966: A Look Back at Web Dev in 2025

December 24, 2025

56 min episode · 2 min read

Wes Bos,Scott Talinsky

Episode

56 min

Read time

2 min

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓Temporal API delivery: The date replacement API shipped in Firefox May 2025, entered Chrome beta December 2025 with stable release January 2026, and landed in Safari behind a flag after four years of anticipation and polyfill usage.
✓AI coding tools maturation: Cursor's tab completion remains superior to VS Code despite improvements, with Opus 4.5 model producing reliable Svelte 5 code consistently. Tools improved more than raw models, though framework choice still matters for AI assistance quality.
✓CSS relative color syntax: Reached baseline 2024 status with full browser support, enabling color system creation that responds to light and dark modes with transparency. Underutilized despite being the year's most valuable CSS addition for automated contrast systems.
✓React security vulnerability: React server components experienced a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting Next.js, Remix, and Parcel-based sites through simple POST requests, potentially souring developer adoption despite the team's rapid response and fixes.

What It Covers

Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski review their 2025 web development predictions, evaluating accuracy on CSS features, AI tools, React ecosystem changes, bundlers, and browser APIs that shipped or failed to materialize this year.

Key Questions Answered

•Temporal API delivery: The date replacement API shipped in Firefox May 2025, entered Chrome beta December 2025 with stable release January 2026, and landed in Safari behind a flag after four years of anticipation and polyfill usage.
•AI coding tools maturation: Cursor's tab completion remains superior to VS Code despite improvements, with Opus 4.5 model producing reliable Svelte 5 code consistently. Tools improved more than raw models, though framework choice still matters for AI assistance quality.
•CSS relative color syntax: Reached baseline 2024 status with full browser support, enabling color system creation that responds to light and dark modes with transparency. Underutilized despite being the year's most valuable CSS addition for automated contrast systems.
•React security vulnerability: React server components experienced a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting Next.js, Remix, and Parcel-based sites through simple POST requests, potentially souring developer adoption despite the team's rapid response and fixes.

Notable Moment

Scott discovered he accidentally booked a 6AM flight using Perplexity's Comet browser AI agent, which auto-filled his friend's early morning flight details all the way to checkout without his full awareness of the departure time.

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