The Weekly API Cocktail – Issue #2
Each week we carefully handpick content about APIs, AI and the evolution of our jobs in software engineering. Yes, by «hand» we mean a part of an actual human.
What’s new this week? It’s been very hard to compile good stuff from this week, reading more than 1000 excerpts from around 100 sources… Let's start this week by a few off-topics ...
The AI lifestyle subsidy is going to end
Ever wondered why Copilot cost 10$ a month ? Well, big corps are actually buying your soul, throwing cash in your direction.
Burn Response to the GNU/Linux Comment That Tried to Gatekeep Me Off My Own Machine — fireborn
A sadly usual story of human toxicity over the Internet...
APIs & Programming
JSON Schema Management revamp
JSON Schema is one of the most widely used standards for describing data, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a crowd pleaser.
How to Think About Time in Programming
Managing time in programs is a quite easy task right ? Hold my beer...
Web Numbers
Aral Balkan suggests that as Let's Encrypt begins offering security certificates for IP addresses by the end of 2025, it could enable the Small Web to operate without traditional domain names. He critiques the commercial domain system as artificial scarcity exploited by capitalism, highlighting the high costs and technical barriers involved in acquiring domains.
The probability of a hash collision
The piece delves into how hash functions map complex data to numbers for efficient storage and cryptography, but often lead to collisions when multiple inputs share the same output. It explains that even with evenly distributed outputs, adding more items than boxes guarantees at least one collision by the pigeonhole principle. The article then poses the question of calculating the probability of such a collision given N boxes and k books, suggesting buying enough boxes reduces this risk.
Bloom Filters by Example
This text explains what a Bloom filter is—a probabilistic data structure designed rapidly determine if an element belongs in a set by hashing it multiple times against bits. It highlights the trade-off between efficiency and occasional inaccuracies due to hash collisions, noting that elements can be confirmed absent but not present despite positives being possible.
OpenAPI Initiative Newsletter – June 2025
The OpenAPI Initiative newsletter for June 2025 highlights recent developments in the OpenAPI Specification version 3.2, including a new Tag Object format, support for the QUERY HTTP method, and enhanced XML support. The specification team is working to finalize all new features soon.
LLMs & MCPs
AI and Tech Jobs: More Evidence That Panic Isn’t Justified
Or is it denial?
MCP is eating the world, and it's here to stay
Agents (and mostly coding agents, as far as I'm concerned) have their API de-facto standard, and it's a great foundation to build on. A quick look at the momentum and a reminder on how easy it is for you to implement one.
LLMs bring new nature of abstraction
In this article, Martin Fowler draws parallels between the introduction of generative AI like large language models (LLMs) and the transition from assembly language to early high-level programming languages.
AI systems are unlikely to make the scientific discoveries some leading labs are hoping for, Hugging Face’s top scientist says
What a surprise, AI is more artificial than intelligent?
Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
Now I can pretend to understand it and impress my drunken uncle at the next family dinner.
Tools
rules: This repository contains security rule files designed to be used with AI
A set of security rules tailored for use with various AI coding assistants, including backend and frontend platforms. These rules help steer the AI towards secure practices during code generation, reducing vulnerabilities while maintaining consistency. They can be integrated into local projects by copying specific files or updating configurations depending on the tool in use.
Warp - The Agentic Development Environment
Warp provides a platform where developers can leverage AI agents to complete various development tasks simultaneously, such as writing code or debugging errors. It integrates seamlessly into the workflow with natural language commands and offers full control over agent actions while ensuring user privacy.
google-gemini/gemini-cli: An open-source AI agent that brings the power of Gemini directly into your terminal.
Google and Microsoft tries to catch up by releasing clones of Claude Code ... From the early tries I did, it's far from what I consider the leading terminal agent, for now, but let's keep an eye on it.
useautumn/autumn: Autumn is an open-source pricing & billing platform
Billing, managing plans, etc. is a hard task. Autumn looks like an interesting option to not implement it ourselves.
And I guess that’s it for this week! Let me know what you think, and make sure to subscribe to get our weekly curation delivered to you each week, 100% free.
Curated with 🖤 by Romain Dorgueil & the Makersquad team.