Episode notes
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 - Intro3:50 - Vercel and Shopify collab on Hydrogen13:11 - A Fable 5 update22:38 - Astryx33:51 - Cloudflare to change its crawler policy43:42 - What's Making Us HappyNews Paige: Fable 5's ban has been lifted & Sonnet 5 is out tooJack: Vercel and Shopify c...
Front-End Fire
by TJ VanToll, Paige Niedringhaus, Jack Herrington · English · Tech & Science
A weekly show that helps you stay up to date on the latest and greatest in the front-end world.
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E155 · 27 Jul 2026 · 57 min
155: OpenAI Breaks Out of its Sandbox
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E154 · 21 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
154: How Not to Drown in AI Code Reviews
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 - Intro0:26 - How to not drown in code reviews49:55 - What's Making Us HappyLinks Anthropic: Recursive Self ImprovementSpotify Engineering: C...
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E153 · 13 Jul 2026 · 48 min
153: Vercel Wants Your Entire Stack
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E151 · 29 Jun 2026 · 40 min
151: Fixing AI’s Microservices Problem
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 - Intro1:41 - Polygraph meta-harness from the Nx folks7:49 - Deno Desktop12:39 - An update on the tech hiring landscape24:42 - Dan Abramov joins Vercel27:01 - Claude C...
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E150 · 22 Jun 2026 · 1 hr
150: The Government Said “No Fable For You”
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 - Intro1:27 - Anthropic released Fable and the US government shut it down13:51 - GLM-5.220:16 - MDN MCP Server25:42 - npm...
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E149 · 15 Jun 2026 · 52 min
149: Rise of the React Foundation
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 su...
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E164 · 5 Oct 2026 · 53 minNew
164: Developers Are Tired of This Sh*t
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E163 · 28 Sep 2026 · 51 min
163: Do Frameworks Still Matter Anymore?
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E162 · 21 Sep 2026 · 56 min
162: Shopify Breaks Up with React Native
The React core team just shipped 19.3 with view transitions, fragment refs, and Context support in server components. A startup called TypeSafe AI is making waves with Jev, a fast, cheap "System One" model built for structured decisions instead of full LLM reasoning. And Shopify is walking away from React Native after six years, heading back to native Swift and Kotlin. We also cover Matt Mullenweg's whirlwind week at Automattic and how white hat hackers used Claude to ethically hack OpenAI. T...
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E161 · 14 Sep 2026 · 44 min
161: Tailwind Has a New Home
There are finally some real-world consequences for the Shai-Hulud npm attacks: Australian Federal Police and the FBI arrested two men behind TeamPCP, a group that's been running supply chain attacks using npm since last year. Meanwhile, the open source acquihire train rolls on as Shopify buys Tailwind CSS. In Lightning News the WordPress/WP Engine saga returns as Matt Mullenweg is ousted as Automattic CEO, an Anthropic researcher quits with a warning that AI could kill us all inside a decade,...
