966: A Look Back at Web Dev in 2025
Episode
56 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Artificial Intelligence, Software Development
AI-Generated Summary
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.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Syntax. We've got two episodes for you coming up in the next week. Today, we have our reviewing our 2025 prediction. So every single year, what we do is we look at where web development is, and we say, these are our predictions for the next year. What's gonna happen? What's gonna flop? What's gonna pop? And we are gonna go through all of our predictions today and say, did we hit it or did we not? And then next Wednesday, we'll have another episode, which is our predictions for 2026 as to what's gonna happen. So my name is Wes Bos. Happy holidays. Merry Christmas, everybody. Hopefully, you're enjoying it. This is gonna be a really fun episode. I'm here with Scott Talinsky. How are you doing today, Scott? Hey. I'm doing good. Did you just come up with that did it flop or did it not on the fly just now? I I'm I'm just genius. Yeah. Yeah. I just have an incredible intuition and all of that. Oh, yeah. No. That's great. I, I like that a lot. Did it flop or did it not? That's a great, metric I think we can all, buy here. Or did it pop? Clop or pop? These episodes because this is the thing I like doing the most, just pontificating on, like, theoretical who knows what. Is this gonna happen or not? I I feel like I'm always a little too optimistic on stuff. So, the reason why say last year last year, we had a lot of, like, man, we are a little up too optimistic on that. But I I have to say that this year, we we nailed quite a bit. So let's get on into the first one, which was the temporal API will ship in the browser. So I said both Chrome and Safari will ship by end of year, and Scott said that it will be in at least one browser. So if you haven't heard of it, temporal is this massive API that is set to replace the date API. You might be saying, well, what's wrong with the date API? Stop changing stuff. I don't know if anybody's ever said what's wrong with the date API. Yeah. That's I don't know. That's fair. Fair. So the temporal API will allow you to encapsulate durations. So if you've ever wanted to, say, I I want to somehow make three days. How can you say that in a in a a standardized way? Or if I want to do January 25 to January 6. But regardless of time zones, or if you do want to include time zones in a start and an end, there's just time is time is hard. Time is complex. What is time? And the temporal API is going to solve all of this. It's gonna be a absolutely killer API. And where are we at right now? I think we nailed it. So here's where we're at. …
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Tools
by Microsoft
“Cursor's tab completion remains superior to VS Code despite improvements, with Opus 4.5 model producing reliable Svelte 5 code consistently.”
“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.”
- CursorRecommended
“Cursor's tab completion remains superior to VS Code despite improvements, with Opus 4.5 model producing reliable Svelte 5 code consistently.”
“💼 SPONSORS [{"name": "Sentry", "url": "https://sentry.io/syntax"}]”
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