What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, July 14th, 2025. At risk of unleashing your green monster, I just *have* to report that researchers in Japan have [achieved a world](https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/download-all-of-netflix-in-one-second-researchers-in-japan-just-broke-the-internet-speed-record/) record in data transmission speed at <strike>1.21 jigowatts</strike> 1.02 Petabits per second over 1,123 miles. Just how fast is that?! It's more than 3.5 million times faster than the average internet speed (~300Mbps) in the US right now. Jealous yet? Ok, let's get into the news.
Break: Jerod Santo:[An app can be a home-cooked meal](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/) This post by Robin Sloan was originally penned in Feburary, 2020, but I'm sharing it now because this new wave of vibe coding tools makes it even more true now than when he wrote it: > I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruthlessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it. I wanted to share a few notes about how and why I made it, both to (a) offer a nudge to anyone else considering a similar project, and (b) suggest something a little larger about software. That "something a little larger about software" that he's referring to, is that the "learn to code" movement was mostly about market value, but the "learn to cook" movement almost never is. Robin suggests that if we think of coding more like cooking, we can use software to make our little world a better place. > This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty? > > Is it simply … the feeling of being home? From one perspective, AI coding tools are scary because they threaten our market value. From a different perspective, AI coding tools unlock a world of opportunity to create home-cooked software never before possible (or worth the effort). Yeah, let's do more of that.
Break: Jerod Santo:[Google hires Windsurf CEO](https://web.archive.org/web/20250711213611/https://www.theverge.com/openai/705999/google-windsurf-ceo-openai) If you thought OpenAI was buying Windsurf for *boo koo bucks*, you were once right, but now you're wrong. That deal is off. Instead, Google is hiring CEO Varun Mohan, cofounder Douglas Chen, and "some of Windsurf's R&D employees" for their DeepMind team. Not an acquisition. Just hiring them for, yes, *boo koo bucks*. This seems like a great deal for Google (cleaner than an acquisition in almost every way), a great deal for Windsurf's founders (they got a large portion of those bucks), but a raw deal for the remaining Windsurf employees who have equity and/or options in the company. Google isn't alone. Microsoft and Meta have made similar moves recently. Be careful out there, especially if you're considering non-cash compensation at an AI-related startup, which is quickly becoming the only kind of startup that exists.
Break: Jerod Santo:[It's "too late" for Intel](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/intel-ceo-says-its-too-late-for-them-to-catch-up-with-ai-competition-claims-intel-has-fallen-out-of-the-top-10-semiconductor-companies-as-the-firm-lays-off-thousands-across-the-world) It's difficult to fathom how fast (and hard) Intel has fallen from the top of the semiconductor world. Here's a report from the mouth of new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan: > On training, I think it is too late for us... Twenty, 30 years ago, we were really the leader. Now I think the world has changed. We are not in the top 10 semiconductor companies. Yikes. They've already laid off thousands of employees around the world and their costs continue to explode due to high R&D spending and they faced a $16 billion loss in Q3 last year. To put their fall in perspective, there was a day when Intel considering acquiring Nvidia for $20 billion. Now Nvidia's market cap is 40x the size of Intel's...
Break: Jerod Santo:It's now time for sponsored news! [Depot build autoscaling for everyone](https://depot.dev/blog/build-autoscaling-now-generally-available) Depot just launched general availability for build autoscaling, which dynamically scales your remote build capacity based on workload demand. Whether you’re pushing one commit or a hundred, your builds stay fast—without managing any infrastructure. And it's available today on all paid plans. Here's Founder and CEO Kyle Gailbrath: > When we first launched Depot, our goal was to make Docker image builds exponentially faster. Why? Because we experienced the absolute drudgery of waiting for container builds locally and in CI. The modern day equivalent of watching paint dry because saving and loading layer cache over networks negated all performance benefits of caching, and building multi-platform images required emulation, bringing builds to a crawl. So, we built the solution we had always wanted: a fast, shareable, and reliable container build service that could be used from any existing CI workflow or anywhere you were using "docker build". Learn more at [Depot.dev](https://depot.dev/blog/build-autoscaling-now-generally-available).
Break: Jerod Santo:[Stop forcing AI tools on your engineers](https://newsletter.manager.dev/p/stop-forcing-ai-tools-on-your-engineers) Anton Zaides, imploring people in leadership roles to stop forcing AI on their engineers: > I’m definitely NOT saying that we should ignore those tools. There ARE engineers who are old-fashioned and resist without giving it a real chance. You do have a responsibility to help your team adapt to the new world (and it IS a new world). > > But there are so many better ways to do it I couldn't agree more! Here's a few better ways that Anton suggests: 1. Give time to explore 2. Share what worked in your org 3. Give people time to adopt it their way This jives with Abi Noda's response when I asked him how he's approaching AI adoption at DX in last week's Friends (link 👇). Abi referenced Netflix as an example of an organization that employees *super* smart engineers and has been *super* quiet about AI adoption because they're just letting their *super* smart engineers make *super* smart decisions about AI just like they tend to make *super* smart decisions about other tooling choices. Seems like a *super* smart way to go about it.
Break: Jerod Santo:[Ten years of running every day, visualized](https://nodaysoff.run/) Adrien Friggeri went for a run on July 11, 2015. And every single day since. It started like many streaks start, with small inhibitions: > I headed out on a run on a Tuesday, then did another one the next day, and the day after, and… I took the Friday off. When I woke up on July 11, 2015 I remember thinking I could have done 4 days in a row, so I set out to try and do that. 4 days turned into a week, then a month, then two, then six, then a year, and here I am, ten years later. He didn't merely run every day, he tracked his running (via Strava) and documented his runs, creating compelling visualizations of his annual mileage, workout activity by time of day, treadmill vs outdoor distributions, pace, heart zone rates, weather conditions, states / countries / continents visited... you name it. On the overall impact of running, Adrien says: > Running has changed my life, and I hope I'll still keep this going in another decade. I've been extremely lucky to have had the support of my wonderful wife Molly throughout this journey, and I couldn't have done it without her patience, how many times has she heard me say *I'll be back in a few*! in the mornings. An impressive achievement and an inspiring set of visualizations that are so good, I *almost* went for a run, myself. Then I remembered how much I hate it...
Break: Jerod Santo: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: - [Vercel acquires NuxtLabs](https://vercel.com/blog/nuxtlabs-joins-vercel) - [Firefox is fine. The people running it are not](https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/08/firefox_isnt_dead/) - [A human-friendly alternative to netstat](https://github.com/theopfr/somo) Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news. Last week on the pod: Don MacKinnon joined us to talk Searchcraft and Abi Noda from DX shared some cold, hard data on just how productive AI coding tools are actually making developers We have some great episodes coming up this week: - **Wed**: Adam does a founders talk with Retool's David Hsu - **Fri**: Nick Nisi joins us to discuss the news Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.