Newsletter

A quiet capture stretch meant reaching back to early October to fill this out, so this issue covers four weeks, not one. The theme that kept surfacing: AI makes building cheap, and everyone from solo engineers to Cisco and Anthropic is working out what that does to the rest of the job. AI promised less work. I’ve never worked more — Orestis Ioannou leads engineering and should be writing less code than ever. Their GitHub history says otherwise: August 2026 was the busiest month since 2019, at 427 contributions. The diagnosis rings true. Cheap implementation removes the friction that used to stop a yes, and review and context switching become the new bottleneck. Discuss → ...

This issue covers three weeks, not one. Archivore’s capture pipeline sat idle from Sep 23 to Oct 11 — a scheduling gap, now fixed — so this catches up on everything that piled up behind it. Fifteen picks below: Git’s coming break with its own past, three separate corrections to AI-industry hype, a surveillance fight in Missouri, and a wooden typewriter that, against its own warning label, actually types. Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0 — Git’s next release carries routine fixes; the one after, likely 3.0, breaks the project’s defaults for the first time in two decades: SHA-256 hashes instead of SHA-1, reftables instead of flat ref files, mandatory Rust in the build. GitHub still can’t read SHA-256 repositories, which is the real reason the switch has waited this long. Read this before you upgrade blind if you maintain scripts or submodules that assume SHA-1. Discuss → ...

Fifteen things worth your time from the past week, pulled out of whatever archivore caught me reading. A quieter week for big model releases, a heavier one for people arguing about who’s stealing from whom. I don’t like passkeys — Ethan Hawksley argues passkeys solve the wrong threat model for an individual. They kill phishing, but do nothing about the risk that actually ends most people’s accounts: losing the one device they’re bound to. Hardware keys cap out at 25–300 accounts each; synced passkeys tie your whole identity to Apple or Google, so one account ban costs you everything at once. Discuss → ...