Edition 33: Carson Gross on why your JSON API isn't RESTful, Vercel's durable harness, Zod 4 freed a third of the CPUs | Soft navigations in CrUX, Code is clay now

Why your JSON API is not RESTful

We cut a four-minute clip out of last week's episode with Carson Gross, the creator of HTMX, on where REST came from.

How far is what we call REST today from what Roy Fielding wrote in his dissertation? How did REST come to mean "good," and why did the whole industry end up on React and JSON APIs anyway?

Watch the four-minute clip

If you missed the episode, the full conversation with the creator of HTMX covers whether you need a JavaScript framework at all, which apps HTMX is a bad fit for, what changed in HTMX 4, and why he moved his students back to pencil and paper exams.

Watch the full episode on YouTube

Listen on Spotify

Community reads

Web platform

Experimental soft navigation metrics now available in CrUX by Annie Sullivan — your SPA's route changes now count as navigations in CrUX, so what happens to your Core Web Vitals once they do?

Tooling

Zod 4 got rid of a bunch of CPUs for us by Chris Arderne — one hot path parses about 98 million payloads a day, and a version bump cut worker CPU by nearly a third, so go upgrade.

AI and agents

Making every harness durable by Pranay Prakash and Eric Dodds — Vercel's answer to the Mac mini under the desk: an open source package that lets a Claude Code or Codex session survive a crash mid-turn.

Introducing Clairic, a new System One class of extraction models by Michelle Chen — after decision models, Cloudflare now has a model that extracts, computes, estimates and forecasts from messy input without generating a single token.

Decision Models-as-a-judge by Alfonso de la Rocha — LLM-as-a-judge is too slow and expensive to run on every commit, so can a decision model grade your agents in CI instead?

Code is clay now by Alberto Denia — we spent the Middle Ages of coding (everything before November 2025) carving stone, and the material changed under us.

Book recommendation

I keep coming back to this one whenever a team asks why their numbers are not moving.

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh, with Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh

Walsh took the San Francisco 49ers from a 2-14 season to a Super Bowl win in three years. He managed what he called the Standard of Performance, how every person in the building did their job, from the quarterback to whoever answered the phones. Swap the football for an engineering org and it works the same: set the bar on how a PR gets written, how a review gets done, how an incident gets run, and how people treat each other, and the delivery metrics will follow.

Find it on Goodreads

Meme of the week

If you're enjoying these (and read to this section), please share the subscribe link with someone who'd get something out of it, or with your team on Slack:

neciudan.dev/subscribe