Fresh Reads

Scott and Wes talk with Adam Jacob about software factories: what they actually are, why they’re unique to each team, and how to build trust in agent-generated code. They dig into Swamp Club, black box testing, domain driven design, adversarial review for accessibility, and…

Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll…

Deno is shutting down and the team is heading to Cloudflare — Scott, Wes, and CJ break down what that means for the runtime, JSR, and workerd. Plus OpenCode 2.0 on durable objects, TanStack Start 1.0, SubQ Snap, Gemini 4 Argon, and Wes’s accidental $50 photo frame movement. Show…

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!…

I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source…

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…

Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other…

You can just prove things, apparently.

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…

I’ve been doing some spring/fall cleaning and found an unpublished follow-up component to <snow-fall> (a web component to “snow” on your website — which also happens to work with emoji too). Originally it was created as an easter egg for Blog Awesome (click on the Font Awesome…

…and another one. This little (zero CSS) web component has two modes: progressively enhance a hierarchy of server rendered <ol> or <ul> elements (or conveniently client render them for you if they don’t exist) to highlight which are currently visible in the viewport. I pulled…

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…

In Trying out a Two-state Dark Mode Toggle I summarized the Two-state Dark and Light mode Toggle discussion as I experimented with a toggle in my personal website footer. After launch, Curtis Wilcox left some good feedback to improve the accessibility of the component. I decided…

What it takes to run agents in a codebase older than the team

Update I made some updates and released it as a web component: details in Solar Eclipse Toggle, a Dark/Light mode Toggle Web Component. Lea Verou sparked some lovely discussions about dark/light mode toggles by asking a simple question: do these form controls need three options…

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…

Prior blog post (if you want the full context): If I work really hard on my Open Graph Images, People will share my Blog Posts (2021 Aug) Here’s the gist: Open Graph images are those little pictures that show up when your site is shared on social media. […] Each individual blog…

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…

Agents can finish the task without teaching you anything. Building expertise now has to be deliberate.

A practical guide to auditing what your coding agent still needs.

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…

speedlify.dev, now running Speedlify2. The year is 2020. Inspired by a lack of budget for a web performance monitoring tool, the original Speedlify project (Speedlify Classic) was shipped to continuously measure site performance. It ran Lighthouse against a predetermined list of…

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…