that too simple? Perhaps yes, especially if it gets popular, which always brings abuse. But for now, it's refreshing.

3:29Go ahead, create an event and share it with friends. The story of how RSS beat Microsoft. Here's Ryan Farley writing for button down. Quote, not many people talk about how or why RSS won the content syndication war because few people are aware that a war ever took place. Everyone was so fixated on the drama over RSS's competing standard, Atom versus RSS 2.0, that they barely registered the rise and fall of the information and content exchange, ICE, specification, which had been created, funded, and eventually abandoned by Microsoft, Adobe, CNET, and other household names. End quote. I had never even heard of the ICE specification, which predated RSS by almost exactly a year and was philosophically almost a complete opposite approach.

4:18Thankfully, simple and open, beat out, complex, and closed. Eventually, Google killed RSS by shuttering Google Reader, but that's not the whole story either. Quote, All RSS had to do to weather ice, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next was keep things simple and let users build their own feeds, filters, lists, and aggregators. Like email, it probably won't make anyone a billion dollars or reshape entire industries, but it will always be wholly yours. And if that isn't nice, I don't know what it is. It's now time for sponsored news. Use Augment Codes CLI for automated code review. What if you could run a full code review from the command line?

5:00No pull request, no waiting. Just a well-done code review by a senior-level engineer with full context of all the changes. That's exactly what Augment Code's Augie CLI makes possible. It hooks straight into your repo and runs the same deep reasoning you'd expect from a reviewer, but instantly and on demand. Why does this matter? Code review isn't just about catching bugs. It's about catching bugs and security concerns early. The CLI shifts review left, letting you see what Augie thinks before you ever open a PR. That means faster feedback loops, fewer back and forth comments, and a smoother handoff to your team.

5:37It's a provocative idea. What if automated review at the CLI became as routine as calling Git status? Learn more at AugmentCo.com. The link to the blog post is in our companion newsletter. Ditching Docker for Podman. Dominic Cizomanski is old enough to remember when Vagrant looked like a promised land where every development environment would look the same. Then came Docker. Quote,

6:13End quote. After many years of Docker use, Dominic's thoughts on Docker began to change. Quote, Along the way, the quiet Docker daemon running in the background felt less like a comfortable constant and more like a ticking bomb. End quote. The long-running daemon, Dominic believes, is Docker's security downfall, so he went looking for alternatives. Enter Podman. Quote, beyond the obvious daemon advantages, Podman brings some genuinely clever features that make day-to-day container work more pleasant, such as system de-integration that doesn't suck, Kubernetes alignment that's not just marketing, and the Unix philosophy done right, end quote.

6:54If that's enough to get your attention, I have good news. Dominic says switching from Docker to Podman was almost seamless. Stripe announces a new layer one blockchain. Developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s, Tempo is a new payments focused blockchain that supports all major stable coins. But why? Quote, stable coins enable instant, borderless, programmable transactions, but current blockchain infrastructure isn't designed for them. Existing systems are either fully general or trading focused. Tempo is a blockchain designed and built for real world payments. End quote.

7:33Tempo will be EVM compatible, but it isn't meant to displace other general purpose blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, etc. Because it's entirely focused on high volume payment use cases. That being said, high volume payment use cases that route around the banks and credit card companies stranglehold on transfer fees are, so far at least, the killer app of general purpose blockchains. We'll have to wait and see how this plays out. Tempo has been announced, but it's not yet public. There is an invite-only testnet at the moment, and it will be validated by a diverse group of independent entities at launch.

8:10In other words, it'll only be as decentralized as Stripe wants it to be before they transition to a permissionless model. 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 Cloudflare's AI Insights, SpecKit by GitHub, and package managers are evil. Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. 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.