Front-End Fire

The Tanner-verse expands again, as TanStack Form announces v1 just two years after Tanner Linsley began work on it. Out of the gate, TanStack Form supports React, Vue, Angular, Solid, and Lit. 

ByteDance (yes, that ByteDance) has released a React Native competitor named Lynx. Lynx is a new JavaScript framework that allows you to write apps that run across iOS, Android, and the Web, and it’s already being used in production TikTok apps.

VS Code’s February release had some major AI highlights this month. Preview access to the latest ChatGPT 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 models for GH Copilot, the ability to attach images, GH problems, and entire folders for context, and improvements to Agent Mode. 

News:

• Paige - VS Code Feb highlights
• Jack - TanStack Form hits v1
• TJ - Lynx

Bonus News:

• Tailwind UI becomes Tailwind Plus
• Vibecoding

Fire Starters:

• Invoker Commands API

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Visiting Greenville, SC
• Jack - Prime Target TV series
• TJ - Pokémon GO

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 announcement: Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

The web development world can’t seem to get enough of surveys, so we’ve got the first State of AI 2025 to announce in this week’s episode. The folks behind this survey are the same ones who run State of JS, State of CSS, State of HTML, and more. Take 15 minutes to let them know what AI models you prefer, which code assistants you use, and what annoys you about the state of AI today.

Along the same lines, Anthropic just released Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude Code. Claude Sonnet’s become a favorite model in the programming world and 3.7 introduces the first hybrid model that can produce near instant response or extended, thoughtful responses, depending on what the user wants. Claude Code is Anthropic’s first agentic coding tool in the form of a CLI that can search and read code, edit files, run tests, and commit code to GitHub.

Jack’s drop in replacement for the deprecated Create React App, create-tsrouter-app, now offers Solid JS support, add-ons like including Sentry or Tailwind CSS in a new project, and model context protocol (MCP) support for AI coding assistants to interact with the application.

News:

• Paige - State of AI survey 2025
• Jack - create-tsrouter-app updates (Solid, add-ons, MCP support)
• TJ - Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Claude CodeBonus News:

Bonus News:

• First impressions of Bolt.new + Expo
• react-scan 0.2
• React Explorer

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Breville InFizz Aqua
• Jack - Adrian’s Digital Basement YT channel
• TJ - ClaudePlaysPokemon

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 announcement: Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

The parent company of TikTok, ByteDance, has just released TraeAI, the newest entrant to the AI-enhanced IDE wars. Trae is also a fork of the VS Code IDE and offers many of the same AI features of competitors Windsurf and Cursor: chats, autocomplete, etc.

Recently we reported the React team agreed to deprecate starter React repo Create React App due to changes in React 19 breaking the project. Well, our very own Jack Herrington collaborated with the TanStack team to create a drop-in replacement called create-tsrouter-app that builds TanStack Router based SPA applications to give folks who previously used CRA a better option in today’s world.

Bolt.new, the browser-based AI agent continues to make news announcing a new integration with native app development framework Expo. Now, users can describe to Bolt what sort of mobile app they want in natural language, preview the code in real time on any platform, and refine their vision by chatting with the agent, and finally deploying it to the app store.

News:

• Paige - Bolt.new & Expo integrate to build mobile apps with AI 
• Jack - Jack’s very own Create React App replacement: create-tsrouter-app
• TJ - TraeAI

Bonus News:

• Microsoft Says It Has Created a New State of Matter
• ESLint supports CSS linting

Fire Starters:

• CSS text-box-trim

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Drop Stop car seat gap filler
• Jack - 3D printing
• TJ - Onyx Storm

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

Please take our listener survey so we can better tailor the podcast to your interests.

It’s only mid-February and already the State of React survey results for 2024 are in! Unsurprisingly Next.js continues to dominate as the most used React-based framework and Tailwind CSS tops the charts when it comes to CSS tools and libraries.

TypeScript 5.8 beta brings TypeScript syntax one step closer to being a first-class citizen in the Node runtime. Node 23.6 unflagged experimental support for running TS files directly, but certain TS constructs like enums, import aliases and a few other things just aren’t supported. TS 5.8 beta introduces the –eraseabeSyntaxOnly flag, which will allow users to only write TS constructs that can be erased from a Node file, and will issue an error if it encounters constructs that can’t be erased cleanly.

Vercel’s AI tool v0 can now import Tailwind config and Figma files. Now, designs begun in Figma can be imported to v0 to refine without the friction of design-to-code translation and custom font weights and colors can be added to directly from a custom Tailwind config file.

News:

• Paige - TypeScript 5.8’s –eraseableSyntaxOnly flag
• Jack - v0 can now import Tailwind config and Figma files
• TJ - State of React 2024 survey results

Bonus News:

• Angular: The Documentary
• Astro 5.2

Fire Starters:

• CSS hanging-punctuation

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - A Man on the Inside TV series
• Jack - Strings of bee lights
• TJ - Heated gloves

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

The latest wrinkle for AI coding assistant tools like Cursor and Windsurf is known as the Model Context Protocol (MCP). MCP is an open protocol that allows users to provide custom tools and services to agentic LLMs like calling a third party weather service.

In further AI news, OpenAI has introduced a new deep research agent designed to conduct multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks. Just give it a prompt requiring research, like which model of washing machine to buy, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.

And as it turns out, the upgrade to React 19 broke React’s own Create React App (CRA) starter repo and the community wants it fixed and deprecated, as it’s no longer the recommended way to build a new React project in the docs. Mark Erikson, of Redux fame, opens a GitHub issue in the repo suggesting updates and solutions and the official acquiesces to fix the repo for now, and deprecate it in the docs.

News:

• Paige - OpenAI introduces deep research agent
• Jack - Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Cursor and Windsurf
• TJ - Create React App and React 19 (and here’s the issue to add Astro to the React docs)

Bonus News:

• Dan Abramov leaves Bluesky
• Oracle v. Deno trademark update
• GitHub Copilot introduces agents with Copilot Edits

Fire Starters:

• CSS position sticky

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Handheld compressed air duster
• Jack - Finishing LED movie poster RPi project
• TJ - Cannondale Topstone 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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

A new challenger to rival OpenAI’s best ChatGPT model has arisen from China named DeepSeek R1. The reason it’s causing even more of a stir is because the creators claim DeepSeek R1 was trained for under $5M - a mere fraction of the cost of comparable models to date - and they’ve open sourced the code, the models, all of it.

In the same vein, both TJ and Paige had the chance to try out AI coding assistant Devin.ai firsthand last week. Devin is best described as an energetic junior programmer, and while it offers unique ways of interacting with it: Slack threads, PR comments, and has oversight over multiple repos so it can be asked to do things like compare documentation in one repo to SDK endpoints in another repo, its end value is still questionable.

TypeScript validation libraries have been catching on in recent years, and the creators of some of the most popular ones (Zod, ArkType, and Valibot) have gotten together to promote a common interface for libraries called Standard Schema.

News:

• Paige - Standard Schema promotes a common interface for TypeScript validation libraries
• Jack - DeepSeek R1
• TJ - Our firsthand experiences with Devin.ai and jokes about AI trained coding assistants

Bonus News:

• Matt Biilman coins the next big term in web dev experience: AX (“agent experience”)
• Vercel acquires dashboard and chart library Tremor
• Has the “Rust wave” crested?

Fire Starters:

• toReversed, toSorted, and toSpliced

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Recruit TV series
• Jack - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
• TJ - Onyx Storm

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

This week, the team behind JavaScript runtime Bun drops some major updates into Bun 1.2. Bun introduces a built-in S3 storage API, a built-in Postgres client (with MySQL coming soon), 90% compatibility with Node.js, and it’s faster than ever before.

Tailwind CSS v4 is out as well, and it boasts a new higher performance engine for 5x faster full builds, support for cutting edge CSS features like cascade layers, custom properties, and container queries, a simplified initial install and config to get going, and a first-party Vite plugin.

And React Scan, built by Aiden Bai who also built Million.js, is also out this week with v0.1. Install React Scan into any React app and it will auto detect performance issues due to excessive re-rendering, and highlight the components causing the issues.

News:

• Paige - Tailwind CSS v4.0
• Jack - React Scan 0.1 (aka Million.js)
• TJ - Bun 1.2

Bonus News:

• Stargate
• OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you

Fire Starters:

• Link to text fragments with #:~:text=

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Puzzles (like the ones from Buffalo Games)
• Jack - Klipsch G-17 air wireless speaker
• TJ - Not So Super, Apple

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

The first topic of conversation this week is an unexpected new area the Expo team is tackling: Expo Application Service Hosting. EAS Hosting is a new service for quickly deploying web projects built using Expo and React Native apps. It makes it easy to compile and sign apps with custom native code, upload apps to the Play Store or App Store, and push live app updates directly to users.

The Interop project, which aims to improve interoperability between major browser engines, released its accomplishments from 2024 this week. The browsers took on 17 areas of focus in 2024, and went from 46% of tests passing in January, all the way to 95% of tests passing by the end of December.

WordPress makes headlines once more, as Autommatic, the WordPress hosting company owned by WP creator Matt Mullenweg cuts its contributions back on the WP open-source project from 4,000 hours per week to 45 hours per week.

News:

• Paige - Interop 2024 highlights
• Jack - Expo APIs (EAS Hosting)
• TJ - Automattic cuts WordPress contribution hours (WordPress Drama Timeline)

Bonus News:

• Vitest 3.0 is out
• The iPhone Air could be coming later this year

Fire Starters:

• WebXR Device API

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Shrinking TV show and browser-based SwaggerEditor
• Jack - fzf command-line fuzzy finder
• TJ - Switch 2

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

This episode begins with a cautionary tale to double check your browser extensions. Popular coupon browser extension Honey’s been caught replacing affiliate links with its own tracking codes right before checkout, as well as applying pre-selected discount codes from its business partners that aren’t always the best deals.

A few weeks ago we reported Deno is petitioning Oracle to release the JavaScript trademark as Oracle’s never used it since acquiring it when it bought Sun Microsystems. This week Oracle has informed Deno they won’t voluntarily withdraw their trademark on JavaScript, and are lawyering up.

And the creator of HashiCorp has built a new terminal emulator called Ghostty that’s getting a lot of buzz lately. Ghostty is written in Zig and uses platform native UI and GPU acceleration for an ultra fast terminal experience. It’s got all the expected features like split screen, key commands, and support for programs like Neovim, and is worth a shot if you’re interested in trying a new terminal competitor.

News:

• Paige - Ghostty terminal emulator and app settings GUI
• Jack - Honey browser extension scandal
• TJ - Oracle plans to fight Deno’s petition for them to release the JavaScript trademark

Bonus News:

• Node’s experimental type stripping is now enabled by default

Fire Starters:

• Broadcast Channel API

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Lies of Locke Lamora novel
• Jack - Home automation and the Hue lighting API
• TJ - CES! Featuring things like Swippitt

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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

To start us off, the State of JS 2024 survey results were recently released, and there’s lots of interesting stats to share. Vite continues to be the most loved framework and build tool amongst all JS devs, React continues to be the most used framework amongst JS devs at work, and SvelteKit and Astro are the two meta frameworks JS devs are most interested in trying out. Fun fact: 67% of respondents say they use ChatGPT to help them write code, but estimate only 12 - 20% of their code in a project is AI-assisted.

In keeping with the AI trend, VS Code announced a fee plan for GitHub Copilot: no trial, no subscription, no credit card required. Limits apply, but it’s a great opportunity for devs who aren’t sure if Copilot is worth the cost to try it out.

Shadcn has also released its new resource site Awesome Shadcn UI. The site contains 13 categories, 200 resources, and lots of useful links to templates, UI libraries, components, color customizations, animations, and more. 

News:

• Paige - State of JS 2024 survey results
• Jack - Shadcn UI design system resources
• TJ - Announcing a free GitHub Copilot for VS Code

Bonus News:

• Matt Mullenweg imposes a “holiday break” on WordPress and asks Redditors what other drama he should create in 2025

Fire Starters:

• Clipboard API

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Tulsa King TV series
• Jack - Hue Play HDMI sync box 8K
• TJ - Updating my blog

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 Tweet us on X @front_end_fire and BlueSky.

• 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