The Code, Prose & Pods That Shaped 2025  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Year Through Three Lenses** - The host curated the year's highlights as coolest code, best prose, and favorite episode from each month to reveal patterns. - This month-by-month framing surfaces recurring themes across 2025 in one compact review. Transcript: Jerod Santo I reviewed the 49 previous editions and picked, in my humble opinion, the coolest code, the best pros, and my favorite episode of the show from each month. Enjoy! In January, big AI data center investments are big. People see Spotify's Ghost Artists and DeepSeek R1 shocks and awes. The coolest code is printer cow, which transforms any USB thermal printer into a networked HTTP powered API endpoint. So any service can send print jobs to it. If that's not cool, I don't know what is. Best pros goes to it's time to bring back personal computing. Benj Edwards deftly describes how surveillance capitalism and DRM turned home tech from friend to foe by asking a litany of rhetorical questions about the past. I didn't know it at the time, but this article started a theme of coverage for us that continues to this day. And my favorite episode in January, from open source to acquired with Ashley Jeffs. I almost picked Alicia White on the world of embedded systems, but hearing Ashley Jeffs' journey building and selling Benthos to Red Panda was just too much fun. ([Time 0:00:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/88487635-a33a-42a0-af67-44d696a61c91)) - **AI Shapes Adoption And Habits** - February's selections highlight AI's early negative effects on adoption and habits like doomscrolling. - The month connects tooling trends with personal behavior and agentic AI concerns. Transcript: Jerod Santo Best pros. AI is stifling tech adoption. Another trend this year was AI agents choosing tools on our behalf, which Declan Chidlow called early on. Quote, the advent and integration of AI models into the workflows of developers has stifled the adoption of new and potentially superior technologies due to training data cutoffs And system prompt influence. And my favorite episode, discovering discovery coding. Fire up a REPL, grab your favorite Stephen King novel, and hold on to the seat of your pants. Jimmy Miller returns to reveal why, at least for some of us, Discovery Coding is where it's at. ([Time 0:02:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2b290131-67bc-46db-a417-d29c516cdbde)) - **XPipe And Sensory Interfaces** - March's coolest code pick was XPipe, a cross-platform SSH and remote-machine organizer for heavy remote workflows. - Jerod pairs it with Amelia Wattenberger's essay about reclaiming richer, multisensory interfaces and a Redis interview favorite. Transcript: Jerod Santo If you connect to a lot of remote machines often, XPipe looks like an excellent way to organize the chaos. It's cross-platform, has complete SSH support, and full-on file system management with lots of bells and whistles. Best pros? Our interfaces have lost their senses. Amelia Wattenberger didn't merely write an absolute banger with this one. She created a work of art. Quote, All day, we poke, swipe, and scroll through flat, silent screens. But we're more than just eyes and a pointer finger. We think with our hands, our ears, our bodies. The future of computing is being designed right now. Can we build something richer? Something that moves with us? Speaks our language and molds to our bodies? End quote. And my favorite pod, Anti-Res returns to Redis. ([Time 0:02:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a610fa6a-eb04-48e8-90d6-07e429ff34d0)) - **Build An Agent Step By Step** - Thorsten Ball's post proves building a functional code-editing agent is approachable by walking through the process. - Readers should follow his step-by-step example to learn agent construction fundamentals. Transcript: Jerod Santo Best pros, how to build an agent, in which Thorsten Ball proves that it's not difficult to build a fully functioning code editing agent by walking us through the process step by step. This post was so good it forced us to have Thorsten on the show again. And my favorite pod, hello Matt world. Every episode we make with Matt Reier gets crazy, but this one where Matt decided we should each get to make up a new world where we invent a new gadget and declare a new rule was over the Top nuts. Matt is scheduled to return to ChangeLog and Friends in early January, by the way. ([Time 0:04:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bd690007-d384-499b-a98b-ee8036e23918)) - **Internet Artifacts And Original Thought** - May's coolest code was Neil Agrawal's Internet Artifacts museum showcasing early web milestones. - Jerod includes Clayton Ramsey's plea 'don't let a computer write for you' as May's best prose. Transcript: Jerod Santo WSL is open source, Zed gets agentic, and entry-level jobs get wiped out. The coolest code goes to internet artifacts. Neil Agrawal from neil.fun has put together a virtual museum of internet artifacts, including a map of ARPANET, the first spam email, the first smiley, the first mp3, the first online Pizza delivery website, which was probably earlier than you're thinking, and much more. The best prose is I'd rather read a prompt. Clayton Ramsey, a PhD student at Rice University, grades other students' assignments, and regularly sees chat GPT copypasta. So he wrote this article as a plea to everyone, not just his students, all of us. Quote, don't let a computer write for you. I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into, end quote. ([Time 0:04:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/60599fdd-01b7-44d1-b5fa-34e7ddaddbfe)) - **Monitor AI Token Usage** - June's top tool was CloudCode Usage Monitor for real-time AI token analytics and predictions. - Jerod pairs it with essays on writing and a favorite episode about babysitting coding agents with Steve Yegge. Transcript: Jerod Santo The coolest code is CloudCode Usage Monitor, a beautiful real-time terminal monitoring tool for Cloud AI token usage with advanced analytics, machine learning-based predictions, And rich UI. Track your token consumption, burn rate, cost analysis, and get intelligent predictions about session limits. The best pros, write to escape your default setting. Writing is hard, painful even. In the past, I've likened publishing an essay to birthing a child. They're both laborious journeys mired in contractions, heavy breathing, and occasional screams. My wife, who birthed six healthy children on our behalf, finds the analogy lacking, and she deserves to. I'd come up with a better one, but writing is hard. I guess my point is, sometimes we need motivation to do hard things. If you need some reasons to write, this post's for you. And my favorite pod in June, Adventures in Babysitting Coding Agents. Steve Yeggy joins us, fresh off a Vibe Coding Bender, so productive he wrote a book about it. ([Time 0:05:57](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7a4586ce-11e9-47e6-9900-2508e6ef15e5)) - **Job Worth Calculator Highlight** - July's coolest code pick was a Job Worth Calculator to evaluate job value beyond salary. - Jerod recalls revisited Game Genie prose and a favorite episode with Nick Neesey on agentic lifestyles. Transcript: Jerod Santo Job worth calculator. Is your job worth the grind? This job worth calculator calculates a job value rating based on a salary, work hours, commute time, environment, and more. The best pros, the Game Genie generation. Ernie Smith refreshed his 2015 piece about Game Genie in honor of its 35th anniversary. I loved everything about this piece, but I'm also in the core demographic for Game Genie nostalgia, so your mileage may vary. Quote, July 1990, a full 35 years ago, was supposed to be the coming out party for one of the best accessories ever created for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It made games easier, sure, but it also made them more interesting. It presented a new way of thinking about the games that you brought home. But Nintendo didn't like it and the company sued. That device eventually emerged and despite the legal battle, it became a defining part of what made the NES great. End quote. And my favorite pod, Try Harder, Ultra Think. ([Time 0:08:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/26ecb918-1ffc-4bcd-8cf2-898cfa3ed869)) - **Overtype's Under-Engineered Win** - August's coolest code was Overtype, a simple markdown editor that renders preview behind a textarea. - Jerod also highlights Ben Stancil's math piece on wealth signaling and live Kaizen/Pipely events. Transcript: Jerod Santo The author calls it an under-engineered solution. I call it a breath of fresh air. It works by rendering a preview pane behind the text area and keeping the two elements perfectly aligned. Best prose goes to Enough, the math in the headlines. Ben Stancil does the math on the gobsmacking amount of money floating around Silicon Valley these days and how everyone does the math to see how much everyone else is worth. Ben concludes, quote, we don't do the math to measure ourselves. We do the math to compare ourselves. End quote. And my favorite pod in August, Kaizen. Pipely is live. Gerhard calls Kaizen 20 the one where we meet. Rightfully so. It's also the one where we eat, hike, chat, and launch Pipely live on stage with friends. This was a highlight of the year for me, for sure. ([Time 0:10:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9bda5b64-7970-4d3a-b6a5-ab183857e5e8)) - **Learn Vim With Focused Levels** - September's coolest code was Vim Master, an in-browser game teaching core Vim motions through short levels. - Jerod contrasts it with essays on automation value and an Oxide founders episode. Transcript: Jerod Santo Coolest code, Vim Master. This in-browser game teaches core Vim motions and editing commands through short, focused levels. Best pros? Just enough automation. I used to try to automate everything. Eventually I learned there are some things that just aren't worth it. But where exactly is that line? Zach Gates tried to quantify it. After a few iterations, he came up with this. The long-term value equals the value of the task times the number of iterations of the task minus the effort of automating the task minus maintenance costs minus documentation costs Minus mistake costs plus or minus any long-term effects. And my favorite pod, Inside Oxide. Brian Cantrell and Steve Tuck, the co-founders of Oxide, are on the pod live to tape from the stage at Oxcon. Adam and I were invited to Oxide's annual internal conference to meet the people and to hear the stories of what makes Oxide a truly special place to work right now. The best part was this onstage discussion with Brian and Steve. ([Time 0:11:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/172e4c5c-679c-48f9-a661-55ed22708c97)) - **AI Art And Developer Drama** - October's picks included Clodcidian for Obsidian vaults and Matthew Inman's piece questioning AI art's emotional impact. - Jerod names a RubyGems discussion episode as his favorite that month. Transcript: Jerod Santo The coolest code is Clodcidian, a pre-configured obsidian vault structure that's designed to work seamlessly with Clodcode as an AI-powered second brain. Obsidian and Clodcode, two great tastes that are even better together. Best Pros, The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman says, let's talk about AI art. Quote, when I consume art, it evokes a feeling, good, bad, neutral, whatever. When I consume AI art, it also evokes a feeling, good, bad, neutral, whatever. Until I find out that it's AI art, then I feel deflated, grossed out, and maybe a little bored, end quote. I've hemmed and hawed about AI art, but I'm starting to think the right approach is to adapt my stance on other AI tools, which is use AI to help you think, not to think for you, and apply It to the wonderful world of art and creative expression. Use AI to help you make art, not to make art for you. And my favorite pod in October, there will be bleeps. Mike McQuaid and Justin Searles join me in the wake of the RubyGems debacle to discuss what happened, what it says about money in open source, what sustainability really means for our Community, making a career out of open source or not, and more. ([Time 0:12:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/13c80b59-20ee-49f3-a760-fcf30a9a7f13)) - **Continuum 93 Retro Emulator** - November's coolest code was Continuum 93, a retro computer emulator by EnthusiastGuy. - Jerod spotlights an essay on the power of URLs and a favorite episode about engineers in organizational politics. Transcript: Jerod Santo Continuum 93 was recently open sourced, runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, all 64-bit Raspberry Pis, and Steam Deck, and is created by a guy whose handle is EnthusiastGuy. So you know it's good. The best pros, the overlooked power of URLs. URLs can do so much, but we don't always use them to their full potential. In this article, Akhmad Alfie explains how URLs are even more than UI. They're state containers. Quote, we've built increasingly sophisticated state management libraries like Redux, MobX, Zustend, Recoil, and more. They all have their place, but sometimes the best solution is the one that's been there all along. End quote. And my favorite pod in November, do repeat yourself. ([Time 0:13:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c9b44511-010d-4136-bd3d-1374f198337d)) - **Simplicity, Visualization, And Systems** - December showcases Stack Tower as a playful visualization of dependencies and argues for vanilla CSS's sufficiency. - A Wikipedia episode with Bill Buechler acts as the month's favorite deep dive into how systems actually work. Transcript: Jerod Santo Zig moves off GitHub, Werner Vogels predicts the future. And Bun joins Anthropic. The coolest code, Stack Tower. This is what happens when you take an ex-KCD joke too literally. Quote, I'd seen it dozens of times, but for whatever reason, I looked at it differently this time. It's not just a joke about fragile infrastructure. It's actually a better way to visualize dependencies. End quote. Best pros? Vanilla CSS is all you need. Rob Zolkos does a deep dive into three apps from 37 Signals that eschew modern build tools. Quote, I cracked open the source code for Campfire, Writebook, and Fizzy and traced the evolution of their CSS architecture. What started as curiosity became genuine surprise. These are not just consistent patterns. They are improving patterns. Each release builds on the last, adopting progressively more modern CSS features while maintaining the same no-build philosophy, end quote. And my favorite episode in December so far, The Inner Workings of Wikipedia. We hear how Wikipedia actually works from longtime Wikipedian Bill Buechler. ([Time 0:14:47](https://share.snipd.com/snip/181e8bc2-def4-41b3-b371-166a65ea8bfc)) - **Give Feedback To Shape The Show** - Jerod asks listeners for feedback to improve the show and experiments launched this year. - Leave comments about likes, dislikes, and improvement suggestions for 2026 planning. Transcript: Jerod Santo I hope you enjoyed the 49 issues slash episodes that we brought to you each Monday. We are always tinkering, and this year was no exception. In 2025, we started a video version, added the developer's dictionary column, and experimented with classifieds. ([Time 0:15:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1d3613b6-27a8-4df7-9848-86de6ef8abf4))