Issue 310: The top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025

What luck for our 310 issue to land on the 31st! If you're practicing your numbers in preparation for the New Years' countdown, we're right there with you. We're counting down the top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025, and this week we've got the first five for your holiday reading pleasure. From popping the AI bubble to the ick you get from slop to the losing employment battle Gen Z is having against bots, this year's blogs dug deep into the economic, cultural, and technical shifts caused by AI in 2025. And don't worry, we wrote about stuff besides AI. Rounding out the first five of our countdown are the Great Unracking of our last physical datacenter, and a piece on making your codebase better by making your code coverage worse.

If you're in more of a listening mood, you're in luck because the pod stops for no holiday. We're joined by former Stack Overflow board member Anil Dash for a conversation on how AI is normal and should be treated as such. We also spoke with Dan Ciruli from Nutanix about the delicate dance between VMs and Kubernetes in cloud-native environments. From around the web, we've got a piece on when we can expect quantum computing to be scalable (apparently it's imminent), one dev's reflection on a year of vibe coding, plus the disproving of the old developer proverb, "If you're as clever as you can be when you write your code, how will you ever debug it?"

Wait, is that 2026 I see on the horizon? Let's countdown the end of this issue the way we always do—with some questions. 5...What would Aristotle say about Cliff's Notes? 4...Will people believe me if I say the reason I don't understand advanced math is because its notation is not standardized? 3...What does "technically sound" mean? 2...Why won't my pirated disc of Brat work on my mom's 1999 CD player? 1...Happy New Year! Until next year, we have all those answers and so much more down in the links below.