John Siciliano

Developer updates you need to know Aug 18 🧠 🚨 Your internet is going down!! That’s if you use AOL dial-up 😉They are shutting it down on Sept 30, 2025. Was shocked to find out this was still an offering. 📸 Sanity now supports uploading HEIC and AVIF. No more converting iPhone images before uploading. Wish more products did this! 👋 GitHub’s CEO is stepping down. And the org is going to be less dependent as it’s rolled into Microsoft’s CoreAI team. 🧠 Claude Sonnet 4 supports 1 million tokens. That’s 75,000 lines of code or dozens of research papers. This now matches Gemini CLI’s high context limit. 🔥 Gemini CLI now integrates into VS Code. It’s aware of the files open and text you select so you can prompt with them as context. After it edits, a full‑screen diff opens inside VS Code. This is the best of both worlds (CLI and UI working together). 🤔 The viability of generative AI companies is getting questioned and the term “bubble” gets thrown around. Lots of factors including strained growth margins, ludicrous valuations, ballooning capital expenditures, and rampant unprofitability. Explained in this article: wheresyoured.at/ai-is-a-mone…. Maybe with more efficient models, some of these risks can be mitigated. The economics of this are NOT something I know firsthand so do your own research :) Like and follow if you like these kinds of updates. I send them out every week. ✌️

🧠 Developer updates you need to know Aug 11 🧠 😉 Cloudflare devs, you no longer need .dev.vars. You can use this new naming convention that goes like this: .env 😍 TypeScript 5.9 is out. Now `—init` generates a minimal config file (instead of all the commented-out options), modules can be imported with “defer”, summary descriptions show for DOM APIs, and when hovering over a variable, the type definition shows instead of just seeing the type. Nice! 🤨 Cursor launched a CLI. An interesting move given its IDE-focused success. But I suppose they want to own the entire workflow instead of pushing people to Claude Code/Gemini CLI/Opencode/can’t keep up. 🤖 OpenAI released two open-source models. The larger (120b params) is comparable to o4-mini and the smaller (20b) to o3‑mini - which can run on just 16GB of memory! Private and free. 💻 Ollama Desktop dropped to run and interact with LLMs locally. It’s pretty nice! Super easy to use, private, and free! ✨ Svelte Async delivers the benefits of React’s use + Suspense without the boilerplate and SvelteKit’s Remote Functions bring typed, secure Server Actions without the Next.js complexity. Follow if you like these kinds of updates. I send them out every Monday. ✌️

Wow. This thumbnail test had a CLEAR winner. ❌ Privacy angle with screenshot ✅ Cost angle with screenshot ❌ Cost angle without screenshot I got a lil lucky by testing the 3rd version. It proved that even the winning copy is nothing without the right visual to back it up. Copy and visuals must work together.

Developer updates you need to know Aug 4 🧠 - Bun is now supported in the Canary version of Next.js. Vercel, however, does not support this JavaScript runtime (yet). - Google released a new font for code called Google Sans Code. It’s geometric with a touch of calligraphic flair. - Webflow had a major outage that lasted 3 days. The big areas of impact were the builder and form submissions. It was first caused by a malicious attack, then from attempting to mitigate it. - Sanity announced it's sponsoring TailwindCSS and released granular controls for triggering serverless functions. E.g., only run the translation function if the body field changed. - Figma's market cap is $59.36B after their IPO. Remember when Adobe tried buying Figma in 2022? That was for $20B (regulators didn't allow it). - OpenAI raised $8.3B at a $300B valuation. Reports say they have $12B in annual revenue and 700M weekly users of ChatGPT. - A new developer-focused model just dropped called Qwen3-coder. It's open source and optimized for entire repository-scale understanding. I should make some time to play with this one... Follow if you like these kinds of updates. I send them out every Monday. ✌️

🧠 Minimalist developer updates, July 28 - “I panicked and ran database commands without permission“: This is what Replit, the AI coding tool, said after it deleted a production DB without consent. Replit CEO and team were all hands on deck to prevent this from happening again with separate staging envs for DBs, improved AI knowledge by connecting other docs to it, and adding a chat-only mode instead of merely asking it not to make changes. - Tailwind launched a framework-agnostic version of Tailwind Plus called Elements. These enable you to build/use interactive components like autocomplete, tabs, and command palettes without writing custom JS or having to use React/Vue (which were the only frameworks previously supported). Now with custom HTML elements, you just add HTML, import a script/package, and it handles the rest including interactivity and accessibility. - Sanity added two new hooks to the App SDK: useUser and usePresence. The former gives you the current user’s info, and the latter lets you know where various users are on the given project (more to come on this one… this sets the foundation). - GitHub launched Spark, a tool to build and host apps via prompts (and code if you desire/need). It’s fully integrated into GitHub so you can create repos, use Copilot, and even host the apps. It’s $39/month and part of Copilot Pro+ sub (for now.. they will create other plans). It seems its competitive advantage is offering the one-stop-shop (repos, IDE, agentic tooling, hosting, prompting, etc.) - Slack updated their API to essentially prevent companies from building internal tools. New private apps are rate limited to 1 request per minute for conversation data. And, you can only fetch 15 objects. They say it’s in the name of security, which is questionable, as one, it’s the company’s data so they should be responsible for tooling security and two, in the same announcement they mentioned Real-time Search API, a new API which is in private beta right now (pricing unknown). - PostHog, the engineering analytics platform that has awesome product marketing and insightful newsletters for founders and engineers, has revealed that they hire more engineers than not. To be exact, the ratio is 1.22 with just Supabase slightly ahead at 1.31, and Vercel at the median of .61. They attribute some of their success to having so many technical people on the team (I would agree). - Google has launched an API for Google Trends. These insights about search trends have been around for about 20 years, but not directly through an API. Now, companies can build tooling for research, tracking emerging trends, and prioritizing marketing investments based on data. - Webstudio added visual support for SVGs… so you can see each layer in the navigator and style them without having to use an HTML embed. This enables cool hover effects and scroll animations. Follow if you like these kinds of updates. I send them out every Monday. ✌️

Developer updates July 21: - Nuxt 4 launched after about a year of testing. It now supports an app dir (/app), faster CLI and development, and has better TypeScript support. A lot of it is backwards compatible with v3. Nuxt 5 won’t be far behind with Nitro v3. - Windsurf…. OpenAI deal fell through, Google acqui-hired its founders and “key” employees, and some licensing rights. Cognition bought the rest. - OpenAI released “ChatGPT Agent” which can perform actions on the web, including ones that require complex reasoning. Users need to grant permission before the agent takes actions, such as creating a new calendar event. I’ll pass. - Cloudflare experienced a major outage. Their 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver (a privacy-centric replacement for the default ones provided by our ISPs) was down for an hour due to a configuration error. - Apple released design kits for iOS and iPadOS 26 for Figma and Sketch, helping developers design apps with the new "Liquid Glass" interface. - Cookie Store API now has baseline support which offers async operations and access within service workers. - Figma launched Figma Glass. It’s a new effect that sort of emulates Apple Liquid Glass. It’s easy to use and looks nice. Follow if you like these kinds of updates. I send them out every week. ✌️

Figma just made adding a glass effect super easy. It looks nice and lots of designers will be using it. Add effect > glass > play with params 🫰

A TUI for agentic coding has just been launched by @OpenCode_AI - any model - open source - private here’s a quick demo 👇

Just overrode the Monokai theme background and not sure why I didn’t do this 10 years ago

DRY (don’t repeat yourself) is a core development principle. Hardcode an email in 3 places on a site, and human error will strike if you need to update it. Plus, it just takes more work. Now you can define reusable data on the Global Root. Think phone numbers, emails, etc.

Official Webstudio sections library coming soon! - Built with Craft - One-click insert - Auto-adapts to your design system on insert - Quality > quantity - Accessible and SEO’d Talk soon 😉

A 36.55% boost in conversions… I’ll take it! 🔥 The title experiment was a success. “Custom frontend without custom code” converts at 7.45% 🤯

Just tested a new feature on Webstudio 🔥🔥🔥 Talk soon 😉

Starting an A/B test for our homepage title. It’s been extremely challenging to ideate these, specifically balancing clarity, SEO, punchiness, target audience, and unique value proposition.