Programmer Weekly (Issue 264 July 31 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
July 31, 2025

Welcome to issue 264 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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Quote of the Week

“The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.” — Douglas McIlroy


Reading List

How Carta’s internal AI agents save thousands of hours of back-and-forth work.

The article explains that AI evaluations ("evals") are structured benchmarks and tests designed to measure the performance of coding-capable AI models, defining what "good" output looks like to systematically track improvements or regressions. It highlights how evals use tasks with gold-standard solutions ("goldens"), automated scoring (including LLM-based auto-raters), and an iterative “hill climbing” approach to continuously refine models by analyzing failures and improving with targeted training and prompt adjustments, thus guiding AI development from coding correctness to true software engineering capability.

JavaScript runtimes have rapidly multiplied over the past decade, extending from browsers to the cloud, edge, mobile devices, and beyond, with engines like V8, JavaScriptCore, and others now coexisting to meet diverse performance and compatibility needs.

The article demonstrates that generative AI and LLM applications can be critically vulnerable to simple manipulation, with attackers often only needing to craft the right prompt or input to bypass safeguards or extract sensitive information. It highlights how straightforward requests or cleverly phrased prompts can exploit weaknesses in AI systems, leading to risks such as prompt injection, data leaks, and unintended behaviors.

In the speed-obsessed world of today, better performance comes with serious business gains. This frontend performance checklist is a cumulative list of items that we at Crystallize found important in 2025 when creating a Superfast web application.

The PyroWave codec is a custom ultra-low latency video codec for game streaming, offering encoding and decoding in mere tenths of a millisecond on GPUs. It sacrifices bandwidth for speed and efficiency, enabling fast, low-power streaming ideal for local networks and devices like the Steam Deck

The article introduces Jujutsu (jj), a modern, Git-compatible version control system written in Rust that simplifies and streamlines coding workflows for busy developers. It replaces Git’s traditional branch-based model with a flexible, branchless workflow focused on changes rather than commits, offering features like easy undo, interactive conflict resolution, and efficient merging that improve productivity and reduce complexity in managing code revisions.

Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.


Watch, Listen

Nadia Odunayo, founder and sole developer of The StoryGraph, describes how she scaled a Ruby on Rails application to support over four million users across web and mobile platforms by leveraging tools like Turbo Native and moving from Heroku to YugabyteDB for database scalability. The episode explores her technical choices, the challenges of remaining a solo developer, and how the Rails community and ecosystem enabled her to run a high-volume platform without a team.

This talk explores how pursuing fundamental simplicity in software design leads to compounding benefits like performance, correctness, and maintainability. Through practical examples from TigerBeetle, he shows that simplicity is achieved by systematically eliminating unnecessary complexity in tools, processes, and code—making even "boring" tasks the foundation for robust systems.

Laura Tacho, CTO of DX, shares findings from 180+ companies on how AI is really impacting dev productivity, what most teams get wrong, and why measuring dev experience first is critical.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

AI Design Agent for Your IDE.

Ivory is designed to simplify and visualise work with Postgres clusters. It provides patroni management ui and postgres query builder.

The glamourous AI coding agent for your favourite terminal.

Janet is a functional and imperative programming language. The entire language (core library, interpreter, compiler, assembler, PEG) is less than 1MB. You can also add Janet scripting to an application by embedding a single C source file and a single header.

Linux Bash Script for the Paranoid Admin on a Budget - real-time monitoring and active threat response.

An open-source AI agent that brings the power of Grok directly into your terminal.

Next-Gen Big Data File Format.


Our Other Newsletters

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