The overlooked power of URLs (News)

What up, nerds? Sheboy. I'm Jared, and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, 11/03/2025. We are making a quick trip to San Francisco next week to partake in SyncConf, a boutique conference on the future of real time, collaborative, and agentic software dev organized by Johannes Schickling from Prisma, Adam Wiggins from Heroku, Emma Tracy from Colt Repo, and more. If you're going, let's sync up. See what I did there? If not, stay tuned for the best combos from the hallway track. Okay. Let's get in to this week's news. The overlooked power of URLs. Ahmad Alfie found an old comment in his code that contained a powerful link. Quote, I clicked the URL, and it was the Prism JS download page with every checkbox, drop down, and option preselected to match my exact configuration. Themes chosen, languages selected, plugins enabled, everything perfectly reconstructed from that single URL. Here was a URL doing far more than just pointing to a page. It was storing state, encoding intent, and making my entire setup shareable and recoverable. No database, no cookies, no local storage, just a URL. End quote. URLs can do so much, but we don't always use them to their full potential. In this article, Achmat explains how URLs are even more than user interface. They're state containers. They have their limitations. Yes. But Pareto tells me we're not benefiting from the virtues of the URL nearly enough. Ahmad agrees. Quote, we've built increasingly sophisticated state management libraries like Redux, MobX, Zoos stand, Recoil, and others. They all have their place, but sometimes the best solution is the one that's been there all along. How I use every Claude Code feature. The more I use Claude Code, the more I want to use Claude Code. That's a strong indicator of good product design. The challenge I have is the surface area of the product feels overwhelming. Not that I'm holding it wrong necessarily, but that I could be holding it better. But if I'm being honest, which I actually always try to be, so I don't know why I feel compelled to prefix the following or any statement with that phrase, but here we are, aren't we? I don't know how much of Claude Code's feature set is worth investing in. Are slash commands here to stay? Are sub agents even worth it? Will I switch to AMP or codex or Gemini CLI next week and make any cloud code specific learnings moot? With those questions in my mind, I love posts like this one linked in the newsletter from Shrivu Shankar. A brain dump of all the ways he's been using cloud code for me to cherry pick from. More people write posts like this, and I'll keep linking them up for the rest of us. AI broke interviews. I'm not sure the software industry's interview process was functional prior to October '22. But as Yousef Atis laments in this post, it's certainly busted …