The mythical agent-month (News)

What up, nerds? Sheboy. I'm Jared, and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, 02/23/2026. Today, we have some change log news news. This is my final episode. Starting next week, my good friend, Adam Stokowiak, will be taking care of you. Yes. After thirteen years, 1,042 podcasts, 452 newsletters, and countless friends made along the way, it is time for a change. I will write more about this decision and the future on my blog, and we'll discuss it together on Friday's friends episode, which will also be my last. Until then, thanks for logging with me and definitely don't unsubscribe. I'm sure Adam's change log news will be great. Okay. Let's get in this week's news. The mythical agent months. Wes McKinney has been wondering what many of us have been wondering. Quote, among my inner circle of engineering and data science friends, there is a lot of discussion about how long our competitive edge as humans will last. Will having good ideas and lots of them still matter as the agents begin having better ideas themselves? End quote. For now, West feels needed. But with things changing so rapidly, he wonders how much software engineering's past will inform software engineering's future. With that in mind, he decided to revisit one of his and my favorite books on the topic, Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month. In so doing, West discovered that the book's themes are still highly relevant in agentic software and that its follow-up, no silver bullet, predicts the exact problem he's having in his agentic engineering. Quote, the accidental complexity is no problem at all anymore, but what's left is the essential complexity which was always the hard part. Agents can't reliably tell the difference. End quote. Thought provoking stuff, definitely worth a read. Employ a peon today. I clicked the copy to clipboard button on the brew install command approximately zero point three seconds after landing on this peon ping website. What could possibly be so compelling? Quote, gain character voice lines the instant your AI agent finishes or needs permission. It works with Claude code, codex, cursor, open code, Kiro, Windsurf, anti gravity, and more. Never lose flow to a silent terminal again, end quote. With 95 plus sound packs and counting, there's a game character voice in here for everyone. I sampled a bunch, but I'm sticking with a default Warcraft three orc peon for now. Ready to work. Give it a try. There is a 0% chance this won't bring some joy to your work life. Me not that kind of orc. Lady Bird adopts rust. One popular segment of our Lady Bird pod with Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath was when Andreas told us they were leaning towards Swift as their c plus plus replacement. Well, well, well. How the turntables Quote, we previously explored Swift, but the c plus plus interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is …