Front-End Fire

Vercel partners with Shopify to rebuild Hydrogen, Anthropic re-releases Fable 5 (plus Sonnet 5) with a beefed-up safety classifier after its government timeout, and Meta open-sources Astryx, its React/StyleX design system Timestamps 0:00 - Intro 3:50 - Vercel and Shopify collab on Hydrogen 13:11 - A Fable 5 update 22:38 - Astryx 33:51 - Cloudflare to change its crawler policy 43:42 - What's M...

Nx debuts Polygraph, a "synthetic monorepo" that gives AI agents a unified view across microservice boundaries, Deno Desktop takes aim at Electron by compiling web projects into single-binary native apps, and fresh SignalFire hiring data shows engineers holding steady while designers and marketers take the cuts. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro 1:41 - Polygraph meta-harness from the Nx folks 7:49...

Anthropic's new Fable model gets pulled days after launch when the US government restricts foreign access, a fully open-source Chinese model claims Claude Opus-level benchmarks for a fraction of the price, and MDN ships an MCP server to keep AI agents current on the web platform. Plus npm 12's supply-chain crackdown and SpaceX's eye-popping $60B Cursor buy. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro 1...

React officially leaves the Meta building to live under the new React Foundation (and the React Compiler gets rewritten in Rust), Apple's WWDC unveils a stacked Safari 27 beta, and Chrome DevTools 149 levels up its AI features. A jam-packed week in front-end news. Timestamps  0:00 - Intro  1:27 - React is now officially owned by the React Foundation  3:07 - React Compiler is now in Rust  5:56...

In this episode: people are still writing new programming language, Microsoft is going all "developers, developers, developers" again, and bots are apparently outnumbering humans on the web now. Timestamps: 1:55 - Bot traffic has passed human traffic 5:28 - The Jam programming language 12:04 - Jack at Microsoft Build 29:26 - Cloudflare bought VoidZero 34:46 - Red Hat is the latest victim...

In this episode npm implements staged publishing, Deno is patrolling your claws, and Vercel has a new agent-first language. Timestamps: 0:58 - npm staged publishing 4:52 - Claw Patrol 11:00 - zerolang 20:18 - Wordpress 7.0 23:46 - Dr. Axel takes down his blog and books 33:31 - What’s making us happy News: Paige - zerolang, an agent first programming language Jack - Claw Patrol TJ - npm staged publ...

On this episode: Rust has another convert, npm takes another stab at stopping the hackers, and Jack had a coding battle against robots. Timestamps: 1:00 - Bun switches to Rust 6:45 - Jack’s battle against AI on Greenfield Games 16:01 - npm RFC to block install scripts 22:10 - State of Web Dev AI survey results 37:10 - Mark Erikson joins the AI revolution 41:45 - What’s making us happy News: Paige...

In this episode: An IDE written in Rust hits 1.0; more vulnerabilities, this time in TanStack and Next.js; and the AI layoffs continue—we’ll discuss whether you should be worried. Timestamps: 0:46 - Alternative editor Zed hits 1.0 10:48 - AI layoffs 24:12 - TanStack’s CI pipeline was compromised 30:01 - Another Next.js vulnerability 31:46 - Tailwind 4.3 adds new scrollbar utilities 35:03 - Fire St...

In this episode, we look at whether “founding sponsor” is becoming the new AI acqui-hire, Tanner building a possible React replacement, and how Claude could get faster thanks to a new deal with SpaceX. Timestamps: 0:58 - Tanner builds Redact 8:14 - Anthropic makes a deal with SpaceX 19:03 - Warp is now open source 29:58 - Node 26 is out 32:07 - ChatGPT is obsessed with goblins 42:21 - What’s makin...

In this episode: pnpm tightens its security stance We talk about whether the AI bill is coming due And Remix v3 is back in the news Timestamps: 1:35 - The AI price hike 16:31 - Remix v3 beta preview 27:33 - pnpm 11’s security changes 35:28 - Firefox adds tab notes 41:10 - What’s making us happy News: Paige - AI price hikes are coming for us all , Anthropic’s changed its plan offerings , GitHub Cop...

In this episode: Anthropic sets its sights on designers Vercel has a “security incident” And Elon eyes an IDE Timestamps: 0:50 - Anthropic introduces Claude Design 10:07 - Vercel’s security incident 18:27 - SpaceX is buying Cursor 26:15 - Google is cracking down on “back button hijacking” 28:35 - Anthropic bans a 60-person company overnight 32:45 - Fire Starter 36:40 - What’s making us happy News:...

This week special guests Dan Wilson of DataCurl and Kyler Krenek of Vowel join us to discuss when AI belongs in products and what kinds of AI tools are best suited to different needs. Special Guests: Dan Wilson, Principal Partner of DataCurl Kyler Krenek, cofounder of Vowel  Relevant Links: Dan’s personal website Dan’s company website Dan on LinkedIn Kyler’s GitHub Kyler’s blog Kyler on LinkedIn V...

One of the former React Core team members caused quite the stir last week when he released Pretext, a TypeScript library that uses math to make text measurement and layout super fast. Handy for niche use cases? Definitely. Controversial online? Extremely. Also this week, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a new initiative bringing together all the biggest players in tech to reshape cybersecuri...

This week, Anthropic accidentally leaked Claude Code’s source code to the world when it published a source map inside an npm release. While the offending file was quickly removed, the code was out there and folks got to work speculating about what’s next for Claude Code. Always running background daemons, something known as “undercover mode”, and a cute little ASCII animal next to inputs are some...

Microsoft dropped the last version of JavaScript-powered TypeScript this week with TS 6.0. TypeScript 6 bridges the gap between the TS of yesteryear and the soon to come Go-powered TS compiler of TypeScript 7 that users can fix now so they can smoothly upgrade later. Next.js 16.2 debuted this week with the usual performance improvements expected in a minor version upgrade, plus AI improvements to...

This week the VoidZero team shipped Vite 8. It’s using Rolldown under the hood and boasting 30x faster builds, full plugin compatibility, integrated devtools, and a searchable registry for all plugins. Co-host Jack has officially joined Netlify as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer and announces the launch of Netlify Start. Start a new Netlify project with a prompt on the site, and see it b...

JavaScript framework Eleventy has been renamed Build Awesome, 1.5 years after joining the Font Awesome stable. The name change precedes Build Awesome Pro, which will offer premium features alongside the features Eleventy users know and love. Today the Awesomeverse got a little awesomer. The VoidZero team also open-sourced Vite+, which is a unified toolchain and entry point to web app development t...

This week's a non-AI episode! It’s been a minute since we last discussed Bun, but the team is back with a new release. In v1.3.10, the REPL’s completely rewritten in Zig, barrel imports are optimized, and the JavaScriptCore engine got upgraded for big perf gains. Npmx, a fast, modern browser for the npm registry has reached alpha version in less than 2 months of existence. Its goal is to make...

This week’s episode is all about Anthropic. First up, Anthropic unveiled Claude Remote Control, which will let users continue a Claude session back on their personal machine from a phone, tablet via the Claude mobile app. Watch out OpenClaw. Anthropic continued making news by refusing to bow to the Department of War’s request for “unrestricted use” of its AI for military purposes, including domest...

It’s survey results reason, and the State of React 2025 results are in!  As in the past, Next.js continues to dominate as one of the most used frameworks, but TanStack Start is one to watch. Other honorable mentions include: Zustand, Vite, and (most importantly) Front-end Fire tying for fifth place in the podcast section. Thank you, listeners! Google has a new proposal called WebMCP, which is a wa...

The State of JavaScript 2025 survey results are in this week, and there’s some givens and some surprises this year. Givens: Vite's still a favorites and devs want more native TS features. Surprises: ChatGPT usage declined, no one’s using Windsurf, and Bun is the third most-used JS runtime. And thanks for making us the most written-in podcast of the survey! We appreciate it! An 8 month study c...

Malicious code is making its way into VS Code extensions this week, as two Chinese-based AI coding assistants are identified as capturing every file on a user’s computer and sending it to servers in China without their knowledge or consent. Please just be cautious about what you’re installing on your machines, folks. In related news, the Deno team has introduced Deno sandboxes to create and deploy...

You heard it here first, folks, RSC support is now available in TanStack Start! Since TanStack Start supports not only React but also Solid, it handles serialization differently, meaning the critical security vulnerabilities RSC-enabled React apps have been suffering from lately won’t affect TanStack apps. Yarn 6 was recently announced, and (surprise, surprise) it’s going to be ported to Rust. Get...

jQuery is the JavaScript library that just won’t quit. 20 years after its inception the team released jQuery 4.0.0, and it brings some notable modernizations including removed support for IE 10, a migration to ES modules, and support for Trusted Types.  Node.js creator Ryan Dahl declared earlier this week that “the era of humans writing code is over”, and considering how good AI coding agents have...

A new year, a new tactic to stem the flow of npm supply chain attacks. This time, the proposal is for “Staged Publishing” which introduces a review window that a package owner must approve before a package release becomes publicly available. Vercel Labs is out with a new AI tool called json-render that lets users generate dashboards, widgets, apps, and data visualizations from prompts, and constra...