5 Quick Links for Devs: Week 4, 2026
Git Rebase for the Terrified
While the jury may still be out on whether we should use rebase or merge, depending on the organization you're working in that might not be a choice for you. If your team uses rebases then here's a great explanation of what it does, why it's a preference for some teams, and what to do if it all goes pear-shaped. Generally it seems to come down to a cleaner commit history vs a messy, yet complete trail of commits.
Related: Atlassian Git Rebase tutorial
A Social Filesystem
Dan Abramov talks about his exploration of file-based networks, digital sovereignty and his work on AT Protocol, which moves content ownership to the user and provides a protocol for social applications to request access to that data. As our online footprint becomes ever more siloed and controlled by massive private companies (with limited life-spans), owning your own files & data looks like the best (if not the easiest) path forward.
Related: AT Protocol
How the Lobsters front page works
Lobsters is one of my favourite sites for up-to-date tech & computing news, and it is less political / fiery than Hacker News because it's much more heavily moderated and also invite-only. In this post Atarva Aykar dived into the open-source code and shares how the front-page ranking algorithm works.
Related: Lobsters Github Repo
A brief history of ralph
Ralph is basically a bash loop that keeps Claude Code running endlessly in pursuit of completing a task. It handles context overload and allows the model to be 'rebooted' into the current state of progress while keeping an end objective in mind. It's deceptively simple tooling that is great at burning Claude credits and churning out projects, but has had a huge amount of hype recently alongside Gas Town (an agent orchestration tool), and this post gives some insight into the development of Ralph from minor side project into one of 2026's first agentic coding memes.
Related: everything is a ralph loop
Where I'm at with AI
Paul Osman shares his view on the current state of AI coding tools, and we can add him to the list of professional developers who have been shocked by the recent progress in quality, but hasn't completely drunk the kool-aid.
Related: LLMs and your career