Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Jerod here! 👋

OpenClaw creator, Peter Steinberger, announced on Saturday that he’s joining OpenAI “to work on bringing agents to everyone.” This week’s issue covers it in-depth, but I want to start by congratulating Peter on his meteoric (and unprecedented) rise!

He went from a dev in relative obscurity to creating the fastest growing repo in GitHub history to being at the frontier of AI research and development in a matter of months. We live in absolutely wild times

Ok, let’s get into this week’s news.

🎧 Building the machine that builds the machine

Paul Dix joins us to discuss the InfluxDB co-founder’s journey adapting to an agentic world. Paul sent his AI coding agents on various real-world side quests and shares all his findings: what’s going to prod, what’s not, and why he’s (at least for a bit) back to coding by hand. 🎥 VIDEO HERE 👀

🦞 OpenClaw, OpenAI and the future

Peter Steinberger shares details from inside the whirlwind he’s been living since OpenClaw’s moment:

There’s an endless array of possibilities that opened up for me, countless people trying to push me into various directions, giving me advice, asking how they can invest or what I will do. Saying it’s overwhelming is an understatement.

OpenClaw could’ve become a huge company, but Peter’s not interested in that.

What I want is to change the world, not build a large company and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone.

Great news for Peter isn’t necessarily good news for the open source community. Here’s Peter’s vision for the future of OpenClaw:

The community around OpenClaw is something magical and OpenAI has made strong commitments to enable me to dedicate my time to it and already sponsors the project. To get this into a proper structure I’m working on making it a foundation. It will stay a place for thinkers, hackers and people that want a way to own their data, with the goal of supporting even more models and companies.

🦀 ZeroClaw is “claw done right”

One of my favorite facets of the open source ethos (and I say this sincerely) is the sentiment that “anything you can do I can do better.” OpenClaw’s success made ports, copies, and remixes inevitable. In that way, ZeroClaw was also inevitable:

Zero overhead. Zero compromise. 100% Rust. 100% Agnostic. Runs on $10 hardware with <5MB RAM: That’s 99% less memory than OpenClaw and 98% cheaper than a Mac mini!

That’s a long list of bumper sticker comparisons, but it’s also a pretty compelling one. ZeroClaw’s creators provide benchmarks demonstrating the performance comparisons, but OpenClaw’s “batteries included” approach and gravitational pull might make it difficult to compete with, feature-for-feature.

On the other hand, agents are pretty good at cranking out features…

🪞 MimiClaw runs on a $5 chip

If you were impressed by ZeroClaw’s “$10 hardware claim”, get a load of MimiClaw:

MimiClaw turns a tiny ESP32-S3 board into a personal AI assistant. Plug it into USB power, connect to WiFi, and talk to it through Telegram — it handles any task you throw at it and evolves over time with local memory — all on a chip the size of a thumb.

No Linux. No Node.js. Just pure C.

💰 Tuning Postgres won’t fix your perf problems

Thanks to Tiger Data for sponsoring Changelog News

If your team is still debating “shared_buffers” while dashboards time out, this is your sign to listen up.

Tiger Data wrote a post that lays out six practical signs performance issues aren’t a tuning problem anymore. Once workloads become high-ingest, high-cardinality, and time-oriented, you eventually outgrow incremental knob-turning. You can squeeze query plans and memory settings for a while, but not forever.

The red flags look like this: recent data needs to be fast while older data still has to stay queryable, ingest keeps climbing, long-range analytics compete with real-time reads, and storage costs balloon without compression. At that point, “just tune Postgres” turns into a loop.

It’s not that Postgres failed you. Your architecture decisions mattered more than parameter tweaks once scale and workload shape changed. Postgres is still the foundation, but it needs the right primitives for time-series patterns, data tiering, compression, and continuous aggregation.

🧛‍♂️ The AI Vampire

This Steve Yegge ~~confessional~~ article describes why he believes AI is “starting to kill us, Colin Robinson style.”

If you’ll recall from What We Do In The Shadows (worth a watch, yo), Colin Robinson was an Energy Vampire. Being in the same room with him would drain people.
That’s…pretty much what’s happening. Being in the same room with AI is draining people.

Steve spends some time explaining why that’s the case, even taking some of the blame for it, but most of this post is about how we builders should be thinking about value capture in the agentic world and some solid advice on making sure we’re capturing some of the value that is otherwise being drained from us, vampire style.

🪦 The day the telnet died

On January 14, 2026, global telnet traffic observed by GreyNoise sensors fell off a cliff. A 59% sustained reduction, eighteen ASNs going completely silent, five countries vanishing from our data entirely. Six days later, CVE-2026-24061 dropped. Coincidence is one explanation.

I would love to claim that anyone still running telnet in 2026 doesn’t care about security, but that would be naive. People have their reasons, and they’re usually more founded than we think they’ll be. But after this, you might not be able to run a telnet daemon on the internet anymore, even if you have good reason.

Oh, and to the authors of this post: Nice homage! Don McLean would be proud, if he had any idea what you are talking about 😆

🎙️ Han shot first

Our ol’ friend, Brett Cannon, is back to talk all things Python. But first! Star Wars, Machete Order, Lost, Babylon 5, Game of Thrones, Murderbot, Ted Lasso, Project Hail Mary, David Attenborough, perpetual voice rights, and the AI uncanny valley. 🎥 VIDEO HERE 👀

😢 We mourn our craft

Nolan Lawson, feeling melancholy about the direction we’re heading:

I don’t celebrate the new world, but I also don’t resist it. The sun rises, the sun sets, I orbit helplessly around it, and my protests can’t stop it. It doesn’t care; it continues its arc across the sky regardless, moving but unmoved.
If you would like to grieve, I invite you to grieve with me. We are the last of our kind, and those who follow us won’t understand our sorrow. Our craft, as we have practiced it, will end up like some blacksmith’s tool in an archeological dig, a curio for future generations. It cannot be helped, it is the nature of all things to pass to dust, and yet still we can mourn. Now is the time to mourn the passing of our craft.

🌎 Real-time global intelligence dashboard

AI-powered news aggregation, geopolitical monitoring, and infrastructure tracking in a unified situational awareness interface. See it in action here and a tech-focused version here.

😅 Agentic anxiety

One fascinating part of our (upcoming) conversation with Steve Ruiz from tldraw started when he confessed that he feels bad going to bed without his Claudes working on something. I share the feeling. But why? We analyze it on the pod, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts as well, if for no other reason but to get it out of my head.

📐 Don’t forget your (un)ordered list

That’s the news for now, but stay tuned for a deep conversation on Wednesday about building a business in the era of many Claudes with Steve Ruiz from tldraw!

Have yourself a wonderful week,
wisdom is a tree of life to those who take hold of her,