Front-End Fire

Node is back in the news with some noteworthy updates as v24 drops. It gets an upgrade to 13.6 for its V8 JavaScript engine, runs with npm version 11, and has more efficient implementation of the local storage API and test runner updates.

Google has released its newest version of its Gemini AI model: Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview (I/O Edition), which claims to be the best model for front-end and UI development. To prove it, Google links to a site called the WebDev Arena (where Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview ranks #1), that lets users put in a prompt and then pits different AI models head to head to build a site based on the prompt. 

Figma just had their 2025 Config conference and unveiled a host of new offerings, including Figma Sites that lets folks design, prototype and publish with Figma, and Figma Make the AI prompting tool that can add functionality to a Figma mockup via natural language directions.

News:

• Paige - Node 24 updates
• Jack - Figma Make and Figma Sites and conference demo video
• TJ - Gemini 2.5 updates and WebDev Arena

Bonus News:

• Take the first annual State of Devs survey
• OpenAI agrees to buy Windsurf for $3B

Fire Starters:

• CSS reading-flow and reading-order

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Old Town Trolley Tours
• Jack -  The Residence TV show
• TJ - ChatGPT helping with camera & video setup

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 React team’s been on a roll lately with new experimental updates. Last episode we covered  View Transitions, and today we discuss Activity. Activity is a component to hide and show parts of the UI while maintaining the component’s state and continuing to render at a lower priority when it’s not visible on screen.

Storybook 9 beta is out now, and it seems to be transitioning from a frontend workshop for building UI components in isolation to a one-stop shop for all your frontend testing needs.

And Microsoft recently released a paper from researchers at Cambridge and Carnegie Mellon studying how AI coding assistants have allowed developers to engage in less critical thinking and independent problem-solving, and how the skills to do both could deteriorate if this over-reliance on AI continues unchecked.

News:

• Paige - Storybook 9 beta
• Jack - React
• TJ - The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking and Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

Bonus News:

• Ladybird new independent web browser
• MTMC-16
• Apple changes App Store rules to allow external purchases

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Night Manager series
• Jack - Raycast
• TJ - Linkin Park World Tour

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

Signals has been gaining in popularity the past few years for its fine-grained approach to reactivity in the browser, and a new high performance implementation called Alien Signals has landed in Vue.js. It offers significant performance improvements to complex applications with lots of data changes, and has been extended so it can be used in other JS-based libraries besides Vue.

 The React team announces that React Compiler has reached release candidate (RC) stage and is nearing stable release territory. React Compiler is a build-time tool that optimizes React apps through automatic memoization so devs don’t have to worry about including useMemo() and useCallback() hooks in their code.

RedwoodSDK, which had some cryptic messaging about its future last month, has unveiled more of the story on its new website this month. It’s aiming to be part of the “personal software revolution” by providing a React framework for Cloudflare, offering built in access to Cloudflare Workers, databases and storage, queues, AI, and more.

News:

• Paige - RedwoodSDK details revealed
• Jack - Alien Signals
• TJ - React Compiler RC

Bonus News:

• Everybody wants to buy Chrome

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Severance TV series season 2
• Jack - Grilling season
• TJ - Detroit grows in population for the first time in decades

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 AI hype train keeps chugging along with new updates from OpenAI. ChatGPT now offers GPT-4.1 - a new dev-first model trained for use cases related to coding, instruction following, and function calling with a context window of up to 1 million tokens. It also announces Codex CLI, a terminal version of ChatGPT that devs can use to run code, manipulate files, and iterate without ever leaving their preferred terminal.

Next.js 15.3 drops with new features like using its Turbopack buildpack for production builds (still in alpha stage so use with caution), community support for Rspack as a drop in replacement for the Webpack bundler, and new navigation hooks for enhanced client-side routing capabilities.

There’s also a new survey out this week: the first annual State of Web Dev AI, which answers questions like which AI tools devs find most useful, how much devs are spending on AI, and what pain points are devs most likely to encounter when leveraging AI to develop their own web apps.

News:

• Paige - OpenAI Codex CLI and GPT-4.1 models
• Jack - State of AI Web Dev 2025
• TJ - Next.js 15.3

Bonus News:

• OpenAI is in talks to acquire Windsurf for $3B
• “Slopsquatting”
• AI agents for everyone (Firebase Studio), (Arduino AI Assistant)

Fire Starter:

• Declarative Web Push

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Solo Leveling anime series
• Jack - Knuckles TV mini series 
• TJ - NY Times Flashback

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

Google announces a new Agent2Agent protocol meant to support AI agents communicating with each other. A2A aims to  complement MCP and address the challenges of deploying large-scale, multi-agent systems from various providers across different platforms and cloud environments.

GitHub Copilot’s new code review feature is now generally available. Just like you’d assign a coworker to review a PR, users can now assign a Copilot agent to review that same PR and spot bugs, identify potential performance problems, and suggest fixes.

RedwoodJS has rebranded itself RedwoodSDK, and is focusing on a new framework that will become the foundation of a personal software revolution. RedwoodSDK promises modern serverless infrastructure, AI-driven dev tools, and open ecosystems, with more details coming soon.

News:

• Paige - RedwoodJS becomes RedwoodSDK
• Jack - Google’s A2A
• TJ - Copilot code reviews & premium requests

Bonus News:

• StackBlitz is hosting the world’s largest hackathon
• Devin 2.0
• Wordpress.com launches free AI-powered website builder

Fire Starter:

• text-wrap: pretty

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Claude AI
• Jack - The Accountant 2 movie
• TJ - Apple Sports

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 tRPC team declares v11 officially production-ready. tRPC allows devs to build typesafe APIs with types that can be shared on the client and server, and now it has support for TanStack Query v5, the ability to send and receive non-JSON data content types, improved support for RSCs, and the ability to stream responses.

After the Next.js security incident a few weeks back, Netlify writes an open letter around the challenges Next.js poses when not hosted on Vercel. It raises valid points like a lack of adapters, no production grade documentation for serverless deployments, no visible roadmap or release schedule, and a disregard for open web standards, among others.

Firefox is finally adding support for progressive web apps (PWAs), but its web app support will intentionally not look, feel, or behave the same way similar features do in other browsers.

News:

• Paige - tRPC v11
• Jack - Firefox will support PWAs (finally)
• TJ - Next.js Netlify deployment drama

Bonus News:

• Styled-components enter maintenance mode
• New Bare JS runtime
• Windsurf and Netlify partnership (and docs on the feature)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Squeeze Me novel
• Jack - Pickup Music site
• TJ - Mario Kart World

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

Special guests Burke Holland and Harald Kirschner from Microsoft join us on this episode to share the new GitHub Copilot features coming to VS Code and beyond.

First up: agent mode is now available to all users in VS Code. GitHub Copilot gets a serious upgrade as it can now create new apps from scratch, handle complex changes to existing code across multiple files, run (and debug) tests from the command line, and guide you through its reasoning. 

Additionally, VS Code and GH Copilot now offer MCP (model context protocol) for agent mode. This means that GitHub Copilot can use context tools and services while building an application. There’s a host of already available community-standard MCP servers available on github.com or devs can build their own and GH Copilot will be able to use it to enhance its knowledge and capabilities.

Next Edit Suggestions (NES) lands in GH Copilot as well, so when devs make one change to a file Copilot predicts the changes that follow and presents them in sequence. Not only are ghost-text suggestions faster to appear to users in VS Code, but Copilot is also better at understanding what other changes are needed to support the new code.

Special Guests:

• Burke Holland, Principal Developer Advocate at Microsoft running the VS Code developer community team
• Harald Kirschner, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft for VS Code and GitHub Copilot

Relevant Links:

• VS Code Timeline view
• Burke’s Website
• Burke on GitHub
• Burke on Twitter
• Burke on YouTube
• Burke on TikTok
• Burke on LinkedIn
• Harald’s Website
• Harald on GitHub
• Harald on Twitter
• Harald on LinkedIn

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Apple AirPods Pro Gen 2
• Jack - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 3
• TJ - Trip to the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park
• Burke - Insta 360 webcam
• Harald - Springtime in CA

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

Next.js had a security vulnerability scare last week due to an internal header in its middleware that allowed for skipping middleware (like auth validation) before reaching routes. The Next.js team responded quickly and patched the security holes, but this serves as a reminder to stay vigilant, keep dependencies updated, and implement multiple layers of security.

Michael Jackson, co-founder of Remix and React Router, is calling it quits for Remix support React Server Components. Lots of React-based frameworks built prior to RSCs have been struggling to support the new paradigm shift - and lots of devs have bemoaned the fact because of the added complexity it introduces, and MJ is over it. This isn’t the first time framework authors have made bold claims to not support new breaking changes, so we’ll have to wait and see if he sticks to it.

Rsdoctor, a build analyzer tool by ByteDance, has hit v1.0. Rsdoctor goes beyond other build analysis tools offering a visual view of the build process and smart analysis to help dev teams identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, and improve overall engineering quality.

News:

• Paige - Rsdoctor 1.0 is available now
• Jack - Remix bailing on RSC?
• TJ - Next.js’s security vulnerability

Bonus News:

• Redwood JS enters maintenance mode
• Browser Use Raises $17M

Fire Starters:

• CSS interpolate-size: allow-keywords

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Mythic Quest TV series
• Jack - Relearning guitar and the Katana Go headphone amp
• TJ - Open AI image generation and Studio Ghibli

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

Web app bundler Parcel adds support for React Server Components, including a repo of example apps for developers to reference. Although not specifically aimed at framework developers it seems like that’s the audience that would benefit most from this new feature in Parcel.

CodeSandbox enters the AI game by teaming up with AI hosting platform Together AI, and launching CodeSandbox SDK. CodeSandbox SDK will allow developers to programmatically spin up AI sandboxes just like they can spin up microVMs today to run web app sandboxes in the cloud on CodeSandbox.io. 

Netlify inks a deal to become the official deployment partner of TanStack Start. Deploying TanStack projects on Netlify will mean: no config files needed, access to Netlify serverless functions, the reliability of Netlify’s global edge network, and the developer tools we know and love like instant previews and automated workflows.

News:

• Paige - CodeSandbox joins Together AI and launches CodeSandbox SDK
• Jack - Parcel RSCs
• TJ - TanStack + Netlify Partnership

Bonus News:

• Google Acquires Wiz for $32 billion
• Oxlint Beta is ready to replace ESLint

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Formula 1: Drive to Survive S7 
• Jack - Mushroom outdoor solar lights
• TJ - Michael Jordan-shaped Cheeto up for auction

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 TypeScript Compiler (TSC) is getting a major port to Go. Go’s support for concurrency and efficient memory management convinced the Microsoft team to port the code over and should result in as much as 10x faster builds in the future. Expect a feature-complete implementation towards the end of 2025, and the first major release of the native compiler to be TS 7.0 after that.

OpenAI has released new APIs to make building agentic apps even simpler. A new Response API, built in tools like web search and file search, an Agents SDK to orchestrate agent workflows, and observability tools to trace and inspect those workflows round out the offerings for empowering autonomous agents to accomplish more tasks.

Developer Aiden Bai’s back in the news with a new site called same.dev that claims to “one-shot” clone any site. Just enter a site URL into the input and it will return React, Tailwind, and Shadcn UI code. It’s pretty unreal.

News:

• Paige - OpenAI: New Tools for Building Agents
• Jack - same.dev 
• TJ - TypeScript ports compiler to Go for 10x faster builds

Bonus News:

• Apple delays upgraded Siri

Fire Starters:

• HTML Data List element

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Under desk heated footrest
• Jack - Jamstik Standard MIDI Guitar
• TJ - Charizard Cheeto

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