Humility in the Age of Agentic Coding
What happens when an AI hater starts building with AI agents? In this episode, we talk with software engineer Steve Klabnik, known for his work on the Rust programming language, about his journey from criticizing AI to experimenting with it firsthand. We explore Steve’s programming language Rue, largely built with the help of AI tools like Claude, and discuss what this means for software engineering and the future of coding in an AI-driven world.
Featuring:
Steve Klabnik – LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, LinkedIn, Bluesky, GitHub, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Links:
The Rust Programming Language
Rust
Rue
Daniel's RSA Meeting link for March 23, 2026
Daniel's RSA Meeting link for March 24-25, 2026
Upcoming Events:
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Ep. 55 - Open Source Contributor (Steve Klabnik)
The first open source project Steve Klabnik got involved with was a pretty big one - he took on Hackety Hack, the beloved application that helped kids learn to code. He only meant to help out, but when no else joined, he ended up running the show, and diving headfirst into the open source world. Now, many years and pull requests later, Klabnik shares how he went from Hackety Hack to contributing to Rails to working full-time on the Rust language, and gives us a beginner-friendly overview of the open source world and many lessons he’s learned along the way.
Show Links
Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor)
_why
Survivorship Bias
High Five bot
Rust language
Sidekiq
Ryan Seashore
The Long Tail
Code for America
Hackety Hack
Code Now
Discourse
Summer of Code
Codeland Conf
Codeland 2019
Steve Klabnik
Prolific open source contributor, Rust core team, Author of "Rails 4 in Action," "Designing Hypermedia APIs", and "The Rust Programming Language".
The Rust Programming Language (Interview)
Steve Klabnik and Yehuda Katz joined the show to talk about the Rust Programming Language, a systems programming language from Mozilla Research. We covered memory safety without garbage collection, security, the Rust 1.0 Beta, getting started with Rust, and we even hypothesize about the future of the Rust.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Sponsors:
Codeship – If it works with Docker, it works with Codeship Jet.
Toptal – Join Toptal and work with awesome people from anywhere in the world. Freelance with companies like Airbnb, Artsy & IDEO.
DigitalOcean – Use the code CHANGELOG to get a $10 hosting credit when you create a new DigitalOcean account
Featuring:
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Yehuda Katz – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Show Notes:
Steve and Yehuda are core team members of Rust.
Steve Klabnik
Yehuda Katz
Steve Klabnik comments on “Rust 1.0.0 beta is here!” on Reddit
Rust Means Never Having to Close a Socket
The Rust Programming Language
The Rust Programming Language on Reddit
Style Guidelines
Cargo, Rust’s Package Manager
Zinc: An experimental attempt to write an ARM stack that would be similar to CMSIS or mbed in capabilities but would show rust’s best safety features applied to embedded development.
Skylight
Is the six-week release cycle too frequent? - Proposals - Ember.JS
Yehuda Katz on Twitter: “Just posted a long set of thoughts on the 6-week-release-cycle discussion we’ve been having on the Ember Discourse”
Let’s Talk About Rust by Yehuda Katz - Confreaks TV
The Rust Book
Rust by Example
Rust for Rubyists
Rust Users Forum
Rust Development Forum (Internals)
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
Hackety Hack and _why (Interview)
Steve Klabnik joined the show to talk about learning to program with Hackety Hack and why the lucky stiff.
Join the discussion
Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!
Featuring:
Steve Klabnik – Website, GitHub, X
Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Wynn Netherland – GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Steve Klabnik, maintainer of Hackety Hack, newest contributor to The Changelog
Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up.
_why, creator of Hackety Hack. Help keep his memory alive.
Abbott and Costello’s classic “Who’s on first?”
Yakety Yak is a song written, produced, and arranged by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller for The Coasters and released on Atlantic Records in 1958
Shoes is a tiny graphical app kit for ruby
GTK is a highly usable, feature rich toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces which boasts cross platform compatibility and an easy to use API.
MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks.
The Shoebox is a gallery of Shoes apps.
Mad props to Heroku, Sinatra, and MongoMapper for handling a LifeHacker traffic spike
Ruby is a great language to teach programming
_why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby
ChunkFive is a nice bold free and open source typeface
Steve is intrigued by projects like cool.io and node.js and the evented style of programming.
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!