Developers Mourn The Lost Craft.
Also France Makes Its Own Spreadsheet.

The Craft Has Been Moved to The Archive Folder

The collective existential dread of the software industry has solidified, turning into an official mourning period for what developer Nolan Lawson calls "the craft" of programming as we knew it. Mr. Lawson suggests our intricate skill set will soon be a historical curiosity, much like a blacksmith’s tool discovered at an archeological dig. The core problem, apparently, is that we have transitioned from hands-on building to simply telling a highly capable, yet deeply frustrating, digital intern what we want.

The role is shifting from writing code line by line to expressing intention and governing quality, which feels like supervising a toddler who successfully cooked dinner but set the kitchen on fire in the process. The modern developer is now a "prompt overseer" rather than an engineer, trading in fully documented, comprehensible systems for black box AI models and the inevitable march of perpetual subscription services. The new golden age of computing has all the magic of the past, but now everything requires a sign-in and a two-factor authentication code.

Notepad Now Requires a Cloud License to Function

In a move that perfectly summarizes the current state of technology, the most barebones application in the Microsoft ecosystem, Notepad, has been rendered unusable by a Microsoft Store licensing bug. Users are unable to open the simple text editor because it is no longer "available in the account," which is an error code that no human being should ever have to see for an application that has been on PCs since 1983.

The error, an obscure 0x803f8001, also locked users out of the Snipping Tool, creating a perfect Catch-22 where you cannot use the tool designed to screenshot the error message. This highlights the aggressive creep of the Software as a Service (SaaS) philosophy into basic desktop functionality; apparently, even typing out an angry memo now requires a verifiable cloud handshake. Thankfully, the legacy executable still works, an embarrassing manual bypass for an entirely manufactured bureaucratic oopsie.

OpenAI Recruits Industry Veteran to "Save The Planet"

Brendan Gregg, a well-known engineer and datacenter performance expert, announced his move to OpenAI in a blog post that features the mandatory "mission-driven" corporate rationale. The new challenge is framed around the "staggering and fast-growing cost of AI datacenters," where improving performance is not just about saving costs, but about "saving the planet".

The blog details a touching anecdote where Mr. Gregg, who was previously an Intel Fellow, was convinced to join after his hairstylist, Mia, shared how she uses ChatGPT "all the time". The message is clear; the path to saving the world is not through reducing the massive, planet-warming compute load, but by maximizing its efficiency so the hairstylist can continue to get real-time advice on her traveling friends. According to the internal comments on this news, the narrative is an understandable way to bypass the slow, bureaucratic pace of large companies where strategy execution is a multi-quarter, ELT-approved nightmare.

Briefs

• Sovereign Spreadsheet: The governments of France and Germany are collaborating on France's homegrown open source online office suite, called La Suite numérique, in a bid for "digital sovereignty". This is just the government reinventing the wheel to ensure the wheel is painted the correct shade of European bureaucratic gray.
• Resource Contention: The AI boom is reportedly causing shortages everywhere else, draining everything from power grids to human talent. The new tech bubble is not just going to pop, it is going to use up all the local bandwidth and the good coffee before it does.
• Performance Review: The US has seen the fastest January pace of job disappearance since the great recession. This is likely just a large-scale, nationwide "rightsizing" that the AI agents have already signed off on.