The Consensus

Source-available projects and their AI contribution policies

(paywall has expired, article is now available for all to read)

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/02...

In a new article for The Consensus, @keles.bsky.social discusses the challenge of making sense of error messages in jq, and how jq's error message can be made more useful with gradual typing.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/03/06...

The very first of The Consensus Standard just went out. This is a monthly newsletter for folks subscribing at the Standard Subscription tier.

A collection of 1) articles written for The Consensus, 2) interesting jobs, 3) funding announcements, and 4) external articles I enjoyed.

New batch of jobs dropped. These job postings are not sponsored (if they ever are, they will be labeled). They're simply interesting-looking opportunities related to software infrastructure, pulled from around the internet.

theconsensus.dev/jobs.html

We - like many other technical teams - are hungry for the market for trusted, neutral, technical advice, but it's hard to find. The big analyst firms aren't sufficiently forward-thinking, and their publications are rarely detailed enough, geared towards managers rather than practitioners.

I surveyed 112 major source-available projects to understand their AI contribution policy and whether or not they have actually accepted explicitly-labeled AI contributions.

Only 4 projects banned AI completely: Zig, NetBSD, GIMP, and qemu. 70 already have AI-assisted commits.

We have pgvector at home

(paywall has expired, article is now available for all to read)

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/22...

I spoke with Kosta Tarasov who contributes to DataFusion and arrow-rs in his free time. This article is not paywalled, read it now.

A big goal of The Consensus is to highlight and celebrate the work of open source contributors, both newcomers and long-time contributors.

I started a software research company

notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

You're probably right to pick a modern extension to support vector similarity search in Postgres. But did you know Postgres already has one built in?

I took a look at the cube extension in Postgres, pgvector, and model2vec for some impressively fast embeddings generation.

I wanted to understand how to generate my own vector embeddings and understand semantic search in general without external services. It became a significant rabbit hole. I wrote a post on some of what I learned.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/15...

VillageSQL came out of stealth this week, prompting me to understand the state of plugins and vector indexes in forks and rewrites of MySQL.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/08...

If you've run seaweedfs, versity, juicefs, beegfs, or rustfs—permissively-licensed s3-compatible storage systems— and are open to chatting about your experience, I'd like to chat with you for The Consensus.

One thing I'm excited about with The Consensus is giving you a hub to find interesting 1) jobs and 2) events going on in systems programming.

I wrote a short article about the major companies behind the most recent release of Postgres. Also mentioned interesting commits by smaller contributors, including a first-time contributor who fixed a bug involving ctid scans that might have dated back to 1999.

theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/02...