Front-End Fire

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 - Intro
3:05 - State of CSS 2026 survey
20:01 - CodePen 2.0
32:55 - Octane JS framework
38:37 - State of Devs survey 2026
39:30 - LinkedIn adds a "Seems like AI slop" button
42:54 - TanStack rebrand, and a new charting library
45:38 - GitHub stacked pull requests
52:13 - Opus 5
54:27 - What's Making Us Happy
News
Paige: State of CSS 2026 survey
Jack: Octane JS framework
TJ: CodePen 2.0
Lightning News
State of Devs survey 2026
LinkedIn adds a "Seems like AI slop" button
GitHub adds stacked pull requests
TanStack rebrand & a new charting library
Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 model
What's Making Us Happy
Paige: His & Hers miniseries
Jack: The Vampire Lestat miniseries
TJ: Orbit Traveling Tractor Water Sprinkler
Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.
Front-End Fire website
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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 - Intro
3:05 - Kimi K3
10:58 - Rewriting Bun in Rust
20:42 - OpenAI hacks Hugging Face
39:48 - App Store number updates
42:11 - Meta's new app is set to a song about human extinction
46:50 - What's Making Us Happy
News
Paige: Rewriting Bun in Rust
Jack: Kimi K3
TJ: OpenAI hacks Hugging Face
Lightning News
App Store app numbers are way up; downloads are not
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
What's Making Us Happy
Paige: The Bear season 5
Jack: The Odyssey movie
TJ: Detroit Tigers baseball
Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, 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

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 - Intro
0:26 - How to not drown in code reviews
49:55 - What's Making Us Happy
Links
Anthropic: Recursive Self Improvement
Spotify Engineering: Coding is No Longer the Constraint
CodeRabbit
Superpowers
Amelia Wattenberger: how coding used to be how we thought
What's Making Us Happy
Paige: Chef's Choice Electric Knife Sharpener
Jack: Cooper's Hawks
TJ: Acadia National Park
Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, 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

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 - Intro
0:59 - Vercel native
8:22 - Vite+ beta
10:15 - Vercel Services
16:50 - Safari MCP server
19:20 - Claude Tag
27:07 - Museum covers its floor in peanut butter
33:41 - What's Making Us Happy
News
Paige: Vercel Services
Jack: Vercel's native
TJ: Vite+ beta
Lightning News
Safari MCP server
Claude Tag
Museum covers its floor in peanut butter
What's Making Us Happy
Paige: Dutton Ranch TV series
Jack: Bowling
TJ: The World Cup
Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, 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

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 - Intro
3:50 - Vercel and Shopify collab on Hydrogen
13:11 - A Fable 5 update
22:38 - Astryx
33:51 - Cloudflare to change its crawler policy
43:42 - What's Making Us Happy
News
Paige: Fable 5's ban has been lifted & Sonnet 5 is out too
Jack: Vercel and Shopify collab on Hydrogen
TJ: Astryx
Lightning News
Cloudflare to change its crawler policy
What's Making Us Happy
Paige: Pink Starburst Vodka Lemonade
Jack: Goodr sunglasses
TJ: Rail Explorers
Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. Join us in our Discord, 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