Linus Torvalds gets the AI coding bug (News) - The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source

What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 12th, 2026. Have you heard? Stack Overflow is dead. Have you heard? Stack Overflow's revenue has doubled since 2022. The culprit on both accounts: I don't even have to tell you... With a scant 6,866 questions asked last month, Stack Overflow as we once knew it is now a relic of a bygone age. (src) Ok, let's get into this week's news.

Linus Torvalds gets the AI coding bug Vibe coders rejoiced after Linus Torvalds (an S-tier hacker and infamous curmudgeon) pushed some Python code to his AudioNoise repo written by an AI. The commit message: > This is Google Antigravity fixing up my visualization tool (which was also generated with help from google, but of the normal kind). > > It mostly went smoothly, although I had to figure out what the problem with using the builtin rectangle select was. After telling antigravity to just do a custom RectangleSelector, things went much better. > > Is this much better than I could do by hand? Sure is. Who's next, Ken Thompson?!

2026 is the year of self-hosting Jordan Fulghum: > I've wanted to self-host at home for years, but I always bounced off it - too much time spent configuring instead of using. It just wasn't fun. > > That changed recently, because CLI agents like Claude Code make self-hosting on a cheapo home server dramatically easier and actually fun. > > This is the first time I would recommend it to normie/software-literate people who never really wanted to sign up to become a sysadmin and stress about uptime of core personal services. This resonates with me. I self-hosted for many years, but grew tired of the regularly scheduled minutia. Now that I don't have to personally edit every config, schedule system updates, manage security settings, et cetera, et cetera... I'm excited about self-hosting once again. Could AI agents usher in a golden age for self-hosting? It's certainly feasible.

Formatting JSON for compact, human readability > Most JSON libraries give you a choice between two formatting options. Minified JSON is very efficient, but difficult for a person to read. Most beautified/indented JSON, on the other hand, is too spread out, often making it difficult to take in quickly or to scan for specific information. FracturedJson provides a middle ground, trying to format data "like a person would." The end result is pretty great, especially if reading JSON output is relatively new to you. Eventually, your brain does the translating. I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead. 😏

The great flood of adequate software Scott Werner: > Someone recently said to me that there was a last time you and your friends played outside as kids and nobody knew it was the last time. It made me realize that there was also a last time you clicked "Close" on that WinRAR evaluation notice. One day you just... stopped seeing it. And the silence where the nag screen used to be feels louder than the nag screen ever was. > > There's this thing about nostalgia that nobody warns you about. One day you're ignoring WinRAR's 40-day trial notification for the 4,000th time, and the next day you're... actually missing it? Scott thinks we're about to experience a storm of "Thursday afternoon projects" being released to the world. Not revolutionary, world-changing projects. Just... adequate ones.

You can't design software you don't work on Sean Goedecke with another banger: > Only the engineers who work on a large software system can meaningfully participate in the design process. That’s because you cannot do good software design without an intimate understanding of the concrete details of the system. In other words, **generic software design advice is typically useless** for most practical software design problems. Unfortunately, this is the only kind of advice you'll read in software books and blog posts. Blog posts, Sean admits, like the ones he writes on the regular. 🤣 > In a world where you could rewrite the entire system at will, generic software design advice would be much more practical. Some projects are like this! But **the majority of software engineering work is done on systems that cannot be safely rewritten**. These systems cannot rely on “software design”, but must instead rely on internal consistency and the carefulness of their engineers. Be careful out there...

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