The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Pivoting to Retool (Interview)

David Hsu from Retool joins Adam to discuss how he built Retool. From the pivot in YC, to building the most widely used internal tools platform, to now being the platform for AI agents in the enterprise—on this episode we cover David journey from YC to building agents for the enterprise. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform. Start building at Auth0.com/ai CodeRabbit – AI-native code reviews, built for the modern dev stack. — CodeRabbit is your always-on code reviewer—flagging hallucinations, surfacing smells, and enforcing standards, all without leaving your IDE or GitHub PRs. Trusted by top teams to ship better code, faster. Start free at CodeRabbit.ai Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring:David Hsu – Website, LinkedInAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Retool on Y Combinator – YC-backed company building internal tools fast Retool Agents – Use AI Agents to automate workflows with natural language and data access Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

An app can be a home-cooked meal (News)

Researchers in Japan achieve a world record in data transmission speeds, Robin Sloan explains how an app can be a home-cooked meal, Windsurf founders Varun Mohan & Douglas Chen are headed to Google, new Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says it’s too late for the incumbent, Anton Zaides says stop forcing AI tools on your engineers, and Adrien Friggeri visualized his ten-year running streak. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Measuring the actual impact of AI coding (Friends)

Abi Noda from DX is back to share some cold, hard data on just how productive AI coding tools are actually making developers. Teaser: the productivity increase isn’t as high as we expected. We also discuss Jevons paradox, AI agents as extensions of humans, which tools are winning in the enterprise, how development budgets are changing, and more. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform. Start building at Auth0.com/ai Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Outshift by Cisco – AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It’s a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Featuring:Abi Noda – Website, GitHub, LinkedInJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XAdam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Measuring AI code assistants and agents DX Core 4 Reporting Jevons paradox - Wikipedia Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Lightspeed search built for devs (Interview)

We talk with Don MacKinnon, Co-founder and CTO of Searchcraft—a lightspeed search engine built in Rust. We dig into the future of search, how it blends vector embeddings with classic ranking, and what it takes to build developer-friendly, production-grade search from the ground up. Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 6 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Auth0 – The identity infrastructure for the age of AI. Built by developers, for developers—Auth0 helps you secure users, agents, and third-party access across modern AI workflows. Token vaulting, fine-grained authorization, and standards-based auth, all in one platform. Start building at Auth0.com/ai Depot – 10x faster builds? Yes please. Build faster. Waste less time. Accelerate Docker image builds, and GitHub Actions workflows. Easily integrate with your existing CI provider and dev workflows to save hours of build time. Outshift by Cisco – AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It’s a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Featuring:Don MacKinnon – Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XJerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, XShow Notes: Searchcraft Importing and searching all of Wikipedia on a Raspberry Pi Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Full-breadth developers for the win (News)

Justin Searls describes the “full-breadth developer” and why they’ll win because AI, Cloudflare comes up with a way publishers can charge crawlers for access, Hugo Bowne-Anderson explains why building AI agents fails so often, the Job Worth Calculator tells you if your job is worth the grind, and Sam Lambert announces PlanetScale for Postgres. View the newsletterJoin the discussionChangelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:CodeRabbit – Supercharge your dev team with AI code reviews. Featuring:Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X