How I took my site three major versions forward with Claude doing most of the work (while Fabel was available), Sebastian Lorber on what it actually takes to run This Week in React, and a lot happening across the frontend ecosystem.
New article: Upgrading from Astro 3 to 6, with Claude doing most of the work
My site sat on Astro 3.0.2 for three years: three majors behind, 45 known vulnerabilities in the dependency tree, a deprecated config, and a Tailwind integration the Astro team had stopped maintaining.
When Anthropic shipped Fable 5, the first in the Claude 5 family, I put it to work.
Three days later the site runs Astro 6.4.5, builds 44% faster, ships 96–98% less JavaScript on the course pages, and has half as many high- and critical-severity issues as before.
I wrote up the whole thing check it out.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Sebastian Lorber on running This Week in React
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Sebastian Lorber is the creator of This Week in React, the newsletter read by over 45,000 developers every week, and a core maintainer of Docusaurus at Meta.
We get into how to build and mentain one of the most read newsletters in the ecosystem, the exhaustive weekly workflow across 2,000 X profiles and 500+ RSS feeds, and the Gmail truncation limit that quietly shapes every single issue.
Plus the human side of curation, the slow decline of social reach, why he checks React feature flags before calling anything "shipped", and a candid look at the recent TanStack compromise and why trusted publishing can give a false sense of safety.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Community reads
AI
Make AI boring again by Charity Majors — the argument that AI is ordinary technology, not uniquely evil, and that refusing to touch it on purity grounds just cedes influence to people who won't set boundaries.
AI's affordability crisis by David Rosenthal — the case that vendors have been running a drug-dealer's algorithm of heavily subsidized tokens, and that as 2026's usage-based pricing lands, businesses are hitting 7x bills.
Web platform
Modern CSS theming by Una Kravets — a layered theming system where light-dark() switches colors page-wide and per-element, contrast-color() auto-picks readable text, and style queries branch into tinted palettes.
Cross-origin storage by Thomas Steiner — a proposed API that stores big model and Wasm files by cryptographic hash instead of per-origin, so every site stops re-downloading the same weights, now experimental in Transformers.js.
Do websites need to function exactly the same on every platform? by Bramus Van Damme — we long ago accepted sites needn't look identical across browsers; the argument that insisting they behave identically is what's stalling features like Interest Invokers and document Picture-in-Picture.
Frameworks and tooling
Astro 7.0 by the Astro team — a speed release with the .astro compiler and Markdown/MDX pipeline rewritten in Rust for 15–61% faster builds (now I have to upgrade to 7).
Vercel Flags: platform-native feature flags by Vercel — feature flags baked into the framework and evaluated server-side in RSC so there's no client flicker.
Waku's unique feature: slices by Daishi Kato — reusable components with their own render configs that pages explicitly opt into letting you mix static and dynamic rendering and lazy-load chunks independently.
There are no instances in atproto by Dan Abramov — why comparing atproto to Mastodon is wrong: Mastodon bundles hosting and apps into one instance, while atproto separates them so you can swap your data host and switch clients independently.
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is still on my list this year. Strong lineup, well-run community, and the kind of single-track conference you can actually keep up with.
Use code REACTJSBARCELONA_10 for 10% off tickets.
More info and tickets
CityJS Athens
CityJS lands in Athens this October. Adding it here because the CityJS events are consistently worth the trip.
More info and tickets
That's it for this one.
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