Programmer Weekly (Issue 266 August 28 2025)

Author

Rahul Chaudhary
August 28, 2025

Welcome to issue 266 of Programmer Weekly. Let's get straight to the links this week.

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Quote of the Week

"Programmers don’t die. They just GoSub Without Return." — Unknown


Reading List

A series of posts where we write a fast bytecode compiler and a virtual machine for arithmetic in Haskell.

Claude Code stands out because it pairs deep simplicity with thoughtful tooling: leveraging a single control loop, well-designed prompts, and tiered toolsets to make AI-assisted coding intuitive and delightful.

We rewrote Telemetry Harbor’s ingest pipeline from Python FastAPI to Go after hitting severe performance limits. The switch delivered 10x efficiency, improved data integrity with strict typing, and gave us a stable, scalable foundation for high-volume time-series data ingestion.

Attackers can hide malicious prompts in images that become visible only after being downscaled—tricking AI systems like Gemini CLI and Vertex AI Studio into executing hidden instructions. Trail of Bits demonstrates these “image scaling” exploits and introduces Anamorpher, an open-source tool to craft and test such attacks, while also proposing defenses.

A developer created a lightweight, local-first sync system using SQLite in the browser with JSON polling, DB triggers, and the Broadcast Channel API to enable reactivity, sidestepping more complex tools like PGlite or Electric. This simple setup powers a seamless, near‑real‑time notes app without loading delays.

Calm’s engineering team migrated their Rush.js monorepo to use Node’s native type stripping, skipping traditional transpilation to run TypeScript files directly. This improved both local builds and CI speed, made possible by a new testing approach that focused on stubbing classes instead of modules.

AI has shifted software products from deterministic, pre-defined outcomes to probabilistic, stochastic systems, requiring new approaches for design, measurement, and organization. To succeed, companies must embrace empirical, data-driven practices, focusing on managing uncertainty and leveraging emergent user behaviors instead of controlling for reliability.

A decade in software engineering taught the author that growth comes from embracing technical challenges, refining communication, and shifting toward business impact. Ultimately, building and leading teams while staying hands-on proved key to balancing leadership and continuous learning.


Watch, Listen

This episode explores how building a Heroku-like cloud platform at scale involves solving deep technical challenges around reliability, configurability, and user experience. Render’s CEO highlights the balancing act between catering to broad developer needs and managing system complexity, especially as AI-driven workflows reshape platform requirements and feature prioritization.

This tutorial guides viewers through building an AI-powered e-commerce chat assistant using LangChain, MongoDB Atlas, and Google Gemini as the AI agent. The project covers backend setup, database seeding, agent orchestration, and frontend integration for creating a responsive shopping helper with autonomous, multi-step actions.

Developers should treat AI prompts and context like production code, evolving, testing, and versioning them as shared assets to boost team productivity. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables effective prompt distribution and management across organizations, making prompt management more critical than improved models for real-world AI success.


Interesting Projects, Tools and Libraries

11 Lessons to Get Started Building AI Agents.

An opinionated Arch + Hyprland Setup.

An initiative to raise awareness of security vulnerabilities in agentic AI systems.

Modern Backend Framework that unifies APIs, background jobs, workflows, and AI Agents into a single core primitive with built-in observability and state management.

Open-source LLMOps platform for hosting and scaling AI in your own infrastructure.

Smalltalk development in your browser and Node.js

A fast, terminal-native document viewer for Word files. View, search, and export .docx documents without leaving your command line.

Create and share live, interactive wallpapers with HTML/CSS/JS for Windows 10 & 11.

High Performance, Resource Efficient OpenTelemetry Collection.


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