Front-End Fire

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 context for a specific design selection or even porting over Figma designs directly into a code base for use.

The AI browser race heats up as both OpenAI and Perplexity make news with announcements and early access for their own AI-powered web browsers. Details are limited but both companies are putting their AI search engines front and center to try and steal some Google Chrome’s market share.

In this week’s Lightning News, there’s a new framework for building and shipping MCP applications called Xmcp. Focused on developer experience, Xmcp claims you can bootstrap an MCP server from scratch or plug it into an existing Next.js or Express app with one simple command. 

Finally, the Fire Starters section is back this week with the debut of CSS conditional if() statements in Chrome v137. Out of the box, if() works with style(), media(), and support() queries, and unlocks things like state-based styling with very straightforward syntax that uses a series of condition-value pairs, and even allows for an else statement at the end.

Timestamps:

• 1:13 - Vercel acquires NuxtLabs
• 5:54 - Figma releases an MCP Server
• 13:41 - OpenAI and Perplexity announce browsers
• 26:08 - Xmcp framework
• 29:06 - CSS conditions with if()
• 33:05 - What’s making us happy

Links:

• Paige - NuxtLabs joins Vercel
• Jack - Figma Dev Mode MCP server 
• TJ - Upcoming web browsers from OpenAI and Perplexity. 
• Xmcp framework for building MCP applications
• CSS conditionals with if() statements
• Paige - Somebody Feed Phil TV series
• TJ - Murderbot

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

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 they pay creators for their content. While we absolutely support this move, Cloudflare’s future vision of a marketplace where content creators and AI companies come together and compensation is based on how much content “furthers knowledge” seems idealistic, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Serverless Postgres database company Neon has a new product called Neon Launchpad that can create an instant Neon database with zero configuration or account creation. Users get an automatically generated connection string, 72 hours to claim a new database, and even automatic database seeding with SQL scripts for schema and data initialization.

Timestamps:

• 2:13 - Vercel Ship event updates
• 7:49 - Cloudfare declares content independence day
• 16:12 - Neon Launchpad
• 20:03 - Figma IPO
• 22:24 - Deno v. Oracle trademark update
• 25:10 - Antropic lets Claude run a vending machine
• 32:21 - What’s making us happy

Links:

• News:
  • Paige - Cloudflare declares July 1 Content Independence Day
  • Jack - Neon Launchpad instant DBs
  • TJ - Vercel Ship 2025
• Lightning:
  • Figma has filed for an IPO to trade on the stock exchange as “FIG”
  • Claude ran a vending machine, and the first attempt at “vibe management” wasn’t great
  • Deno v. Oracle trademark update
• What Makes Us Happy this Week:
  • Paige - Squid Game season 3
  • Jack - F1: The Movie
  • TJ - Bobby Banilla Day

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

The field of AI coding agent CLIs is crowded and getting more so by the day, and our co-host Jack has tried them all so you don’t have to. The big four are: OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, Google’s Gemini Code, and Amazon Q, along with some lesser known CLIs like AmpCode, OpenCode, and (the already shut down) Anon Kode. After trying everything, Jack says Anthropic’s Sonnet models and Claude Code are still the best.

Google’s quietly been working on new LLM-powered web APIs that rely on Google’s Gemini Nano model to power browser features like language detection and translation, and writing and proofreading, and Mozilla is concerned devs will create apps based on Gemini’s behavior.

Less than two months after Figma’s big Config conference, it shared it's acquired OS headless CMS Payload. Continuing the effort to make Figma a central hub for digital product creation, Figma’s adding a CMS to the mix so marketers and designers can more easily update website content as needed.

Timestamps:

• 1:01 - Jack’s AI tool roundup
• 10:34 - Mozilla’s concerns about Google building AI into Chrome
• 19:16 - Figma buys Payload
• 24:22 - Firefox gets vertical tabs
• 27:15 - Jack’s macOS 26 experiment goes wrong
• 30:36 - Anthropic destroys millions of print books
• 38:06 - What’s making us happy

Links:

• Paige - Figma buys CMS Payload
• Jack - State of the AI CLIs: Codex, OpenCode, AmpCode, Gemini Code, Claude Code, Amazon Q
• TJ - Mozilla’s concerns about Google building AI into Chrome

Lightning News:

• Firefox v140
• Jack's MacOS 26 upgrade gone wrong
• Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Rock Paper Scissors novel
• Jack - Tamolitch Falls and Final Destination movie series
• TJ - Watkins Glen State Park

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

In this episode:

• Linting is getting a whole lot faster with Oxlint
• Your browser is becoming part of your wellness routine
• And Copilot is getting more agentic features

Chapter Markers:

• 1:05 - Oxlint
• 7:05 - Opera Air
• 11:24 - GitHub Copilot coding agent
• 18:45 - More Remix v3 updates
• 23:56 - What makes us happy

Links:

• Paige - void0's Oxlint 1.0
• Jack - Wellness stuff in Opera’s Air Browser
• TJ - GitHub Copilot coding agent in public preview

Lightning News:

• Remix v3 goes further off the rails, names itself “spiritual successor to the web”

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - ALookBackInHistory Instagram account
• Jack - Spiritfarer game
• TJ - Formula 1: Drive to Survive TV 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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

We first reported on Evan You’s company void0 back in October, 2024, and now Evan and co are making good on their promise to rework the entire JS toolchain from the ground up with the release of Rolldown-Vite. The new package is a drop-in replacement for the Vite bundler we all know and love, with benefits like production build time reductions of up to 16x and memory usage decreases of up to 100x. Replacement is easy and the perf gains are real. Try it today.

Apple just held WWDC25 and announced big updates in Safari 26 beta. Favicons get replaced with SVG icons, any website can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS, there’s a brand new HTML element for visionOS, CSS anchor positioning for popovers is supported as well as scroll-driven animations, and much more. Suffice it to say, Safari’s got some slick new features under the hood. The jury is still very much out on the gooey, glassmorphic UI design that Apple also unveiled at WWDC, however.

The Browser Company, who made the niche, but well liked Arc browser, has been working on a new AI-first browser called Dia, and this week it’s available early access for Arc Members. At first glance Dia feels similar to other “agentic” browsers, giving users a chat input and the ability to chat about content in tabs or links, but it also shows off skills like connecting to calendars to schedule meetings or composing text that can be inserted into emails. We’ll report back after we’ve had a chance to test Dia out for a bit.

Chapter markers:

• 1:00 - void0’s Rolldown-Vite
• 5:52 - Safari 26 beta
• 21:26 - Dia, the new AI-browser from The Browser Company
• 29:38 - Cursor raises $900 million 

Links:

• Paige - void0's Rolldown-Vite
• Jack - Dia, the new AI-browser from The Browser Company
• TJ - Safari 26 beta

Lightning News:

• Cursor raises $900 million

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Paradise TV series
• Jack - Ballerina movie 
• TJ - Apple Vision Pro on The Price is Right

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

OpenAI has a new API in beta called the Realtime API, which enables speech conversations with LLMs. Real-time text and audio processing means users can have conversations with voice agents and voice-enabled apps, and OpenAI makes it simple to connect via WebRTC or WebSockets.

Several months ago, The Browser Company, abruptly announced they were stopping work on Arc browser in favor of building a completely new, AI-first browser called Dia. Now, the company’s CEO has released a letter detailing why these decisions were made and what the future holds for The Browser Company. Details on Dia are vague, but the team is optimistic they can build “a true successor to the browser”.

AI-enabled coding IDE Cursor hit v1.0, this week with a bunch of notable features. Notable highlights in this release include: BugBot, which automatically reviews PRs and identifies bugs and issues, Background Agent (Cursor’s remote coding agent) for all users, Memories to help Cursor remember facts and conversations within projects for future use, and one-click MCP install and OAuth support.

Timestamps:

• 1:10 - OpenAI’s realtime agent API
• 10:03 - The Browser Company Kills Arc
• 16:53 - Cursor 1.0
• 28:04 - Codex gets internet access
• 31:09 - React Router’s open governance
• 34:18 - Fire Starter
• 39:55 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Cursor 1.0
• Jack - OpenAI’s Realtime Agent for AI chat
• TJ - The Browser Company stops developing Arc

Lightning News:

• React Router Open Governance
• Codex gets access to the internet

Fire Starter:

• console.log formatting strings

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Clarkson’s Farm season 4
• Jack - Shokz OpenRun Pro 2 headphones
• TJ - Rotary cheese grater

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

It’s been 4 years since TypeScript schema validation library Zod released v3, but the new v4 release makes it worth the wait. Expect faster parsing times across the board, built in error pretty-printing, and even a tree-shakeable API called Zod Mini for constrained environments like edge runtimes.

There’s a new npm-based CLI tool for managing and sharing AI rules across different editors and tools called vibe-rules. In addition to saving favorite prompts so they can be applied to any supported editor, vibe-rules can also automatically install prompts shared in a project’s NPM packages into an editor’s configuration. It’s early days yet, but a great idea to make prompts easier for anyone to use.

Angular v20 is out with some much anticipated highlights. Stabilized signal-based APIs, incremental hydration, custom Angular reporting directly in Chrome DevTools, GenAI development advancements, and, last but not least, a RFC for an official Angular mascot. Not to bias you, but we favor the pink, dice-shaped mascot around here.

In this episode:

• 1:10 - Zod v4
• 5:50 - vibe-rules
• 15:12 - Angular 20
• 27:03 - Remix v3
• 31:32 - Stack Overflow’s Annual Dev Survey
• 38:02 - Firefox and Temporal
• 39:15 - Bolt’s hackathon status

News:

• Paige - Zod v4
• Jack - vibe-rules
• TJ - Angular 20

Lightning News:

• Remix v3 updates
• Firefox is the first browser to support Temporal (Temporal on MDN)
• StackOverflow’s Annual Dev Survey is out now
• Bolt’s hackathon starts

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Annual Gloucestershire cheese rolling race and Wiki history
• Jack - The Portland Pickles baseball game
• TJ - StoryGraph and The God of the Woods

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

This week both Google and Microsoft held conferences where they announced all the new, great AI breakthroughs, but there were a few other notable, web dev-focused pieces in between. VS Code announced it will be open sourcing the GitHub Copilot Chat extension, refactoring relevant components into its core codebase, as the next logical step “in making VS Code an open source AI editor.”

Microsoft has floated a new idea called “NLWeb” to make it easier for websites to turn themselves into AI apps using an LLM model and their own data. While this sounds interesting, it’s very early days yet and is not ready for prime time.

A blog post from Remix creator Ryan Florence leaked earlier this week, and in it, Ryan shares that Remix v3 will move away from using React. The usual criticisms of React are present, and so Remix v3 will be completely new with a focus on a framework that’s AI friendly and leveraging all the Web APIs available today. 

News:

• VS Code is open sourcing its AI chat extension
• Remix’s “Declaration of Independence” blog leaked
• And Microsoft introduces yet another AI standard

Lightning News:

• Satya Nadella and podcasts
• Introducing Claude 4 

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Daredevil: Born Again TV series
• Jack -  Baseball team Portland Pickles’ Red Head Appreciation Night
• TJ - The Philadelphia Inquirer’s summer reading list

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

CTO and co-founder of Apollo, Matt DeBergalis, joins us on this episode to talk about how GraphQL has continued to evolve over time, and how Apollo is focused on making it more accessible for developers and AI agents than ever before.

For those less familiar with Apollo and GraphQL, Matt shares the history of both, including lessons he learned from founding the company Meteor that helped him while building Apollo.

We discuss how even though GraphQL is making less headlines than it was a few years ago, it’s really begun to find its niche within larger organizations that have hundreds or even thousands of APIs and databases underpinning their many applications, and how Apollo has continued to evolve so that it can support APIs, serverless functions, and SQL- or no SQL-databases, with little extra code needed to make these different data sources work together.

Matt also highlights the benefits of a GraphQL schema for AI agents and MCP servers, sharing how the agents are generally very good at parsing the schemas and understanding how to leverage queries against the interface to retrieve the data they need. While we’ve had tech stacks in the past like LAMP and MERN, this new addition of AI to the development mix provides a unique opportunity to redefine the stack once more, and GraphQL could be a very good piece to include.

Special Guest

• Matt DeBergalis, CTO and co-founder of Apollo

Relevant Links:

• Apollo GraphQL website
• Apollo GraphQL YouTube
• Apollo GraphQL LinkedIn
• Apollo GraphQL on X
• Matt on GitHub
• Matt on X
• Matt on Medium
• Matt on LinkedIn

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Pitt TV series
• TJ - I Think I Was Murdered
• Matt - Teaching my daughter to ride a bike

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

TanStack, a collection of popular open-source software libraries, is back in the news cycle this week with the announcement of TanStack DB. TanStack DB extends TanStack Query with collections, live queries, and optimistic UI mutations to keep UIs reactive, consistent, and lightning fast.

VS Code marks its 100th release of v1 with updates like: enabling Next Edit Suggestions (NES) be default, adding custom instructions and reusable prompts for a chat agent inside a project’s .github folder, and new tools at the AI agent’s disposal for better results.

There’s a new component library available called Basecoat UI that claims to bring the magic of shadcn/ui with no React required. No matter if a website’s built using HTML, Flask, Rails, or another JS framework, Basecoat uses HTML and Tailwind, and a hint of Alpine.js when needed, to provide accessible, modern components that are also compatible with shadcn/ui themes.

News:

• Paige - Basecoat UI - framework agnostic component library
• Jack - TanStack DB
• TJ - VS Code 1.100

Bonus News:

• Apparently we should all just f’ing use HTML
• Parcel v2.15 jumps on the Rust bandwagon
• Google is testing a new “AI Mode”
• Google’s logo change
• Max once again becomes HBO Max

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - House of Earth and Blood (#1 in Crescent City series) 
• Jack -  Grand Sumo May 2025 Tournament
• TJ - Coast of Michigan

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.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast