The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

Gavriel Cohen, creator of NanoClaw and co-founder of NanoCo, joins Adam to explain how a 40-hour weekend project became a viral open source hit and the foundation of an enterprise AI company. Gavriel describes the security concerns that led him to build a small, container-isolated alternative to OpenClaw, why he released it under the MIT license, and why the project’s community and credibility are more valuable than keeping its code private.

They explore the shift from writing code to architecting the environments in which agents work, NanoClaw’s “skills over features” approach, the approval and governance layers required inside large companies, and a future where every worker manages agents without surrendering human judgment. They close with the technical simplicity behind NanoClaw, containers, TypeScript, SQLite, and a two-database design, and Adam’s case for durable Agent Flow artifacts that keep organizational context from disappearing into chat.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Gavriel Cohen – LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week I’m joined by Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal.com. What if the majority of open source repositories are already compromised and we just don’t know it yet? That’s the theory Peer brings to the table this week. We dig into how AI has flattened the knowledge graph to the point that a 16-year-old can vibe hack a power station just as easily as their mom can vibe code an iOS app, why the reporting culture that has kept open source safe all these years is collapsing under AI generated noise, Cal.com’s move to fork its own codebase and take the sensitive parts private, and the eye opening reality that shipping “$1 of AI tokens for pennies on the dollar” is now a common startup business model.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Peer Richelsen – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Editorial disclosure: Adam states in the episode that he is a small seed investor in Cal.com.

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki “do-over” of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.

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• Buildkite – You deserve better CI. Buildkite is engineered for frontier scale and trusted by the teams setting the pace.

Featuring:

• Sam Lambert – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Haroon Meer is back! Haroon is the Founder of Thinkst, the ~50-person bootstrapped company behind Canary and Canarytokens — honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can’t resist trying, the real credit card token backed by an actual bank partnership, Breadcrumbs (their brand-new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries), a live demo where a hardware Canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in ten years quietly passed $22.5 million in ARR.

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Sponsors:

• Buildkite – You deserve better CI. Buildkite is engineered for frontier scale and trusted by the teams setting the pace.

Featuring:

• Haroon Meer – Website, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week I’m talking with Max Stoiber, currently working on ChatGPT’s plugin directory and app platform at OpenAI. We discuss the hundreds of open source projects nobody remembers alongside the big ones like react-boilerplate and styled-components, how Spectrum became part of GitHub and eventually helped shape GitHub Discussions, the founder growth that came from building Stellate, the GraphQL cache that turned into a dual acquisition by Shopify and The Guild, and why ChatGPT apps feel like a new surface for software.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Max Stoiber – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week I’m talking with Matt Carey about Code Mode and how most of us have been thinking about MCP all wrong. Matt works on the Agents SDK and MCP at Cloudflare — we discuss how server-side Code Mode lets one MCP server expose all ~2,500 Cloudflare API endpoints in about 1,000 tokens of context, the dynamic Worker loader that runs model-written code safely in a V8 isolate, Matt’s own workflow with Claude, where memory fits into the future of agents, and his Zaggy git wrapper that keeps agents from force-pushing his repos.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Matt Carey – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

This week I’m talking with Adam Jacob, founder of System Initiative and creator of Swamp, about what happens when AI agents change the entire shape of software development. We discuss how he went from an 18-person team down to five and shipped Swamp 900 times in four weeks, why he brought User Acceptance Testing (UAT) testing back from the 90s, why software architecture (and domain-driven design) suddenly matters more than knowing how to write code, the live demo where I pointed Swamp at my Proxmox box and watched it write its own automation (blew my mind!!), and why he’ll never accept a pull request to Swamp, ever.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Adam Jacob – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Bitwarden’s CLI got hit by the Checkmarx supply-chain campaign, TypeScript 7.0 beta lands with the Go-rewritten compiler running ~10x faster than 6.0, and pgBackRest lost its maintainer of thirteen years leaving anyone running production Postgres with a real dependency-trust task this week. We’ve also got Ubuntu 26.04 LTS shipping with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, and Matz dropping Spinel as an AOT path that takes Ruby to native binaries. This week was a good reminder that the tools we depend on are all moving at once. Security, performance, and maintenance aren’t isolated threads.

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Sponsors:

• Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.

Featuring:

• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Today on the show I’m talking with Amelia Wattenberger — designer, data-viz veteran, ex-GitHub Next, and now designing Intent at Augment Code. What if the last 30% of any software project is about to become the hardest part you’ve ever done? That’s the argument Amelia is making today. We discuss the identity crisis developers are having as agents take over the keyboard, the epic redesign of developer tooling in this agent-first world, the arc from autocomplete to chat to CLI back to UI, why Intent treats a workspace as their core primitive not a chat thread, the tradeoffs between one-worktree-per-agent vs. one-worktree-per-task, and why she thinks prototyping just got easier but finishing got harder.

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Sponsors:

• WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com

Featuring:

• Amelia Wattenberger – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Astral is joining OpenAI, which says a lot about where the center of gravity is moving for developer tools, LiteLLM got hit by a nasty supply-chain attack, and OpenCode blew up as the latest serious open source swing at the coding-agent stack. We’ve also got Rust doing a very public reality check on its own pain points, WorkOS pushing AuthKit into CLI auth, Ryan Lizza using AI to build an open source TurboTax alternative, and a fresh httpx fork that turns open source maintenance drama into a real dependency story. If nothing else, this week was a good reminder that tools, trust, and control all move together.

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Join the discussion

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Sponsors:

• WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com

Featuring:

• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X