ByteCode.News

A release to Maven Central used to cost more than the code being released.

A recent discussion on how AI was used effectively made me wonder what "effective" or "better" meant, because there's no way to test the alternative any more to compare.

Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing.

Sean Goedecke argues that domain expertise is the real prompting skill.

Xberg 1.0 has been released.

There's no standard for marking AI contribution, and there can't be, because contribution isn't a scalar.

Baldur Bjarnason argues that development tools win by making developers replaceable.

Imran Nazar recreated a JavaScript animation demo on 1982 hardware and wrote up every decision along the way: 6510 assembler, fixed-point math with no floating point available, a CPU bug turned into a cosine lookup.

An essay from the creator of Primate argues that the JavaScript ecosystem traded cohesion for composition and has been paying for the seams ever since.

Andi Roberts wrote up Alex Pentland's research on why some teams outperform others.

Reader Hideki Idoru argues that AI is a decent information distiller and a bad tool for nearly everything else in software, because no one can cheaply verify that generated code is correct.

Ray Myers wrote up the Bun rewrite and the fight around it.

Java stripped out the SecurityManager and offered nothing in its place.

A Reddit user on r/SaaS is looking forward to the consulting rates he'll command once the wave of projects trying to dig out from under AI slop hits.

Christian Rackerseder argues that the real axis for testing decisions isn't integration versus end-to-end, it's control: whether a team can make a dependency predictable enough for a given test and actually act when it fails.

Roseau, a new breaking-change detector for Java libraries, compares your code against your last released baseline and fails the build when the API contract breaks.

Sven Reinck wants dependency diagrams that nudge you toward clean architecture by looking wrong when the code is wrong.

Bun was ported from Zig to Rust by an LLM and passed nearly all its tests - while shipping more than ten thousand unsafe blocks.

GraphCompose is an MIT-licensed Java DSL for generating PDFs from a semantic document model, with themed templates for CVs, invoices, proposals, and reports built in.The 1.6.4 release adds clip-path shape containers, advanced tables, and two new business…

Christian Ekrem's 'The Tacit Dimension' carries Polanyi's 'we can know more than we can tell' into software engineering.

The OpenLiberty project has released OpenLiberty 26.0.0.5, with official support for Jakarta EE 11 across Core, Web, and Platform profiles, and support for Spring Boot 4 JAR files as opposed to WAR files.

The MetBeans IDE has been updated: NetBeans 30 has been released.

This is a working example of using red/green testing to fix a bug - one that starts in the issue description and lives in the code.

Github user asmo0dey has created an application that provides live audience polling for slidev presentations, using docker, Spring, vue, and either PostgreSQL or H2.

Kirk Pepperdine has released gcsee-jma, a GC analysis tool for Java.

Christian Rackerseder makes the case that developer experience is a performance feature.

David M.

AI code is not the enemy.

JavaScript has no standard library, so reading a file looks different in Node, Deno, and Bun. rcompat is a thin abstraction that gives you one API and uses runtime keys to dispatch to each runtime's native implementation underneath, with branded identity…

Rasmus Ros wrote "From Stringly to Strongly Typed," an article describing a Kotlin library that solves one half of typed schema access: how to read the data.

Alexander Hanff has documented two AI-vendor stealth installs in two weeks: Claude Desktop registering Native Messaging bridges across seven Chromium browsers, and Chrome writing 4GB of Gemini Nano weights to disk on every eligible device.

Simon Willison wrote up a summary of Zig's policy on LLM contribution this morning, suggesting that Zig can afford it because it has PR oversupply and downstream users wealthy enough to fork the project at need.

Jordan Lord lays out three constraints he applies before building anything: a one-page description that survives without padding, a piece of core tech that can outlive the product, and a single defining constraint that shapes the user experience.

Quarkdown, a documentation system using "markdown with superpowers", has been released.

Dragonfly is a multithreaded ground-up reimplementation of the Redis wire protocol, described as being designed to scale vertically where Redis can't.

JetBrains just published a survey on why AI adoption lags in CI/CD.

Leaning Technologies released CheerpJ 4.3, a WebAssembly-packaged JVM that runs unmodified Java applications — including applets, JNLP applications, and Oracle Forms — in a browser without a plugin.

Timefold Solver, OptaPlanner's successor, hits 2.0 with list variables promoted, a new Neighborhoods API, and a quietly consequential license shift: the explainability APIs you built on in 1.x now require a commercial edition.

TypeScript 7.0 Beta represents a fundamental architectural shift for the language, with the entire compiler rewritten in Go rather than bootstrapped TypeScript.

Jim Manico of Manicode Security showed OWASP London a disciplined approach to bootstrapping projects with Claude Code using scripted prompts that generate ARCHITECTURE, SECURITY, and CLAUDE files in sequence, each reviewed and committed before the next.

The "10x engineer" may be a real phenomenon, in that some people really do vastly outperform their peers along certain metrics, but "10x output" is the wrong thing to optimize for: you want to find the people who create exponential output for the whole te…

Chicory Redline delivers native-speed WebAssembly on the JVM by compiling the Cranelift compiler to Wasm and running it through Chicory itself - native code, bundled in a JAR, with no JNI required.

Zig 0.16 is a significant release that breaks a lot of existing code on purpose.

JetBrains' Koog agent framework now integrates directly with Spring AI, layering agent orchestration - multi-step workflows, fault-tolerant checkpointing, history compression - on top of your existing Spring AI setup without replacing it.

Pilot 0.1.0 is a Maven plugin that provides a text console for the Java build tool, providing features like update checking, conflict detection, CVE auditing, dependence tree display, and more in a text console application.

Roq 2.1.0, a Quarkus-based static site generator, has been released with an embedded editor, Tailwind support, and several other enhancements.

Terminal Trove mentioned Matt Hartley's `netwatch` tool as its "tool of the week:" netwatch is a network diagnostic tool for the console, and it's pretty comprehensive, showing a ton of information about network traffic in a quite reasonable, useful inter…

MethodHandle has been in the JDK since Java 7, and most Java developers have a vague sense that it exists somewhere near invokedynamic and lambda internals.

Most teams don't trust their code - they trust the people who wrote it, or the streak of days without incident.

pg_6502 is a fully functional MOS 6502 emulator running in pure PostgreSQL - registers, memory, and all 151 opcodes implemented as stored procedures.