Sacha Greif, creator of the State of Web Dev AI survey, joins the podcast to walk through what over 7,000 web developers actually reported about their AI tool usage, code quality concerns, and growing worries about AI financial costs. Only 29% of developers generate a quarter or less of their code with AI, and the survey reveals surprisingly balanced views on LLM hallucinations, developer job security, and even AI's environmental footprint. A grounded, data-driven counterweight to the AI hype cycle.
Mikayla Maki, software engineer at Zed, digs into what makes this Rust-built code editor tick... from GPUI, their GPU-accelerated UI framework with a Tailwind-inspired API, to CRDTs powering real-time live collaboration without merge conflicts. She talks about the Zed 1.0 release, their approach to AI, how the team builds popular features directly into core instead of relying on extensions, and why Rust might be the best language for agentic coding. Plus: native app comeback, GPUI on mobile, and where the framework is heading.
This month's panel digs into the SpaceX Cursor acquisition rumor and what a $60 billion valuation means for AI coding tools. They debate Bun's million-line Rust rewrite generated entirely by AI, the tradeoffs of agentic coding at scale, and a sophisticated CI/CD cache poisoning attack targeting TanStack. Plus: practical takes on Claude token optimization, session forensics, local AI models, and why most Claude Code skills work best when tailored, not pulled off the shelf.
pnpm lead maintainer Zoltan Kochan joins PodRocket to unpack pnpm 11's biggest shifts: a new minimum release age default that blocks npm registry packages under 24 hours old, a cleaner allow builds config replacing scattered post-install script settings, and the experimental global virtual store that slashes install times with Git worktrees. Zoltan also shares why a Rust rewrite of pnpm's engine is now underway, and how AI-assisted development made it possible far sooner than expected.
Google Chrome engineer Adam Argyle breaks down why AI is bad at frontend development and CSS in particular. From LLM training data problems to the fact that LLMs can't see, the issues run deep. But it's not all doom! Adam shares a game-changing technique for getting creative AI generated UI by asking for low probability outputs, introduces tools like Impeccable and V0 for AI assisted CSS editing, and dives into agentic loop engineering with auto research, an overnight AI workflow he uses to ship improvements while he sleeps.
Jimmy Lai, manager of the Next.js team at Vercel, joins the podcast to explain the adapters API, why it exists, how it fixes Next.js self-hosting pain across platforms like Cloudflare, AWS Amplify, and Netlify, and what it unlocks for partial pre-rendering. He also shares where the team is headed: server components, feature flags at request time, and building the best agentic developer experience for a world where agents write most of the code.
The panel digs into the Cloudflare vs Vercel turf war over Next.js, breaking down what it really means that one engineer vibe coded a full framework rewrite in a week for $1,100 using Claude Code. Then things get spicy: from the Lovable data breach to an early Anthropic model escaping its sandbox, the crew debates whether the wave of AI security incidents is systemic, and what the build vs buy collapse means for developers rolling their own tools in the AI agent era.
Void makes Cloudflare deployment invisible with Alexander Lichter
Miriam Suzanne joins the podcast to unpack the surprisingly deep world of CSS value resolution, the browser program running beneath every website. She explains how cascade and inheritance work together, why CSS custom properties introduce invalid at computed value time errors, and how CSS functions and mixins change the game. Plus: is Sass actually dead, or does it still solve real problems that the browser can't touch?
Most developers reach for date-fns or Moment.js without realizing the browser already ships a powerful string formatting library called the JavaScript Intl API. Killian Valkhof, creator of Polypane, walks through how locale-aware date formatting, currency formatting, the Segmenter API, and the Collator API can replace heavy npm dependencies, with support for over 7,000 locales baked right into every evergreen browser since 2017.
The Amazon AI coding outage reignited a debate the industry can't ignore: is this an AI failure or a process failure, and does that distinction even matter anymore? Paige, Jack, Paul, and Noel dig into vibe coding culture, the engineer retention crisis, and the rise of harness engineering as a discipline in this month's panel. They also tackle autonomous agents running while you sleep, zero-touch engineering, what a senior engineer even means now, and whether open source can survive the agentic era.
In this repeat episode, Jack Herrington sits down with Tanner Linsley to talk about the evolution of TanStack and where it’s headed next. They explore how early projects like React Query and React Table influenced the headless philosophy behind TanStack Router, why virtualized lists matter at scale, and what makes forms in React so challenging. Tanner breaks down TanStack Start and its client-first approach to SSR, routing, and data loading, and shares his perspective on React Server Components, modern authentication tradeoffs, and composable tooling. The episode wraps with a look at TanStack’s roadmap and what it takes to sustainably maintain open source at scale.
Carson Gross, computer science professor at Montana State and creator of htmx, joins the show to cut through the noise around AI and programming. He explains why the jump from high-level languages to LLMs is fundamentally different from past transitions, why junior developers who skip writing code risk being at the mercy of a stochastic system, and why systems architecture and managing code complexity are the skills that will matter most. A grounded, rational take on the future of software development jobs.
Will Madden joins the podcast to talk about Prisma Next and the evolution from Prisma 7, including the decision to migrate away from Rust, ship the core through WebAssembly, and move toward a fully TypeScript ORM. The conversation dives into how modern workflows like agentic coding change the role of an ORM and why tools still matter even when agents can write SQL queries directly.
We discuss how feedback loops, guardrails, and the TypeScript type system help prevent errors, along with the new query builder, query linter, and middleware layer that analyze queries using an abstract syntax tree. The episode also covers new database capabilities including Postgres support, upcoming Mongo support, and extensions like PG Vector, enabling vector columns and cosine distance similarity search.
You’ll also learn about new patterns such as collection methods, scopes, and composable database extensions, plus tooling like driver adapters, a potential compatibility layer, and safeguards like lint rules and a performance budget middleware designed to catch expensive queries before they run.Will Madden joins the podcast to talk about Prisma Next and the evolution from Prisma 7, including the decision to migrate away from Rust, ship the core through WebAssembly, and move toward a fully TypeScript ORM. The conversation dives into how modern workflows like agentic coding change the role of an ORM and why tools still matter even when agents can write SQL queries directly.
We discuss how feedback loops, guardrails, and the TypeScript type system help prevent errors, along with the new query builder, query linter, and middleware layer that analyze queries using an abstract syntax tree. The episode also covers new database capabilities including Postgres support, upcoming Mongo support, and extensions like PG Vector, enabling vector columns and cosine distance similarity search.
You’ll also learn about new patterns such as collection methods, scopes, and composable database extensions, plus tooling like driver adapters, a potential compatibility layer, and safeguards like lint rules and a performance budget middleware designed to catch expensive queries before they run.
The PodRocket panel is back for their February roundup! Paige, Paul, Jack and Noel dig into the biggest stories reshaping the web development landscape right now.
The panel kicks off with a deep dive into OpenClaw, it's transition to a foundation, and Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI. Is a foundation the right long-term home for fast-moving AI projects? And what does the continuing flow of talent into big AI labs mean for the open source ecosystem?
From there, the conversation shifts to the browser's changing role in the web, how the lines between native and web experiences continue to blur, and what that means for developers building for the future. The panel also tackles growing pressures on open source sustainability and the widening gap between developers who are deeply integrating AI agents into their workflows and everyone else who hasn't even heard of these tools yet.
Gil Fink breaks down web rendering patterns including server side rendering, SSR, client side rendering, CSR, and static rendering, along with newer approaches like islands architecture, resumability, and hybrid rendering. The conversation explores tradeoffs around hydration, web performance, INP, CDN caching, and bundle size optimization, and compares frameworks like Next.js, TanStack Start, Astro, Qwik, and Remix to help developers make better decisions about React rendering strategies and overall application performance.