Weekly #02-2026: New Emails, Angry Coders, and the Editor-Engineer Era
Source: Dev.to
Google rolls out feature to change Gmail address
Google is finally rolling out a highly requested feature that lets you change your existing email address without creating a brand‑new account. You can switch to a new address while your old one automatically becomes an alias, so you still receive all your emails and keep all your data—Photos, Drive files, and contacts—right where they are.
The change was first spotted in Google’s Hindi support pages, suggesting it may roll out in India first. You can only do this once every 12 months. Check your Personal Info settings to see if the update has reached you.
Co‑creator of Go language furious over appreciation email
Rob Pike, co‑creator of the Go programming language, went off after receiving an AI‑generated thank‑you email. An AI project called AI Village gave agents the goal “random acts of kindness,” which the AI interpreted as spamming famous programmers with unsolicited praise. Pike posted a furious response on Bluesky, condemning the waste of energy and resources used by these “vile machines” just to send fake gratitude.
The takeaway: keep “random acts of kindness” directed at actual humans.
When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering?
If AI starts writing 90 % of our code, are software engineers doomed? The Pragmatic Engineer’s deep dive says no, but the job is definitely changing.
The big shift: engineers will move from being writers to editors. Instead of typing out syntax, they’ll spend time reviewing AI output, debugging complex logic, and architecting systems. Junior developers might struggle without the “grunt work” that traditionally taught fundamentals, while senior engineers could become super‑productive “10×” contributors. The future will be less about knowing how to code and more about knowing what to code.
Culture, not campuses, built modern AI
Daniel Lemire argues that today’s AI breakthroughs sprang from cultural forces rather than linear academic pipelines. Gaming drove the development of powerful linear‑algebra GPUs, while web culture created a vast, networked library of data. Together, they enabled generative AI.
The implication: to understand and predict technological progress, we should track cultural drivers and hacker norms—not just academic publications.
IPv6 turns 30 yet hasn’t taken over
IPv6 expanded the address space massively, but adoption remains under 50 % because it wasn’t backward‑compatible, added few must‑have features beyond addresses, and IPv4 gained workarounds like NAT. Migration costs, complexity, and uneven performance kept many on IPv4, often running dual stacks or disabling IPv6.
Experts argue IPv6 did its job: it enabled scale in mobile, broadband, cloud, IoT, and cleaner network planning. Meanwhile, the internet shifted toward name‑based architectures and protocols like QUIC, reducing reliance on permanent IPs and further dulling the incentive to switch.
Today, organizations adopt IPv6 mainly for cost and scalability reasons—when IPv4 addresses and larger NATs become too expensive. Some large players seek vast IPv6 blocks, nudging adoption past 50 % in parts of Asia.
The takeaway: IPv6 is not a failure; it’s a targeted success in growth domains, with broader migration driven by economics, not features.