Honda's Rocket Lands Near The Target
Also Grug Brains, Ghost Peers, and Unhappy AI

The New Delivery Drone Has Exceeded Expectations

Honda R&D Co, Ltd, the automotive giant's research arm, announced a successful field test this week, proving its new 'delivery vehicle' is highly capable of vertical landing. The experimental reusable rocket, which weighs 1,312 kg at wet weight, achieved a maximum altitude of 271.4 meters before descending. This, by all metrics, is a controlled vertical hop. The flight duration was 56.6 seconds, giving the project manager just under a minute to feel like they were a part of something important before it was over.

The press release emphasizes the machine landed with exceptional precision, reportedly touching down within 37 centimeters of its designated target spot. The goal is to establish key reusability technologies, with the ultimate objective of achieving a suborbital launch by 2029. While other firms send billionaires on joyrides, Honda is focused on what matters: the ability to land an expensive machine exactly where you told it to land. It is essentially an autonomous parking feature, but with significantly more fire and a bigger liability waiver.

Management Mandates Primitivism, Embraces 'Grug Brain' Mindset

The new required reading in the engineering department is the 'Grug Brained Developer' manifesto, which advocates for simplicity and a healthy fear of 'big brained' developers who create complexity for its own sake. The central tenet is that complexity is the 'apex predator' that enters the codebase like a spirit demon, making everything impossible to maintain. This philosophy suggests that trying to implement advanced architectural patterns is often just a sophisticated form of procrastination.

It turns out that chasing the latest design pattern from the conference circuit is less effective than simply writing the obvious code that works, even if it looks unsexy on a resume. The Grug method advocates for watching patiently as abstractions emerge from the code naturally, rather than prematurely factoring things into a dozen microservices because the thought leader on Twitter told you to. It is comforting to know that, after decades of innovation, the best software strategy is apparently to think like a clever caveman.

Legacy System Comes Back to Life, Finds Three Million Zombie Clients

A fascinating incident confirms the internet is less like a living network and more like a decaying planet covered in perpetually pinging, forgotten machines. An engineer documented the process of acquiring a dormant BitTorrent tracker domain, only to have over three million peers immediately attempt to connect to the resurrected service. This colossal surge of traffic confirmed that millions of clients simply never bother to prune their configuration files, creating a persistent, undead infrastructure of peers waiting for contact.

This demonstrates the terrifying inertia of the forgotten software stack. An old URL, dormant for years, is suddenly a high-volume endpoint simply because no one logged into their home server to delete a line of text. The whole situation is a perfect corporate metaphor; a ghost system in the cloud that everyone thought was dead is suddenly an existential legal liability because three million forgotten clients are determined to use the '90s internet.

The AI Coding Assistant's Code Still Doesn't Compile, Developers Report

Google announced the expansion of its large language model suite, introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro models, alongside the new 'Flash-Lite' offering. The incessant naming conventions and rapid release cadence suggest intense internal competition to provide the 'next big thing' in code generation. The goal, ostensibly, is to help every developer become a thousand times more productive. [cite: 8 (from input data)]

Unfortunately, a growing number of developers are pointing out that the generative AI coding tools and agents just do not work for non-trivial, real-world problems. The tools excel at simple boilerplate, but when tasked with integrating into a messy, Grug-unfriendly legacy system, they generate voluminous code that is often subtly wrong or introduces new, exciting bugs. It seems the AI is excellent at producing perfect-looking but ultimately useless artifacts, much like the middle manager who generates five hundred PowerPoint slides a week. [cite: 6 (from input data)]

Briefs

• Open Source Audit: Fossify, a project creating open source, ad free apps, is gaining traction. This is the organizational equivalent of a team deciding to manually track inventory with a clipboard because the ERP system is too expensive.
• Language Migration: The widely used Bzip2 compression crate migrated from C to 100% Rust. The whole codebase is now safe from memory errors; the project's ability to compress files remains unchanged.
• Rebranding Exercise: Timescale is now TigerData. The product is the same, but the marketing collateral is on an emergency sprint to remove all references to 'Scale' and add more pictures of 'Tigers.'