🚰 Main Branch: The One Where Plumbing Got Fixed

Hiya friends,

First things first: you’re getting this on Sunday instead of Monday. It’s an experiment. If you hate it, reply and tell me. If you love it, also reply and tell me. Either way, do me a favor and save me as a contact so these don’t end up in spam.

Now then.

I use AI every day. I’ll even tell you which model later. But I refuse to make it the entire personality of this newsletter. Open rates agree with me. The fundamentals issues win every time. So this week: the boring, beautiful plumbing fixes that nobody’s writing about because they’re too busy arguing about agents.

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🔍 The plumbing that silently wastes your time

You know those friction points you stopped noticing? The ones where you wrote a workaround years ago and never looked back? GitHub quietly fixed two of them this month.

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🚢 What Shipped

Workflow Dispatch API now returns run IDs

If you’ve ever triggered a workflow via the API and then polled the runs endpoint trying to match timestamps to figure out which run was yours, this one’s for you. The workflow_dispatch API now accepts return_run_details: true and gives you the run ID back immediately.

The CLI got it too. As of v2.87.0, gh workflow run returns the run URL automatically. No extra flags. The community thread for this dates back to January 2022.

Status: GA | Requires: API param return_run_details: true or CLI v2.87.0+

Actions artifacts no longer force-zip everything

Every artifact uploaded through Actions got zipped. Download a single binary? Zipped. Upload a .tar.gz? Congrats, you now have a .tar.gz inside a .zip.

Set archive: false on upload-artifact v7 and the file uploads as-is. HTML files render in the browser. Images display. No more unzipping a single file.

Status: GA | Requires: upload-artifact v7 with archive: false, download-artifact v8 | Single files only for now

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📺 What I’m Watching

AI is replacing ‘safe’ jobs. Here’s what to do about it – Kara Swisher with Bill Gurley

Gurley is a former Benchmark partner and early Uber investor who wrote a book about building careers you love. The parts that resonated went beyond passion. Kara’s observation about how the people who treated her the worst in the mail room were the ones with the least talent? I can back that up. Some of the most cracked engineers and leaders I’ve spoken to never forget where they came from, answer your DMs, and are just kind human beings.

Worth your time if: you’re rethinking what “safe” means in your career right now.

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🔧 What I’m Using

Claude Opus 4.6. The model I’d pick for serious dev work. Now that you can assign Claude an issue directly from GitHub, I’ve been experimenting a lot more with it. Incredible engine. For personal projects I lean on more economical models like MiniMax 2.5, but when the work is complex, Opus is the one.

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✨ This Week

I’ve been feeling an unbelievable amount of existential dread. Massive layoffs. A company trying to stand up for what’s right. Other companies disappointing me at a level that’s hard to explain.

If you’re feeling that too, you’re not alone.

I had a conversation with my colleague Gwen and GitHub Star Rishab, creators of Learn to Cloud (a free, open source, hands-on roadmap for breaking into cloud and DevOps). They attribute a lot of their success to thinking abundantly. Abundantly when it comes to helping people, nourishing friendships, being kind.

To get out of this funk, I’m leaning into what I can do: be a kind human being. I hope you do too.

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That’s the week. Four years of workarounds, fixed in two changelog entries. The boring stuff matters. Fundamentals first. Always.

With gratitude, I’ll see you next week,

Andrea

🇪🇸 Léelo en español

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