Jared

What up, nerds?

I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, February 23rd, 2026.

Today we have some Changelog News news.

This is my final episode.

Starting next week, my good friend Adam Stachowiak will be taking care of you.

Yes, after 13 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 changelog news will be great.

Okay, let's get into this week's news.

The mythical agent month.

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, Wes 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, Wes 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.