Front-End Fire

We’re back with our first episode of 2026, and prominent software developer and YouTuber, Theo Browne, made waves recently when he announced he’d migrated his T3 Chat app from the Next.js framework to TanStack Start. It isn’t that Next.js is bad, but that the requirements of T3 Chat were better supported by TanStack Start’s architecture, and Theo breaks down his evaluation process to reach that de...

It’s that time of year again: the holidays are nearly upon us and 2026 is fast approaching, so it’s time for our year end holiday spectacular! This year our past predictions for the future of web development come back to haunt us, we make some bold new proclamations for what’s in store for 2026, and of course, share what’s made us happy this year. Our past predictions were pretty hit or miss. Alth...

Hot on the heels of the first critical vulnerability discovered in React applications using RSCs last week, two more vulnerabilities have surfaced, which is not uncommon. Even if you already updated for the critical vulnerability, you will need to update again. In lighter news, Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, just one year after introducing it to the world. MCP’s rise has been...

This week TanStack joins the AI wars with the alpha release of TanStack AI: an open-source AI SDK with a unified interface across multiple providers. TanStack AI is an open-source ecosystem of libraries and standards, and it is client, server, and AI provider agnostic, to make building AI-enabled apps accessible to all. In a surprise move, AI company Anthropic acquires JavaScript runtime Bun to ac...

Another week, another new AI IDE. This week, Google released the Antigravity IDE (yet another VS Code fork) which offers unique twists like “cross-surface” agents, user feedback to agent-generated artifacts, and a view of all agents across any workspace. The team behind the Unistyles cross-platform library just debuted Uniwind for all the React Native devs who want to use Tailwind styling in their...

In a surprise move, Snapchat open sources its cross-platform UI Valdi. Valdi lets devs write UI components in TypeScript then compiles them to native views on iOS, Android, and macOS, offers instant hot reload without recompiling, and integrates well into already existing native apps.  GitHub Universe 2025 wrapped up just a few weeks ago, and it had a bunch of new AI agent updates to share. Think:...

This week is a news roundup while cohost Jack is away for a hackathon in SF.  First up, is how Chrome DevTools has added AI to its panels. Now users can ask Gemini to explain console errors, make CSS changes via in the elements tab, and explain traces collected in the performance panel. HTMX has also jumped from v2 to v4 (alpha), rebuilding the internals after 5 years of maintaining the project. U...

It’s been almost 3 weeks since the React Compiler hit v1.0 and Jack gives an update on the ease of adding it to a React-based project and immediate performance improvement he’s seen from it.  Popular AI-powered IDE Cursor just released v2.0, and it’s going hard on the agent mode, offering things like: a multi-agent interface where agents can run in parallel working on the same task with different...

Another week, another new AI-browser. This time it’s OpenAI’s turn to introduce ChatGPT Atlas. As with the other AI browsers, Atlas knows the context of open tabs, has an agent that can do things for you, and (maybe its defining feature) it has "memory" built in so conversations can draw on past chats and details when needed. The team behind Vite reveals their path to revenue with comman...

Back in May, the Remix cofounders revealed they were reimagining Remix v3 from the ground up, and this past week at Remix Jam, they gave a sneak peek of it. It’s fair to say this new framework shouldn’t be called Remix at all because it’s departed so far from its origins: devs manually update state, it uses signals, routes are defined in a TS doc, and it will ship with a component library, for sta...

It’s been a big week for React devs as the annual React Conf just wrapped up in Las Vegas.  The biggest news? React and React Native are moving out from under Meta to a new React Foundation with an independent technical governance structure. The React Foundation’s mission will be to support the React community and ecosystem, and a board of directors will steer it going forward. Also in time for Re...

Anthropic dropped a bunch of good Claude Code updates. There’s a new a native VS Code extension, a v2 of the terminal version of Claude, code checkpoints, and it’s all powered by Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic’s best coding model yet. On top of Claude’s glow up, the Google Chrome team launched a Chrome DevTools MCP. AI coding assistants will be able to debug web pages directly in a Chrome browser, includin...

CSS wizard, and now Staff Design Engineer at Shopify, Adam Argyle, joins us on this episode to talk about what web development interviews are like in 2025 and what folks can do to stand out today. Links: Adam’s nerdy.dev website Adam’s Argyle Ink website Adam on YouTube Adam on Bluesky Adam on GitHub Adam on X Adam on LinkedIn https://nerdy.dev/cascading-secret-sauce   https://www.capcut.com   Wha...

The supply chain attacks on npm continue and this week, Crowdstrike’s npm packages fell victim to the “Shai-Hulud” worm.  To mitigate the potential of downloading these malicious packages, consider pinning specific package versions in JS projects and using 2FA to publish new package versions to npm. Also this week, WebAssembly Specification (Wasm) released v3.0. This version dramatically expands t...

Just 5 months ago we covered how Storybook 9 was in beta, and already Storybook 10 is in beta. The biggest change is that Storybook is going all in on ESM and dropping CJS support, which is making for some big performance gains and smaller bundle sizes. This past week, npm suffered the largest supply chain attack in its history when a prolific OSS maintainer got phished. Luckily, the attack was no...

The Google vs. the US anti-trust lawsuit has finally drawn to a close, and (spoiler alert) Google doesn’t have to sell Chrome (or Android, for that matter). Going forward it will have to share certain search data with its rivals, and that’s about it, so this is definitely a big win for Google any way you look at it. The popular terminal company Warp just unveiled Warp Code - a suite of features fo...

Last episode, we lamented Claude’s lack of checkpoints to roll back code when it goes off the rails. Other devs feel the same, and this week Checkpoints for Claude Code debuted. It’s an MCP server that follows Claude Code, creating checkpoints when tasks are completed, allowing for easy reverts when needed. The Bun team quietly pushed some nice new features in Bun v1.2. Highlights include: a unifi...

The latest craze for MCP this week? Instead of multiple MCP servers with different tools, use an MCP server that accepts programming code as tool inputs - a single “ubertool” if you will. AI agents like Claude Code are pretty good at writing code, but letting the agent write and execute code to invoke API functions instead of using a defined MCP server doesn’t seem like the most efficient use of L...

You just can’t keep TanStack out of the news for more than a few weeks before a new product appears. This week, it’s TanStack Devtools, which provides a centralized devtools panel of all the Tanstack libraries for streamlined DX and custom devtools support. The State of CSS 2025 survey results are in, and highlights include: devs love the new `:has()` feature, Tailwind CSS continues to be the most...

There’s drama brewing between AI-answer engine company Perplexity and hosting platform Cloudflare, which recently declared it would actively block AI bots from crawling websites without the owners’ permission. Cloudflare received complaints, set up its own test sites, and then asked Perplexity pointed questions only - and got answers! Not a great look, Perplexity. Two years after Vercel launched v...

There’s a new utility library in town called es-toolkit, and it’s gunning for Lodash. 2-3x faster, 97% smaller, full TypeScript support, and using modern JavaScript APIs, es-toolkit’s just added a “Lodash compatibility layer” to ensure an identical API and 100% Lodash compatibility. oRPC is the newest wrinkle in the Remote Procedural Call (RPC) world, and it promotes easy to build APIs that are en...

GitHub is advocating for a European Union Sovereign Tech Fund to help pay the open source software developers building and maintaining software relied upon by economies and societies just like any other necessary infrastructure like roads and bridges. Apple gets called out by the Open Web Advocacy group saying its technical rules and restrictions are blocking other browser vendors from successfull...

There are so many headlines about AI IDE Windsurf as of late, but we’ll try to catch you up.  First, OpenAI wanted to buy Windsurf for $3B, but the deal fell through due to Microsoft. Next, Google hired Windsurf’s top execs and researchers to work on its AI products, but didn’t buy the Windsurf IDE, for $2.4B. Then, Cognition bought the remainder of Windsurf’s IP (and its staff) to integrate into...

Tech companies continue the acquisition spree of the summer when Vercel announces it’s hired the creators of NuxtLabs, the folks who build metaframework Nuxt and server runtime Nitro. Figma returns to the newscycle with the introduction of its Dev Mode MCP server. This server allows agentic coding tools to pull in design context directly from Figma designs. Think: getting code, image, or variable...

The big tech company conferences continued this summer with Vercel hosting Vercel Ship 2025. As you’d expect there was lots of talk about AI and Vercel’s AI Cloud: tools, infrastructure, and platform enhancements to build AI agents and help AI agents use Vercel. On July 1, hosting platform Cloudflare declared Content Independence Day, and changed its settings to block AI crawlers by default unless...