Monthly learnings and discoveries related to frontend, the web, and software engineering in general.

• Evan You, author of Vue and Vite, shares his thoughts on the future of Developer Tooling in the Agentic Era at ViteConf 2026. His core point is that “tool design has a second audience”—agents, which need predictability, structure, and fast feedback loops. Unsurprisingly, he thinks the Vite ecosystem is ideally positioned for this new era. I agree! And I’d add that all of these qualities improve the developer experience for humans, too.

• With 2027 around the corner, people are sharing their wishlists for what browser vendors should focus on during Interop 2027. A good telescope for features on the web platform’s horizon that many people are excited about, but that aren’t widely supported yet.

• Plan mode is dead, and one of the people behind Claude Code agrees on Hacker News: “I realized that I wasn’t using plan mode anymore because the model just got it, and because for the increasingly complex work I asked the model to do, planning had become interactive and iterative.”

• New to the Baseline: alpha() is a more ergonomic way of adding transparency to a color. progress() tells you how far a value has progressed between a start and an end value, as a number between 0 and 1. Multiply that by a unit and you get font sizes or spacings that scale with the viewport. Kevin Powell has an explainer on YouTube.

• After years of working with JavaScript frontend frameworks, I went back to classic server-rendered HTML for some projects, and one of the first things that tripped me up was keeping the scroll position when navigating back and forth between pages: The root scroller and how not to lose it.

• Deno is joining Cloudflare, and by Deno they mean Deno the company: Cloudflare is interested in celld, Deno’s open-source, self-hosted implementation of Cloudflare’s Durable Objects. Deno the runtime will receive another year of security updates, after which it will be handed over to the community—which might well mean it will effectively be sunset.

• Two recent additions to my toolbox: zoxide, which offers smart bookmarks and quick directory switching based on your usage patterns, and superfile, a pretty and efficient terminal-based file manager.

• Element.getAnimations(), a convenient API for inspecting an element’s animations, each with a finished promise. Useful, for example, to react programmatically once an element has finished fading out.

• Ever double-tapped a button on mobile, only to have the page zoom in? There’s a CSS property for that.

• Butterick’s Practical Typography, a gold mine of advice that helps typography beginners like me make text look pretty and readable.

Notable releases:

• Claude Code 2.1.287, adding mods—little plugins that can extend the UI and hook into tool calls and other events.

• Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5, refreshing Anthropic’s entire lineup with better quality and performance at a lower cost per task across the board. Also check out their guides for getting the most out of Opus 5.5 and building with Sonnet 5.5.

• GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, and GPT-6 Luna, OpenAI’s counterparts to the Claude models, with similar improvements. I’ve lost track at this point; just use the latest version of your favorite model, and stuff will be better I guess?

• Java 27, turning on compact object headers by default, making G1 the default garbage collector on all machines, and other mostly targeted changes. Seems like a sign of a mature language.

• Node 26.10, adding built-in debounce and throttle, and 26.12, stabilizing the config file.

• Nuxt 4.6, shipping a new CLI with an interactive dev panel, cookie-based sessions via useSession, and opt-in Vue Vapor mode for individual components and pages.

• OpenCode 2, a “major overhaul” rebuilding its internal architecture, redesigning its plugin API, supporting Code Mode for MCP servers, and adding background tasks.

• SvelteKit 3, polishing what was in the release candidate back in August.

• Vite+ 1.0, going stable as a unified toolchain behind a single vp command that manages the runtime, package manager, dev server, linting, formatting, testing, and builds. Watch the demo at ViteConf.