Saturday, 1st November 2025
I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.
In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.
If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.
— Julian Andres Klode, debian-devel mailing list
I just hit send on the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:
- Coding agents and "vibe engineering"
- Claude Code for web
- NVIDIA DGX Spark
- Claude Skills
- OpenAI DevDay and GitHub Universe
- Python 3.14
- October in Chinese Al model releases
- Miscellaneous extras
- Tools I'm using at the moment
Here's a copy of the September newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography (via) Go cryptography author Filippo Valsorda reports on some very positive results applying Claude Code to the challenge of implementing novel cryptography algorithms. After Claude was able to resolve a "fairly complex low-level bug" in fresh code he tried it against two other examples and got positive results both time.
Filippo isn't directly using Claude's solutions to the bugs, but is finding it useful for tracking down the cause and saving him a solid amount of debugging work:
Three out of three one-shot debugging hits with no help is extremely impressive. Importantly, there is no need to trust the LLM or review its output when its job is just saving me an hour or two by telling me where the bug is, for me to reason about it and fix it.
Using coding agents in this way may represent a useful entrypoint for LLM-skeptics who wouldn't dream of letting an autocomplete-machine writing code on their behalf.