What actually makes you senior (News)

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is change log news for the week of Monday, 12/01/2025. December already? I guess it's time to get ready for our eighth annual state of the log episode. We'd love for you to share your favorite moments, guests, topics, and or episodes from the past year. If your audio is used on the show, we'll hook you up with your very own BRAKE MASTER Cylinder remix. So please send us a voice mail at change log dot f m slash s o t l. That stands for state of the log. Once again, that's change log dot f m slash s o t l. Link in the newsletter. Okay. Let's get in to this week's news. What actually makes you senior? Here's Matthias Lima. Quote, people love to describe senior engineers with a big checklist. Architecture, communication, ownership, leadership, etcetera. But if you strip away the title, the salary, and the years of experience, there's one core skill that separates senior plus engineers from everyone else, reducing ambiguity. Everything else flows from that, end quote. One of the reasons that senior engineers are worth their salaries is that they ask great questions. Questions like, what problem are we actually trying to solve? Who's the user here? And what's painful for them? What are we assuming that might be wrong? And what happens if we're wrong and ship this anyway? Boil these kinds of questions down and they're all about reducing ambiguity, creating clarity, and then and only then, solving the problem. So are you a senior engineer? Mateus provide this litmus test. Quote, what happens when someone hands you something abstract slash fuzzy slash complex? Do you wait for someone else to clarify it for you? Do you start coding immediately and hope for the best? Or do you spend some time upfront making it concrete enough that you and your team can actually execute with confidence? Slop evader. Tega Brain created a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome for avoiding AI slop. It's a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT's first public release in November 2022. Tega says, since the public release of ChatGPT and other large language models, the Internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images, and video. This browser extension uses the Google search API to only return content published before 11/30/2022, so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand, end quote. Is this a long term sustainable approach to avoid an AI slop? Absolutely not. Will it become an interesting cultural artifact showing humanity's last ditch effort to keep their beloved Internet alive? Maybe. Zig moves off GitHub. Zig creator Andrew Kelly explains why he's taking his programming language and going home, I mean, going to Codeberg. Quote, it's abundantly clear that the engineering excellence that created GitHub's success is no longer driving it. Priorities and the engineering culture have rotted, leaving users inflicted with …