🫐 August 2026

• The 2026 State of CSS results are in. A few things that stood out to me: the second most popular CSS “framework” behind Tailwind is not using a framework at all, and both CSS-in-JS and pre-/post-processor use are in decline—a strong sign of CSS itself getting better. Also make sure to check out the features section, as always a great resource for features you may not know yet, or that are ready to adopt now.

• What’s the easiest way of declaring Node and package manager versions in 2026? The answer varies by project type, but for application development the ecosystem seems to be aligning on devEngines.packageManager and devEngines.runtime. That’s especially convenient with pnpm, which picks the fields up and, depending on your settings, installs the correct versions of Node and itself automatically. The pnpm/setup action does the same in your pipeline, collapsing pnpm setup, Node installation, and dependency installation into a single step.

• Stacked pull requests on GitHub are now in public preview: a new UI for merging pull requests into other pull requests, letting you break a big feature branch down into more manageable chunks. Personally, I’d still rather cut smaller slices that can be merged earlier, but this looks useful for when that isn’t possible.

• Also in the version control space: the company behind Zed is launching a new product. Delta is an editor plus a new take on version control, optimized for collaborating with agents. Meanwhile, Cursor opened beta access to its Git hosting offering, Origin, and published an in-depth look at what it takes to host Git at any scale.

• Updated guidance from Anthropic on using the latest generation of Claude models and Claude Code effectively: learn how to manage context, maximize the value of your sessions, and build verification loops with skills.

• How do coding agents read your code? They grep their way around your codebase. There’s advice here on making relevant and related parts of the code easier to discover—which is great, because I also prefer grepping over complicated language intelligence features. A good example of how making code easier to understand for humans also benefits agents, and vice versa.

• Stolen Thoughts is research showing how reasoning—the “thinking process” of an LLM that usually isn’t easily accessible—can be deciphered, with some surprising glimpses of what that actually looks like for different models, and of how it can be exploited to steal secrets. Well presented, too.

• How Baseline can help you ship less JavaScript: a strategy, and plenty of practical examples, for using Baseline Availability to reduce dependencies and bundle size.

• Node is working on a new documentation website. It’s still in beta, but I already prefer it to the old docs. Try it.

Notable releases:

• Bun 1.4, the first release since the Rust rewrite, with a dizzying array of new features like remote control of web browsers, image and markdown APIs, a built-in React compiler, and tons of performance and Node compatibility improvements.

• Claude Opus 5, claiming to double Opus 4.8’s score on Anthropic’s Frontier-Bench at a lower cost per task while keeping the same token pricing, with the biggest gains in agentic problem-solving and computer use.

• Microlighter 2, a 2 KiB (compressed) syntax highlighter built on custom elements and the CSS Custom Highlight API.

• Nuxt 4.5, getting ready for Nuxt 5 with various internal improvements, alongside more flexibility when rendering slots in layouts, stable error codes for better bug hunting, and a new enabled option for pausing reactive API requests until a certain condition is met.

• pnpm 12 Release Candidate, yet another Rust rewrite, and adding project-aware global bins: global commands now follow the project you’re standing in, so running a tool from inside a project that asks for a different version gets you the version that project pins. Worth testing the RC now to ease the transition once the final release lands.

• Solid 2 Release Candidate, packing a lot of innovations, above all making async a core part of the reactive system. Their metaframework SolidStart is being retired too, merged into a start mode in Solid’s Vite plugin.

• SvelteKit 3 Release Candidate, simplifying config by reducing the number of required files and leaving things to Node where possible. Type-safe environment variables lose their experimental flag, and remote functions keep improving, though they’re still experimental.

• Vue 3.6 Release Candidate, completing the feature set for vapor mode, an opt-in compilation mode that replaces the virtual DOM with direct DOM operations. Benchmarks put it on par with Solid and Svelte. The reactivity system also got a rewrite based on alien-signals, improving performance and memory use.