Fresh Reads

Someone just clean-room ported seven Adobe apps to Rust, and Wes is shocked at how good it is. Scott and Wes break down what it gets right, what’s still missing, and why copying software is easy but inventing what comes next is the hard part. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax!…

Scott, Wes, and CJ break down the latest Pi updates, including durable long-running agents, Codemode, and MCP support, then debate whether pull requests are dead in favor of issues. Plus Supabase picks up Turso, Screen Studio 4 drops, JavaScript Composites bring value-based…

Scott and Wes answer listener questions about what replaced blogging, what to do while your AI agent works, and who should pay for token costs. They also cover keeping agents from going off the rails, getting your team excited about AI, and staying motivated when AI takes the…

Scott, Wes, and CJ ask whether Ruby on Rails is really dead (and whether Rust is just Rails you don't have to read), then dig into Meta's new Muse agent, which is free, comes with its own VM, and is already reading messages nobody asked it to. Plus: upm, a tiny TypeScript npm…

Scott and Wes ditch Electron and Tauri for GPUI, the GPU accelerated Rust UI framework from the Zed team. They get into its React-like API, styling that feels a lot like Tailwind, GPUI Kit components, the community fork drama, and the tiny desktop apps Scott has built with it.…

Is Jev actually a leap forward for classification or just hype and fake demos? We dig in, plus Claude Code’s new AGENTS.md support, TinyCast (the free, open-source Raycast alternative), an iPhone Fold simulator in Xcode, and a stack of dev tools you’ll want to try Show Notes…

Scott and Wes talk about how non-developers are actually using AI today. They also cover the stuff they don’t think holds up, like AI-staged listings and automated marketing. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:38 Welcome to Syntax! Wes’ post about using AI 01:50 Finding Parts With AI:…

Scott, Wes, and CJ break down developing for the iPhone Duo with the Device Posture and Viewport Segments APIs, plus the React 19.3 release and Pi’s new Radius platform. Also on deck: Tailwind joining Shopify, Shopify going back to native, Homebrew 7, Aeropeek, and Meta’s Muse…

Scott and Wes dig into a listener mailbag full of AI questions: how to bill freelance work when the tools make you faster, whether coding still matters in interviews, and if the AI bubble is about to pop. Plus sandboxing your agents, managing block-based CMS chaos, and what it…

Wes and CJ dig into OpenAI’s GPT‑6 Astra; the massive jump in computer use, the wild Blender MCP 3D demos, and whether all the AGI talk actually holds up. Plus Hugging Face’s robot duck, Vitest 5 and the arrest behind the shai‑hulud supply chain attacks Show Notes 00:00 Welcome…

Scott and Wes talk about WebMCP with Sarah Drasner and Dominic Farolino from the Chrome team, which is the new W3C standard that lets your site hand real tools to an agent. They cover the security model, headless and multi-tab agents, and how to wire it into an app you’ve…

The messy breakup is official; as of November 12, OpenAI's models are getting pulled from Cursor, and we're digging into who's really to blame (and why Wes called it). Plus pnpm 12 goes full Rust, Mitchell Hashimoto drops Superlogical, ~700 AI agents attack Hugging Face, and Zod…

Meta’s StyleX compiles thousands of styles into a few reusable class names at build time—zero runtime, fully type-safe. Scott and Wes break down why it’s suddenly everywhere, and why it might be the best CSS tool for AI agents. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! Syntax Ep 650…

Grokbot actually earns its keep, Cursor takes a swing at GitHub with Origin, and Omarchy Quattro ships pre-wired for nine coding agents. Plus: the GitHub outage post-mortem, a compromised Rust crate, native app vibe-coding with Dactyl, and CAD skills for your AI via nurb.dev…

Scott and Wes run through eight new CSS, JS, and HTML features landing in browsers; including the relative alpha() color function, the progress() function for calculating values between units, Promise.allKeyed(), and native camera and microphone elements. They also get into an…

Scott and CJ break down Stripe's $7B acquisition of OpenRouter, the SvelteKit 3 release candidate, and their first look at TanStack Charts. Plus Zed's new Delta editor, stealing reasoning traces from proprietary LLM APIs, why dark mode toggles only need two states, and all 43…

Scott and Wes answer your questions about coding in the AI era, atrophying skills from too much autocomplete, whether it’s finally time to leave VS Code, chasing flow state with agents, and which single AI subscription is worth your money. Plus: AT Protocol vs Solid, making your…

An AI assistant goes rogue and hacks a gym website, a $9k surprise Cloudflare bill lands in someone’s inbox, and AI subscriptions start promising unlimited usage. Plus Meta’s Muse Glimmer, Agent Plugins, Kimi K3 in Copilot, and a pile of CSS chaos. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to…

Nathan Sobo joins Scott and Wes to explain why Zed was built in Rust, how GPUI works, and what happens to editors once agents write most of the code. They also talk about DeltaDB, Zed’s new Git-compatible version control system, and Delta, the collaborative agentic editor it…

Cloudflare is rolling out crypto wallets with claimable handles as identity, and a real React compiler finally landed for regular hooks-based code. Plus: OpenAI's pricing war, Vue Vapor benchmarks, GitHub's new npm malware scanning, and an active supply chain attack hitting 868…

Scott and Wes tackle your questions on the rise of the design engineer, why AI still lacks “taste” (and why it’s about more than just looks), and how to actually write tests in the age of AI-assisted coding. Plus: is AI a bubble about to burst, keeping coding agents efficient in…

A rogue OpenAI agent allegedly hacks Hugging Face, the React Compiler lands in Rust, and a fresh Rust full-stack framework ships. Scott, Wes, and CJ also dig into Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement, Claude Opus 5, and the campaign to kill the cookie banner. Show Notes 00:00…

Dan Abramov joins Scott and Wes to explain AT Protocol, the open standard quietly rebuilding the social web. They get into how it actually works, why it’s way bigger than just Bluesky, and why Dan calls it one of the most interesting ideas on the internet right now. Show Notes…

A huge week for open models: Inkling (the first big US open-weight model since Gemma 4), Qwen 3.8, and Kimi 3 all dropped. Plus Vue 3.6 RC + Vapor Mode, the slow death of Stack Overflow, a decoy font that blinds AI, and the usual grab bag of fun links. Show Notes 00:00 Intro…

Running your dev process off your main machine doesn’t have to mean the cloud. Scott and Wes break down how to host projects on a box you can reach from any device, close your laptop mid-build, and keep long-running processes alive. They cover Scott’s stack (Mosh, Caddy,…

CJ and Scott break down the biggest week in web dev: TypeScript 7 ships with a 10x-faster native port, Bun gets rewritten in Rust (much to the Zig team’s dismay), and Better Auth joins Vercel. Plus GPT-5.6 first impressions, Odin 1.0, Cloudflare’s new Workers cache and…

Dax Raad, co-founder of OpenCode, joins Scott and Wes to talk remote dev servers, OpenCode 2.0, and why his team is “addicted” to AI models they’re not even allowed to name yet. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:43 Welcome to Syntax! 01:22 Remote Development Environments and Their…

Auto-accept on, brain off? We’re getting into whether anyone actually reads the code they ship anymore — then it’s HTTP’s first new method in 16 years (meet QUERY) and OpenAI’s compute-hungry “Sol Ultra” tier landing in Codex. Bring your hot takes and hang out with us live. Show…

This episode tackles the growing pains of AI-assisted development, from the struggle of reviewing thousands of lines of agent-generated code to the mounting technical debt when teams merge PRs without meaningful human review. Scott and Wes also dig into local models, whether…

Google fires the engineer behind its Workspace CLI tool, OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 with three new model tiers, and Astro 7 lands with a full Rust rewrite. Plus: Coinbase cuts token costs with smarter routing, and more in this week’s Syntax Live Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:34 Welcome…

Scott and Wes raid the listener mailbag to settle the pnpm vs. npm debate, decode how web standards sneak into your browser, and ask the big one: is “AI” even intelligent, or just fancy autocomplete? Plus Stack Overflow nostalgia, the Shadcn head-scratcher, and why big design…

Wes, Scott, and CJ break down the latest web dev news. From AI agents and coding tools to Deno Desktop, Nub, and predictive UX. They also discuss bot-filled social media, remote work debates, and a slick 3D bookstore experience. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:35 Welcome to Syntax!…

Is the web dead, or just evolving? Wes Bos breaks down his JS Nation Amsterdam talk on agentic interfaces, why chat won’t replace everything, how Web MCP lets agents interact with your existing sites, and what “Clicks and Clankers” really means for the future of UI. Show Notes…

Scott, Wes, and CJ reunite fresh off a trip to Amsterdam to chat conferences, burnout, and whether Anthropic actually uses AI. They also dig into a packed bag of sick picks and tech news, including HTML streaming in Chrome, an image-to-ASCII generator, and a wild Arch Linux…

Live at JSNation in Amsterdam, Scott, Wes, and CJ break down Cloudflare’s acquisition of VoidZero, the company behind Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, and Oxc. They dig into why this is genuinely exciting, not scary, covering what it means for the open source tooling you already use,…

Scott and Wes sit down with Jake Archibald from Mozilla to unpack how web standards actually get made at Firefox. From browser features and developer feedback to the drama around the Prompt API. They discuss Interop 2026, the future of web APIs, and what it’s really like shaping…

Scott and Wes sit down with Ben Vinegar, former Syntax GM and founder of Modem.dev, to geek out over terminal-maxxing, from SSH-based development and tmux workflows to AI-powered coding agents. Ben also demos two of his open source tools: Hunk, a slick terminal code reviewer…

On this episode, Scott and Wes dig into the messy reality of modern front-end work, from struggling to find skilled devs and navigating team chaos to questioning code quality, testing, and even whether AI is stealing the joy of programming. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax…

Scott and Wes react to the freshly released State of AI 2026 survey, covering everything from skyrocketing AI adoption and the rise of coding agents to the pain points, job security fears, and big philosophical questions developers are wrestling with right now. Show Notes 00:00…

Scott and Wes sit down with Alex Sexton and Amadeus De Marzi from Pierre Computer to dig into the gnarly performance challenges behind building blazing-fast code review tools, covering virtualization, progressive rendering, and why GitHub’s UI feels so sluggish. They also chat…

Wes and Scott talk about the foundational decisions that make AI-assisted coding actually work—database schemas, validation, routing, CSS structure, and more. They explore why consistency matters more than specific tools, and how a little upfront planning can keep agents from…

Wes and Scott talk about whether AI can actually create good design, or if it just remixes the same patterns over and over. They dig into AI-generated UX, design systems, YouTube thumbnails, Google’s design.md spec, programmatic design, and the tools designers are actually using…

Scott and Wes are joined by Jonny Burger, creator of Remotion, to talk about the explosion of programmatic video, going from 125k to 800k installs per day, and how AI and a new HTML-in-Canvas Chrome spec are changing the game. They dig into monetization, the wild world of video…

Scott and Wes break down the “Mini Shai-Hulud” supply chain attack that compromised TanStack and other popular npm packages through a clever GitHub Actions cache poisoning exploit; a self-propagating worm that stole credentials and persisted through Claude Code hooks and VS Code…