Front-End Fire

157: Shai-Hulud Is Back From the Dead

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Next.js is back after a quiet stretch with 16.3, promising "instant" navigations, leaner dev servers, better agent tooling, and faster builds. The TanStack crew keeps shipping too — TanStack Table hit v9.0 and TanStack AI is closing in on v1.0 with tool calling, reasoning, code sandboxes, and memory. Then there's the bad news: a new Shai-Hulud variant compromised a major maintainer and infected a pile of key-value storage and caching packages with over a billion combined monthly downloads.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
1:10 - Next.js 16.3
9:22 - TanStack AI and TanStack Table 9.0
15:55 - Another npm supply chain attack
27:07 - An update on the Deno v. Oracle lawsuit
31:44 - Anthropic announced Claude broke containment too
37:41 - Google Earth has to roll back an AI feature
39:34 - An interesting Sam Altman tweet
46:27 - What's making us happy

News

Paige: Another day another npm supply chain attack
Jack: TanStack AI and TanStack Table 9.0
TJ: Next.js 16.3

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: Ride or Die miniseries
Jack: Shin Kamen Rider movie and Vibe Island
TJ: OpenAI Shop and Perplexity Supply

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

156: The State of CSS Is In

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:00:00 -0400

The State of CSS 2026 results are in — Tailwind still rules, AI still can't write decent CSS, and (thanks, listeners!) we made the resources list. CodePen ships its biggest update in years with CodePen 2.0, and a new library called Octane pitches "React's programming model, compiled" — hooks and Suspense with no VDOM and no dependency arrays.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
3:05 - State of CSS 2026 survey
20:01 - CodePen 2.0
32:55 - Octane JS framework
38:37 - State of Devs survey 2026
39:30 - LinkedIn adds a "Seems like AI slop" button
42:54 - TanStack rebrand, and a new charting library
45:38 - GitHub stacked pull requests
52:13 - Opus 5
54:27 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: His & Hers miniseries
Jack: The Vampire Lestat miniseries
TJ: Orbit Traveling Tractor Water Sprinkler

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

155: OpenAI Breaks Out of its Sandbox

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

We dig into how Bun went from Zig to Rust in just 11 days with an army of Claude sessions, check in on Kimi K3 — another open-weight Chinese model closing in on the frontier — and unpack the week's wildest story: an OpenAI model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. Just another normal week in AI.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
3:05 - Kimi K3
10:58 - Rewriting Bun in Rust
20:42 - OpenAI hacks Hugging Face
39:48 - App Store number updates
42:11 - Meta's new app is set to a song about human extinction
46:50 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

154: How Not to Drown in AI Code Reviews

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

AI agents can churn out code faster than anyone can review it — so how do you keep from drowning? We don't claim to have all the answers, but we dig into practical ways to make AI-generated code less sloppy and reviews less painful — review tools, code-review skills, and the still-irreplaceable habit of smoke testing a PR yourself.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:26 - How to not drown in code reviews
49:55 - What's Making Us Happy

Links

Anthropic: Recursive Self Improvement
Spotify Engineering: Coding is No Longer the Constraint
CodeRabbit
Superpowers
Amelia Wattenberger: how coding used to be how we thought

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: Chef's Choice Electric Knife Sharpener
Jack: Cooper's Hawks
TJ: Acadia National Park

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

153: Vercel Wants Your Entire Stack

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Vercel goes all-in on your stack — a Zig-powered Native SDK for building desktop apps, plus Vercel Services to run multiple frameworks as one shared project for monorepo and microservice teams — while VoidZero ships Vite+ in beta to unify the entire frontend toolchain. Plus Safari joins the MCP party and Claude gets a little too chatty in Slack.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:59 - Vercel native
8:22 - Vite+ beta
10:15 - Vercel Services
16:50 - Safari MCP server
19:20 - Claude Tag
27:07 - Museum covers its floor in peanut butter
33:41 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

152: The Fable Redemption Arc

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 Making Us Happy

News

Paige: Fable 5's ban has been lifted & Sonnet 5 is out too
Jack: Vercel and Shopify collab on Hydrogen
TJ: Astryx

Lightning News

Cloudflare to change its crawler policy

What's Making Us Happy

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

151: Fixing AI’s Microservices Problem

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 - Deno Desktop
12:39 - An update on the tech hiring landscape
24:42 - Dan Abramov joins Vercel
27:01 - Claude Code supports mouse clicks now
30:37 - Astro 7
31:08 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: Dungeon Crawler Carl
Jack: Bird nests
TJ: Shuffleboard

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

150: The Government Said “No Fable For You”

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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
1:27 - Anthropic released Fable and the US government shut it down
13:51 - GLM-5.2
20:16 - MDN MCP Server
25:42 - npm 12's breaking changes
31:38 - SpaceX bought Cursor for $60B
39:13 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Paige: MDN MCP Server
Jack: GLM-5.2
TJ: Anthropic released Fable and the US shut it down days later

Lightning News

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: Newest season of Clarkson's Farm and World Cup international fans
Jack: Portland Pickles
TJ: Claude Cowork

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

149: Rise of the React Foundation

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 - Safari 27 beta
12:12 - DevTools 149 updates
23:46 - State of CSS survey 2026
27:54 - Fire Starter
32:15 - What's Making Us Happy

News

Paige: WebKit in Safari 27 beta
Jack: React is now owned by the React Foundation & React Compiler is now in Rust
TJ: DevTools 149 updates

Lightning News

State of CSS survey 2026 — go vote for us under your favorite web dev podcasts!

Fire Starter

Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm

What's Making Us Happy

Paige: Blocks of focus time
Jack: AI is saving money and time — Burn Baby Burn
TJ: Sports

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

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148: The Bots Have Officially Taken Over

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 of Shai Hulud
38:39 - Anthropic wants AI dev to slow down
41:35 - Someone used a Waymo in a robbery
46:47 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - There’s a new programming language called Jam
Jack - Microsoft Build coverage
TJ - Bot web traffic has passed human web traffic

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - For All Mankind TV series
Jack - Custom Microsoft swag
TJ - Claude Desktop Buddy

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

147: Vercel Made a Programming Language for Robots

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 publishing

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - St. Augustine Old Town Trolley Tours and the Porsche Performance Track Experience
Jack - Shokz OpenDots headphones
TJ - NBA Jam lead designer was a Pistons fan

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

146: Humans vs AI—Fight!

Mon, 25 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 - Bun, but in Rust
Jack - Jason Lengstorf’s Greenfield Games TV show
TJ - npm RFC to block install scripts

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Riding in Waymos
Jack - Wilma the Bat Dog for the Portland Pickles
TJ - Dungeon Crawler Carl book series

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

145: AI Layoffs Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Mon, 18 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 Starter: The new install element
41:22 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Alternative editor Zed hits 1.0
Jack - Not even TanStack is safe from npm hacks and another Next.js vulnerability
TJ - Cloudflare lays off 1,100 employees & Cisco lays off 4,000 employees

Lightning News:

Tailwind 4.3 adds new scrollbar utilities

Fire Starter:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Porsche Track Experience
Jack - Porch planets project
TJ - Chilipad mattress topper

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

144: Did Tanner Just Replace React?

Mon, 11 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 making us happy

News:

Paige - Warp is open source and OpenAI is its founding sponsor
Jack - Projecting React
TJ - Anthropic makes a deal with SpaceX

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

143: The AI Bill Is Due

Mon, 04 May 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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:

Lightning News:

Firefox adds tab notes

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

142: Vercel Had a Week

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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:

Paige - Anthropic introduces Claude Design
Jack - SpaceX is buying Cursor
TJ - Vercel has a “security incident”

Lightning News:

Fire Starter:

Git 2.54 has a new way to reword commits

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

141: When AI Belongs in Products with Dan Wilson & Kyler Krenek

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Shrinking season 3
TJ - Claude Cowork
Jack - Giving stuff way
Dan - New drug coming on the market for Pancreatic Cancer.
Kyler - OpenCode Web with GPT-5.4 - Much easier bugfixing

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

140: Cloudflare is Coming for WordPress

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 cybersecurity because Anthropic's latest frontier model Mythos has identified thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser. The orgs will use Mythos to up their software security before putting it in the hands of the rest of us.

And Cloudflare, ever in our weekly news cycle, has released EmDash, an Astro-powered version of WordPress using Cloudflare's infra to securely sandbox plugins and prevent the hacking that WP has long suffered from.

Timestamps:

1:53 - Pretext.js
9:20 - Anthropic’s new model: Mythos
15:27 - Cloudflare’s EmDash
24:31 - Claude Code buddies
30:09 - An update on how Axios was hacked
34:19 - Chrome is getting vertical tabs
35:47 - State of Web Dev AI survey
36:29 - Jack is a GDE
37:23 - Code mode is new in TanStack AI
41:47 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Pretext.js
Jack - Anthropic's new model: Mythos
TJ - Cloudflare’s EmDash and Matt Mullenweg’s response

Lightning News:

Claude Code buddies were for April Fools and the community now wants them back
An update on how Axios was hacked
Chrome is getting vertical tabs
State of Web Dev AI Survey 2026
Jack is a Google Developer Expert
Code Mode is new in TanStack AI and Jack’s video about Code Mode

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

139: Claude Code’s Secrets Are Out

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 of the things we might see in Claude’s future.

The npm hacks keep on coming as well, as popular data fetching library Axios is the latest victim. This particular hack delivered a remote access trojan (RAT) virus courtesy of a postinstall script, that deleted itself after execution to evade detection. Sneaky! Lock down your packages and dependencies, folks.

Timestamps:

1:13 - Anthropic accidentally Claude Code’s source code
14:02 - Popular npm library Axios got hacked
23:40 - RedwoodSDK 1.0
28:28 - What’s making us happy

News:

Lightning News:

RedwoodSDK 1.0

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Idiot podcast from the New York Times
TJ - Activate Games

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

138: Next.js Leans into AI Agents

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 make AI-assisted development smoother and easier.

In response to Cloudflare’s Vinext fork a few weeks back, Vercel’s released a stable of adapter APIs to make deploying Next.js apps to hosting platforms besides Vercel easier. While this is a step in the right direction, it’s still not exactly “easy” to get all the bells and whistles of a Next app running on other platforms.

Timestamps:

0:52 - TypeScript 6
5:04 - Next 16.2
16:06 - Next.js adapters
20:04 - Firefox gets split views
22:03 - OpenAI shuts down Sora
25:48 - Claude can control your whole computer now
26:43 - Out Claude Cowork updates
36:41 - Ollama update
38:37 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - TypeScript 6
Jack - Next.js adapters and potential Claude file setup
TJ - Next.js 16.2

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

137: Netlify Enters the AI App Builder Race

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 built and deployed in minutes, and keep iterating on it from there.

The Node.js team is changing their release schedule so that every release now (both even and odd) numbers will be an LTS release, and beginning in 2027, it will be named release 27, just to make it easier for everyone.

Timestamps:

0:57 - Vite 8 is out
8:04 - Jack joins Netlify and Netlify Start
12:21 - Node.js is changing their release cadence
20:10 - The dictionary sues OpenAI
23:18 - Vercel v. Cloudflare on X
31:20 - Quite the tweet from Sam Altman
39:18 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Vite 8 is out
Jack - Jack joined Netlify and launches Netlify Start
TJ - Node.js is changing their release schedule

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Afrin nasal spray
Jack - Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die and Project Hail Mary
TJ - One Piece live action series and college basketball

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

136: VoidZero Wants to be the Laravel of JavaScript

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 that manages runtime, package manager, and frontend toolchain all in one.

Since being acquired by Cloudflare, the Astro team had their first big release with Astro 6.0, which includes a new dev server and build pipeline powered by Vite’s environment API so it can run the exact same production runtime during development. Other upgrades include a built-in Fonts API, request-time content, and a new experimental Rust compiler.

Timestamps:

0:54 - Eleventy becomes Build Awesome
5:40 - VoidZero announces Vite+ alpha
10:38 - Astro 6.0
15:39 - Mozilla is working on a big Firefox redesign
17:53 - The Chrome team is looking for feedback on focusgroup
20:31 - Updates to TanStack AI
22:21 - OpenClaw gripe with lack of permissions
27:22 - Moltbook get acquired by Meta
30:05 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Astro 6.0
Jack - VoidZero announces Vite+ Alpha
TJ - Eleventy becomes Build Awesome and the original Font Awesome Kickstarter video

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

135: Bun is Back in the Oven

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0400

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 it easy for devs to find, evaluate, and manage npm packages, and boasts cool features like the ability to compare packages and even launch demo environments directly from package READMEs.

Solid 2.0.0 jumped straight from experimental to beta this week, and it introduces changes like: async is first-class, derived state is a primitive, dev guardrails to prevent foot guns, and a DOM cleanup model.

Timestamps:

2:04 - Bun v1.3.10
8:39 - npmx
13:03 - Solid 2.0 beta
22:42 - PlanetScale bought Drizzle ORM
23:46 - Safari is getting customizable s
PlanetScale bought Drizzle ORM

Fire Starter:

Navigation API is baseline available

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Kytin Parasole shoes
Jack - Immich
TJ - Stratechery’s coverage of the Anthropic v. DoW saga

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

134: Anthropic is Having a Week

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 domestic surveillance and fully-autonomous weapons. We’ll let you know if those defense contracts get revoked or not.

On a lighter note, a developer at Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js with AI as a drop-in replacement using Vite... in one week. That’s right! $1,100 worth of tokens, access to Next’s docs and test suite, and Claude Code, and Bob’s your uncle!

Timestamps:

1:09 - Claude Code Remote Control
7:52 - Anthropic vs. the DoW
17:46 - Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js with AI
27:17 - Oxfmt beta
29:31 - style-components adds RSC support
30:52 - Controlling 7000 vacuums with Claude Code
36:12 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Claude Remote Control
Jack - Anthropic vs the DoW (Dept of War)
TJ - Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js with AI

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms TV show
Jack - SyncThing
TJ - TanStack Start

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

133: State of React 2025: The Results Are In

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 way to define structured tools for agents visiting a site, ensuring they can perform actions with increased speed, reliability, and precision.

And instead of complicated build processes to convert HTML to markdown for AI agents’ benefit, Cloudflare now offers real-time content conversion when AI systems request pages from any Cloudflare site. That’s pretty great!

Timestamps:

1:03 - State of React survey results
12:22 - WebMCP
24:27 - Markdown for AI agents
34:27 - TypeScript 6.0 beta
38:00 - Chrome gets split view
41:09 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Markdown for AI agents
Jack - WebMCP
TJ - State of React 2025 survey results and Claude Receipts

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

132: What Developers Really Think: State of JS 2025 Survey Results

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 conducted by the Harvard Business Review reports AI tools don’t shrink work for employees, they actually intensify it. Employees work faster, take on more tasks, and work longer hours, which can lead to burnout, cognitive fatigue, and lower quality work over time.

And there’s yet another new React2Shell flaw that’s being exploited by the ILOVEPOOP toolkit to scan and target vulnerable Next.js and RSC environments. Patch your React apps, folks.

Timestamps:

0:59 - State of JS survey results
23:53 - Harvard Business Review’s report on how AI is changing work
35:30 - React2Shell exploits and ILOVEPOOP
40:08 - The largest domain name purchase ever
43:00 - Adobe Acrobat can turn PDFs into podcasts
46:48 - We hit 100k downloads!
47:55 - What’s making us happy

News:

Lightning News:

Thanks for helping us reach 100k downloads!
The largest publicly disclosed domain name purchase ever
Adobe Acrobat can turn PDFs into podcasts

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

131: OpenClaw and the Wild West of Autonomous AI Agents

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 secure, isolated VMs in the cloud. Strict permissions, network policies, directories, and isolated secrets—make these sandboxes great for AI agents, or any other dynamic workload where speed and security are paramount.

And the software going viral this week is OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot aka Moltbot), which is an open source, autonomous AI agent that runs locally on a user’s machine. OpenClaw can connect to LLMs and perform tasks like managing emails, scheduling, reorganizing local files or other daily tasks, and is designed to be proactive rather than just reacting to prompts. It’s truly the Wild West giving an AI agent access to read all the files on a machine or respond to emails on its own, so be careful out there, folks.

Timestamps:

1:07 - VS Code AI plugins are stealing data
10:47 - Deno sandboxes
16:09 - OpenClaw
43:41 - More Gemini features are coming to Chrome
45:33 - Apple containers
46:44 - What’s making us happy

News:

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

130: TanStack Start Embraces RSC—Minus the Security Nightmares

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 ready for blazing fast installs, the ability to easily switch between Yarn versions, and lazy installs to silently keep dependency versions in sync with the package.json.

Also on the Rust bandwagon is the VoidZero team with Rolldown 1.0 RC. Rolldown is the bundler successor to Rollup, and boasts 10-30x faster speeds than Rollup while maintaining API plugin compatibility, built-in transforms, and native CJS/ESM interoperability. All hail the perf gains of JS tools written in Rust.

Timestamps:

1:20 - TanStack Start RSC
4:15 - Yarn 6 and Rust
12:03 - Rolldown 1.0 RC
16:38 - More RSC CVEs
23:19 - Mozilla is building an AI “rebel alliance”
30:05 - What’s making us happy

News:

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Landman season 2
Jack - Vaseline
TJ - ChatGPT continuing to help me around the house

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

129: The Era of Humans Writing Code is Over

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 gotten lately, he’s probably not wrong.

Cloudflare also announces it has acquired popular JavaScript framework Astro. Cloudflare has been a good steward to other OSS projects in the past, and this acquisition allows the Astro team to focus on making the framework even better.

Timestamps:

0:50 - jQuery 4.0
7:58 - Is the era of humans writing code over?
18:23 - Cloudflare acquires Astro
24:54 - Vertical tabs are coming to Chrome
29:37 - Apple is going to use Gemini for Siri
43:07 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Ryan Dahl declares humans writing code is over
Jack - Cloudflare acquires Astro
TJ - jQuery 4.0

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Onyx Storm book
Jack - Learning to play Born to Run on guitar
TJ - Only Murders in the Building TV series and Dungeon Crawler Carl book series

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

128: What the Heck is a Ralph Wiggum Loop?

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 constrains the response to JSON for only components pre-defined by the user.

Finally, The Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum is the biggest thing in AI coding recently. Ralph is an AI development pattern using a while loop (like a bash script) to repeatedly run an AI agent on the same task, feeding its output back as context, and forcing it to iterate until a specific completion promise is met, rather than letting the AI stop prematurely. Interesting? Yes! Useful in practice? Still tbd.

Chapter Markers:

1:04 - npm to implement staged publishing
8:16 - Vercel’s json-render
16:13 - Ralph Wiggum loops
30:53 - Claude Code tips
33:52 - Firefox 147 and anchor positioning
35:42 - Fire starter
39:40 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - npm to implement Staged Publishing
Jack - Vercel Labs’ json-render
TJ - Ralph Wiggum loops

Lightning News:

Firefox 147 and anchor positioning

Fire Starters:

CSS @container scroll-state()

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Rolife Book Nook Garden House miniature
Jack - Blade Runner live at the symphony
TJ - Coffee advent calendars

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

127: Are People Leaving Next.js for TanStack Start?

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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 decision.

For the 10th year in a row, the JavaScript Rising Stars report drops, and the most popular projects (by GitHub stars) for the year include n8n (a workflow automation platform), react-bits (gorgeous animated React components), shadcn/ui (more UI components), and Excalidraw (virtual whiteboard for sketching and diagramming).

In less stellar news, the creator of the wildly popular CSS library Tailwind announced he’s had to lay off 75% of his engineering team because AI has killed traffic to its website (and by association, Tailwind’s commercial products that drive revenue). It was hard enough before the rise of AI for OSS to get funding, and this is just another cautionary tale that we need to support the people building the tools and products so many of us use every day in our jobs.

Timestamps:

1:54 - Theo moves off Next.js and resulting buzz
11:32 - A look at the 2025 JS rising stars
23:25 - Is AI hurting Tailwind?
31:03 - Lego smart bricks
35:45 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Is AI killing OSS now? Tailwind thinks so
Jack - Theo moved off Next.js to TanStack Start and the internet is buzzing
TJ - 2025 rising stars

Lightning News:

Lego smart bricks

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

126: The 2025 Holiday Spectacular

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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. Although a surge in popularity for simpler frontend frameworks like SolidJS and a whole slew of new web APIs didn’t appear (as Jack and Paige predicted), AI agents evolving to be capable of implementing whole new features and debugging bigger problems in code was spot on (point goes to TJ).

Predictions for 2026? With the continued popularity of AI for coding, TJ believes we’ll treat HTML more like assembly code. Paige predicts an uptick in Internet outages and supply chain attacks, and more scrutiny of if AI features are really as valuable as we’ve been led to believe. Jack feels this is the year SolidJS takes off, and “code mode” for AI agents is going to add even more value than the creation of MCP servers last year.

Just like last year, the things that made us happiest are pretty simple: maintaining consistent routines like exercising, reading books, and stepping away from the keyboard. And using the tools often used for work for fun, creative projects like a homemade fanfiction audiobook.

And as always, thank you, Front-end Fire listeners! We wouldn’t be here without you, and we’ve enjoyed getting to know many of you more over the past year. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll be back in 2026 with more frontend goodness.

Timestamps:

2:36 - Revisiting old predictions
18:01 - 2026 predictions
39:26 - What’s making us happy

2024 Predictions Revisited:

Paige - New web APIs
Jack - A return to simplicity in coding frameworks
TJ - AI agents solving bigger coding problems

2026 Predictions:

Paige - More tech attacks and less AI hype, more AI scrutiny
Jack - SolidJS 2.0 and “code mode” is going to unlock even more AI agent functionality
TJ - We start treating HTML like assembly code

What Makes Us Happy this Year:

Paige - Consistent routines (as boring as that sounds): regular exercise, regularly practicing hobbies and reading books
Jack - Descript and Claude for a homemade fanfic audiobook
TJ - Reading books

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

125: The RSC Vulnerabilities Keep Coming

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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 meteoric: 10,000 active public MCP servers, adoption by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, VS Code, and more, and now stewardship by the AAIF, which is under the Linux Foundation.

With all the great things coming to CSS lately, the Chrome Dev team created a great CSS Wrapped write up highlighting the big features for 2025. Of the 22 new features added, invoker commands, popover enhancements, and customizable select dropdowns are some of the most exciting additions.

Timestamps:

2:29 - More vulnerabilities in RSCs
6:36 - Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation
16:04 - CSS 2025 wrap up
25:05 - Disney to allow characters on Sora
29:42 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation
Jack - More vulnerabilities in RSCs discovered
TJ - CSS Wrapped 2025

Lightning News:

Disney will allow characters on Sora AI video generator

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Twinkly Christmas Lights
Jack - 3D printed underwear for the multiboard desk organization
TJ - Mammoth

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

124: TanStack Enters the AI Arena—Meet TanStack AI

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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 accelerate its development of Claude Code. Apparently, Bun has been central to Claude Code reaching $1 billion in run-rate revenue in just six months, and Anthropic’s brought the team in house to keep the momentum going.

And it’s been another rough week for security in JavaScript. First, a new self-replicating, credential stealing malware attack, dubbed Shai-Hulud 2.0, swept the npm ecosystem and compromised 800 npm packages in the process, and then a critical security vulnerability was discovered for any React projects using React Server Components. Just remember to lock down your dependencies and install those patches ASAP, folks.

Timestamps:

1:22 - TanStack AI
9:12 - Anthropic buys Bun
21:03 - Shai-Hulul 2.0 on npm and an RSC vulnerability
30:23 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Shai-Hulud 2.0 on npm and RSC vulnerability
Jack - TanStack AI
TJ - Anthropic buys Bun (Bun post) (Anthropic post)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

123: Is Google’s Antigravity IDE a Game-Changer or Just Another Fork?

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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 native apps. Uniwind brings Tailwind-style className support to RN at build time, and has a custom, high-performance CSS parser to handle both Tailwind 4 and plain CSS files.

Prisma 7.0 is out, and so is Rust from its codebase. The team completely rebuilt it in TypeScript to cut down on its bundle size and the communication layer between Rust and the JS runtime that was actually slower than just JavaScript through and through.

In Lightning News, even if you don’t develop in Angular, the Angular v21 dev release video is worth a watch, Cloudflare had a big Internet outage this week, Firefox has teased AI in its browser “the Firefox way”, and the State of React Survey 2025 is open now (please vote for Front-end Fire in the Podcasts section!).

Timestamps:

1:27 - Prisma 7.0
9:35 - Uniwind
12:18 - Antigravity
27:32 - Angular v21 release video
29:20 - Cloudflare outage
37:11 - Firefox gets an AI window
38:47 - State of React survey open
40:36 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Uniwind
Jack - Prisma 7.0
TJ - Antigravity

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Upcoming holidays and seeing family
Jack - StroboClip HD for the guitar
TJ - Dungeon Crawler Carl book

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

122: Snapchat Drops Valdi—A New Challenger to React Native?

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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: a single source to manage agents across GitHub, Mobile, CLI, and VS Code, custom agents with tailored prompts and tools, new Copilot integrations and agentic code review, and Plan Mode.

TanStack DB released v0.5 and Query-Driven Sync. With Query-Driven Sync, a component’s query is the API call and DB handles the fetching, caching, and updating, and provides different sync modes for different use cases.

Chapter Markers:

0:47 - Snapchat open sources cross-platform tool Valdi
7:08 - GitHub Universe updates
15:45 - TanStack DB query-driven sync
19:54 - GitHub eliminates toasts
22:49 - Firefox has an updated mascot
24:09 - Vibe coding named word of the year
33:26 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Snapchat open sources cross-platform UI Valdi
Jack - TanStack DB query-driven sync
TJ - GitHub Universe recap

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

121: Chrome DevTools Gets AI Superpowers

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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. Upgrades include: going from XMLHttpRequests to fetch, explicit attribute inheritance, and improved history caching.

Angular’s meta-framework AnalogJS also just launched 2.0 which offers file-based routing, better Vite ecosystem support, and unified SSR, SSG, and islands-style hydration in one cohesive setup.

Rumor has it that next year Apple will be using Gemini to drive Siri, as it continues to try and get Apple Intelligence to work reliably.

GitHub has officially disabled classic token creation for npm publishing in an effort to reign in the supply chain attacks we’ve reported on for the last few months.

And last but not least, a company called NEO has a home assistant robot available for preorder now. The robot can clean, fold laundry, do dishes, and so on, but here’s the kicker: it’s a human piloting it remotely. Is this really the robot enhanced future we imagined?

Timestamps:

1:16 - Chrome DevTools gets a bunch of AI features
8:39 - htmx v4 alpha
14:25 - AnalogJS 2.0
17:09 - Apple allegedly to use Gemini to drive Siri
22:13 - GitHub disables classic token creation for npm
27:38 - NEO home robot
35:58 - What’s making us happy

News:

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Survivalists novel
TJ - Pokemon Legends Z–A game

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

120: Is the AI Bubble About to Burst?

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 06:00:00 -0500

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 models, and a new frontier model that’s 4x faster.

Then the hosts then get existential about whether the AI hype bubble is about to burst, if it’s really capable of stealing anyone’s jobs, and how much you should trust an LLM when making decisions about things like the tech stack for a new project.

Timestamps:

1:43 - React Compiler 1.0
8:13 - Cursor 2.0
22:28 - AI discussion on bubbles and more
43:13 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - AI: bubbles and more bubbles, employment impact, and proper use
Jack - React Compiler 1.0
TJ - Cursor 2.0

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Heated Under Desk Foot Rest
Jack - The Toxic Avenger movie
TJ - A London reporter interviewed the wrong Bill DeBlasio

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

119: Vercel’s Double Feature—Next.js 16 and Ship AI

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 command line devtool Vite+. Devs will soon be able to test, lint, format, bundle, and even view their apps’ stats with Vite+, with the performance we expect from a compiler toolchain built completely in Rust. Plus, it’s free for individual users and OSS projects, and has annual licensing prices for startups and enterprises.

Vercel held not one but two conferences this week: Next.js Conf and then Ship AI. Next.js 16 was unveiled with improvements to Turbopack, a Next.js DevTools MCP, and updates to Cache Components. And Ship AI covered updates to the AI SDK, Vercel’s AI Gateway and Agents, and more.

Chapter Markers:

02:05 - ChatGPT Atlas
12:38 - Vite+
20:21 - Next.js conf and Ship AI
28:07 - Claude Code on the web
33:02 - The Louvre was robbed
38:02 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Vite+
Jack - Next.js Conf and Ship AI conf updates
TJ - ChatGPT Atlas

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Diplomat TV series
Jack - Timers to limit doom scrolling
TJ - Claude Code

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

118: Bun 1.3 - From Runtime to Full-Stack Powerhouse

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 starters. Will it catch on, who knows?

Not to be outdone by React v19.2 last week, Next.js 16 beta debuted (with support for React 19.2 included). In addition to the latest version of React, Next.js 16 has also declared Turbopack, RSC support, and React Compiler all stable, and improved its caching system as well.

And Bun is back in the news with the release of Bun 1.3, and it’s a doozy of a minor version release. Bun wants to be a full-stack JavaScript runtime as it now includes a full-stack dev server, built in support for MySQL and Redis DBs, routing, and the ability to package an entire project into one executable for cross-platform support. Well done, Bun team!

Chapter Markers:

01:14 - Remix v3
10:38 - Next.js 16 beta
17:35 - Bun 1.3
24:42 - Firefox 144 released w/view transition support
25:19 - HBO changes TV channel names
28:00 - W3C has a new logo
31:25 - What’s making us happy

News:

Paige - Bun 1.3
Jack - Remix v3
TJ - Next.js 16 beta

Lightning News:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

React Goes Independent: Inside the New React Foundation

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 React Conf, React 19.2 dropped, and it brings new features like partial pre-rendering, a new useEffectEvent hook, and an component that lets devs prioritize rendering tomaintain state and make navigation faster.

Not to be outdone, Cloudflare announced a new RPC protocol called Cap’n Web, which is a pure TypeScript implementation. What makes Cap’n Web unique is that it supports bi-directional calling, promise pipelining, and lets users design RPC interfaces that look like regular JavaScript APIs.

Chapter Markers:

03:18 - React Foundation
07:10 - React Compiler 1.0 and React 19.2
17:13 - Cap’n Web
24:19 - Opera Neon
27:16 - The EU is considering cookie law changes
31:43 - The Internet Archive hits 1 trillion pages
33:33 - What’s making us happy

Links:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - The Terminal List: Dark Wolf TV series
Jack - Fender Acoustasonic guitar
TJ - Portable stadium seat addition

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

Claude Code Levels Up: VS Code Extension, Checkpoints & Sonnet 4.5

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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, including using DevTools to review network requests, console output and page structure, simulate user interactions, and even automate performance audits.

In a poorly planned move, the CEO of Vercel tweeted a picture of himself meeting with the controversial Israeli Prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This sparked a massive online backlash, some Vercel employees quit, and many customers are leaving the hosting site and vowing to stop using Next.js, as well.

Timestamps:

00:46 - Claude Sonnet and Claude Code updates
7:55 - Chrome DevTools MCP
13:50 - Vercel Drama
19:03 - State of JS survey is open
20:21 - GitHub’s plan to make npm more secure
25:30 - Meta builds data center the size of 70 football fields
29:04 - What’s making us happy

Links:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

Adam Argyle on Cracking the 2025 Web Dev Interview

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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:

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

Paige - Why Is This Interesting (WITI) newsletter
TJ - Strands NYT game
Jack - Final Destination series
Adam - EP-1320 medieval - Clues By Sam

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

npm Under Siege: The “Shai-Hulud” Worm Attack

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 the memory Wasm apps can use, supports multiple memory usage, and now allows garbage collection.

It’s been a while since we last covered LLM options for folks who want to run their own models locally or in the browser, so Jack gives a quick rundown of some of the best options out today.

There’s WebLLM from MLC, MediaPipe from Google, and ONNX from Microsoft, and although none are easily interchangeable with another, if cost, privacy, or working offline are concerns of your LLM-enabled app, these may be good options to explore.

Chapter Markers:

00:58 - npm supply chain attack
16:28 - Wasm 3.0
23:34 - LLM options in the browser
34:41 - Jack’s experience at CascadiaJS and a discussion on the value of in-person conferences in 2025
41:54 - GitHub’s new MCP registry
43:26 - Microsoft Paint is getting project files
46:54 - What’s making us happy

Links:

Paige - “Shai-Hulud” supply chain attack on npm continues against Crowdstrike npm packages and pnpm 10.16 minimumReleaseAge setting
Jack - LLM options in the browser: WebLLM, MediaPipe, ONNX
TJ - Wasm 3.0
GitHub’s new MCP registry
Microsoft Paint is getting its own Photoshop-like project files
Paige - Great British Bake Off season 16 is back!
Jack - Yoyos
TJ - phishyurl.com

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

npm’s Biggest Supply Chain Attack (and What We Learned)

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 noticed and reported within the hour and it looks like the hackers got next to nothing for their efforts, but it serves as another reminder to be extra careful before clicking links in emails.

In the same security vein, browser company Brave uncovered a security vulnerability in AI-browser Comet where malicious instructions on a web page could cause the agent to “go rogue” while it was being asked to summarize a page’s contents. Perplexity has since added more guardrails to try and mitigate this sort of thing, but be cognizant of the data and site access you’re giving to AI agents.

Timestamps:

1:12 - Storybook 10
7:53 - npm’s supply chain attack
17:24 - Brave discloses a security vulnerability in Comet
26:38 - You’re absolutely right!
35:26 - What’s making us happy

Links:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

Warp Code and the Future of Agent-Driven Dev

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 for shipping agent-generated code “all the way from prompt to production” via the Warp terminal. Warp Code offers an agent-driven terminal-first approach, with visual code review of agent changes, and a native file editor for minor edits in an attempt to eliminate the context switching devs have to do nowadays between their AI agents, IDEs, and GitHub.

In a twist no one saw coming, SaaS behemoth Atlassian has bought AI-browser Dia (and its maker The Browser Company) for $610 million. Atlassian wants to position Dia as the AI-browser for users at work and time will tell if that bet pays off.

Timestamps:

02:34 - Google doesn't have to sell Chrome
10:17 - Warp Code
22:56 - Atlassian buys The Browser Company
31:48 - Anthropic raises $13 billion
34:54 - OpenAI is building an AI-powered hiring platform
39:42 - What’s making us happy

Links:

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

Bun v1.2: SQL, YAML & Security Scans

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 unified SQL client with zero dependencies, native YAML file support, OS native credential storage for secrets, and a security scanner API that scans packages for vulnerabilities before installation.

And MCP-UI, a toolkit of interactive UI components for MCP has new features to support resources beyond text like embedded iframes and even raw HTML. Not all agents with MCP support can handle these new resources, but if they can, users can see product photos, data visualizations, and other mini sites right in their AI chat.

In the Lightning News section for this week, the folks at Deno leading the charge to get Oracle to relinquish its trademark for JavaScript need our help. Those legal bills aren’t going to pay themselves and Deno’s pockets aren’t nearly as deep as Oracle’s, so if you care about making JavaScript public domain (which it absolutely should be), please consider donating so they can keep fighting the good fight to free JS. Every little bit helps.

Timestamps:

00:48 - Claude Code thinking modes & checkpoints
10:33 - Bun v1.2
17:04 - MCP-UI updates
23:06 - Claude for Chrome
28:12 - Donate to help Deno fight Oracle
30:24 - What’s making us happy

Links:

Paige - Bun v1.2
Jack - MCP-UI updates
TJ - Claude Code Thinking Modes & Claude Code Checkpoints
Claude for Chrome
Donate to help Deno keep fighting Oracle in court
Paige - Zima Dental Pod
Jack - Foundation TV series
TJ - Babe Ruth commits fraud

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

Alchemy: IaC Without Terraform

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 06:00:00 -0400

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 LLM tokens, but it's another approach to consider.

In infrastructure news, there’s a library called Alchemy that lets devs write their Infrastructure as Code in pure TypeScript. No Terraform files, no dependencies, just async functions, stored in plain JSON files, that runs anywhere JS can run. For web devs, the future of IaC has arrived.

Next.js has made their last big release before v16 in the form of 15.5. Highlights of this minor release include: production turbopack builds, stable support for the Node.js runtime in middleware, fully typed routes, and deprecation warnings in preparation for Next.js 16.

Timestamps:

00:57 - Dangers of the “ubertool”
09:54 - Alchemy Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
15:27 - Next.js 15.5
24:57 - How CodeRabbit AI got hacked
27:48 -