5 Quick Links for Devs: Week 18, 2025

Before GitHub

Armin Ronacher reflects on life before Github, when OS lived on services like SourceForge and Bitbucket. I even remember when I first started coding and version control to me meant naming my files with suffixes and dates :) While Github's popularity brought with it some gifts to the OS community, Ronacher's theme is that the spirit of Github has been corrupted, and this is leading to many of the original supporters of Github to begin abandoning it. To go where? That's still to be decided.

The Future of Everything is Lies

There is a large and growing resistance to the inevitability of agentic coding and the AI revolution. While the engaging promises of the machine learning wave are enthusiastically repeated, on the ground many of these promises have yet to bear fruit, while the costs and tradeoffs of this wave are already evident. 
Kyle Kingsbury likens the AI revolution to the introduction of the automobile, which carried with it not only the gift of speed and freedom but also the destruction of third spaces, rampant pollution and unhinged urban sprawl. Many of the negative effects of the adoption of the automobile could have been mitigated if we had spent time to anticipate these effects, and it would be in our best interest to engage in that introspection now, while we still have the chance. 
Related: Societal effects of cars

Staring at walls to improve focus and productivity

Information overload is a real issue in this day and age, and in a career where we work on connected devices all day long, it's a daily challenge. While I've tried meditation, Pomodoros, and long walks, I haven't tried just staring at a wall in between coding sessions. Yet. Apparently it's all the rage and quite helpful for triggering a cognitive reset :) Worth a try!
Related: I Tried the World's Simplest Productivity Trick (it worked)

How An Oil Refinery Works

I recently began diving into books on the history of energy usage and infrastructure, and right now I'm reading 'The Prize' which is the history of oil / petroleum over the period from the mid-1850s through to the 1970's (I highly recommend it). While the book touches on the process of oil refinement, that is, how we go from the raw, heavy, dirty material mined from the earth through to cleanly separated materials with vastly different uses, this blog post takes a more focused dive into fractional distillation and catalytic cracking, among other things. I find it fascinating that our modern world runs on the by-products of a rich organic sludge created by deep time and the corpses of countless organisms and plant matter.

Agentic Coding is a Trap

This is going to be one of the last 'AI coding is destroying our brains' articles that I will post, since they have mainly balanced out the 'Agentic coding is the machine god' articles I have shared so far :) Like most tools, we can use LLM-assisted coding carefully and safely, or we can be irresponsible and inject it directly into our brains while our minds atrophy. 
I've oscillated between the two and my current point of view is that I will use agentic coding tools, and I recommend every professional developer to do the same, but not at the expense of understanding the code you're deploying, and not as a replacement for learning about the technologies that we use every day.