Episode notes
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 - Intro3:05 - State of CSS 2026 survey20:01 - CodePen 2.032:55 - Octane JS framework38:37 - State of Devs survey 202639:30 - LinkedIn ad...
Podcast
Front-End Fire
TJ VanToll, Paige Niedringhaus, Jack Herrington · Tech & Science · English
A weekly show that helps you stay up to date on the latest and greatest in the front-end world.
More from Front-End Fire All episodes →
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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,...
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E160 · 7 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
160: GPT-6 vs. Claude 5.1
Both big AI labs shipped their best models yet this week: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra finally takes computer use seriously, and Anthropic's Fable & Mythos 5.1 land with gains in coding, knowledge work, and long-running tasks. Jack also went down a rabbit hole on how LLM watermarking actually works. Plus a Roomba with two floor-cleaning brains, a website tallying up AI agent felonies, and OpenAI cutting Cursor off from its models. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro1:16 - GPT-6 Astra11:58 - How LLM watermark...
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E159 · 31 Aug 2026 · 54 min
159: Is AI Making Us Worse Devs?
This week we're asking the uncomfortable question: is AI coding making us worse developers, or just changing which skills matter? We dig into OpenAI's new WebMCP Challenge and what it means for the agentic web, plus Bun's massive 1.4 release packed with performance wins and new features. Then we wrap up with TanStack AI hitting release candidate and the internet's new favorite gimmick, Hugging Face's rollerblading Microduck. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro1:03 - Will AI coding prevent expertise?21:40...
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E158 · 24 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 3 min
158: The Browser Wars are Getting Weird
This week we dig into Cloudflare's new agent-only browser, Kitesurf, built for speed over polish. Cursor made waves by ditching Solid.js for React, and Jack brings back a field report from RenderATL on the state of dev conferences in 2026. Plus, in Lightning News: pnpm's Rust rewrite, Microsoft trimming its AI feature list, Claude tackling the Riemann hypothesis with 60 subagents, and a Claude agent that accidentally hacked into a gym's registration system. Timestamps 0:00 - Intro1:00 - Cloud...
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E157 · 10 Aug 2026 · 57 min
157: Shai-Hulud Is Back From the Dead
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. Ti...
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E155 · 27 Jul 2026 · 57 min
155: OpenAI Breaks Out of its Sandbox
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 - Intro3:05 - Kimi K310:58 - Rewriting Bun in Rust20:42 - OpenAI hacks Hugging Face39:48 - App Store number updates42:11 - Meta's new app is set to a song about human ext...
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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
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 - Intro0:59 - Vercel native8:22 - Vite+ beta10:15 - Vercel Services16:50 - Safari MCP server19:20 - Claude Tag27:07 - Museum covers i...
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E152 · 6 Jul 2026 · 55 min
152: The Fable Redemption Arc
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...
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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...
