What’s Going to Happen in Web Dev During 2026

Welcome to Syntax. We have our 2026 predictions for you today. What's gonna happen? 2026, last year, we had an incredible hit rate. I mean, we were well into eighty eighty 800% accuracy.

Yep.

We guessed things that we didn't even know that were gonna happen.

And today, Wes and I are standing up. In fact, Wes was like, I'm standing up. And you know what I said? Me too. I'm standing up too. Let's do it. Me. I'm a stander now. I can't wait to try stand for a week and a half and then sit down for the rest of the year. Yeah. Maybe I should do an episode on the treadmill. Get walking. Let's get into it, though. Let's get our predictions cooking here. What do we predict for the year 2026 in the world of web development? So number one here is web GPU and three d experiences pop. Man, let me tell you. That Lando Norris website made some waves, and that made some waves that won't be felt until 2026.

But Wes I think we're gonna really feel them with new experiences. Now we saw a lot of really cool GPU enhanced websites or websites that had a lot more shaders and graphical, elements and things like that.

I think it's only gonna get crazier, for 2026

for sure. I think so too. Man, the cool landing page and this this kind of I'm gonna loop this in with with another one of my predictions JS design making a comeback because everybody's cranking out the same decent looking website with AI and the Raycast ass Node page. Yeah. In order for and that's not a that's not a a a slander at Raycast at all because Raycast, like, invented that whole UI. And it it kinda sucks that, like, your entire, like, aesthetic has become like a meme because it's so good and everybody copies it. But websites where you land on it and you feel like, Wes.

Somebody has actually put some work into this. It makes you stop and look at it and experience and feel good about the product because there's so many generic ass websites where I can't even tell if I'm on, like, what website I'm on. Sometimes I'm on threads and Twitter, and I don't even know what website I'm on because they all look exactly the same. And and part of that is good because it's like you just know what to expect and and just wanna use the application. But, also, like, there's there's some joy that's been lost in in the website. And I think three d, all these Wes GPU experiences are going to improve that. People are able to make new things. So, Simon LaMarsha is working on shaders.com, and it's just, like, really sick. It's a web app and, like, an Npm package that you can just, like, use shaders together, and you can mask things and blend them. And there's a whole bunch of, like, defaults that you can you can pick out.

And I think it's the year. It's the year for three d's. It's the year that people are gonna learn what shaders are and make cool ass looking websites. Let's do it. See dithering all over the place. People are gonna find out about dithering, and they're gonna dither all the noise. Yes. And I'm not just gonna stop drop. Ease. Yeah. I'm gonna stop drop,

shut them down, roll them up, shop. Roll open up the shop. Lunch.

Stop drop. Shut them down. Open up shop. Sorry. Yes. I agree with you on that. Shaders, man, shaders are a crazy thing, but I I also think AI will

improve the burden on learning shaders. Yeah. I think that's why. JS that, like, in order to, like, write shaders right now or GitHub AI, like, you have to be a mathematician.

You know? You have to be an artist and a mathematician.

And, basically, people wanna be able to, like, not be mathematician and still make cool looking stuff, and I think the tools for that are coming this year. Yeah.

Yeah. Light mode makes a comeback.

I gotta say, I've been using light mode. I joined Yeah. I I told you. There's evidence here. I I, I joined the the Syntax team meeting the other day, and I had light mode on. I had to turn it off because it was making my glasses look crazy.

But, Yeah. That's the hard part about glasses, whereas on camera, you know, gives you this look here. But, you know, for me personally, I I have been liking light mode during the day and dark mode in the evening, and I have the automatic thing set up. And I have found, light mode themes that I really like in my text editor for the first time in my entire life. I think the last time I used life, not even, like, Dreamweaver Node days? I was gonna say, the last time I used a light mode theme for more than, enough time to change it to a dark mode theme was Dreamweaver.

Because the moment I went into TextMate, I with the dark theme, and then in in Sublime Text, dark theme, and then dark theme ever since. So

I'm just so sick of, like, crappy dark mode. It's, like, brown or washed out gray. JS the poster child for that. Doesn't work well. You know? I like

I I love dark mode. I still dark mode when I'm coding, but most of my other apps default to light, and I like it. I use a system setting for everything. And I was actually asking this on Twitter the other day. It was like, do people really want the little sun toggle in it some personal person's website, or do you just want it to be the system setting?

I because I I I opt in on a per site basis. Like, I use Twitter in dark mode. Yeah. It looks way better, and and it's just it's just about how it feels for that website. And like like I said, there's so many crappy dark modes that have been half assed,

so I I want that little sun toggle. Don't You think Node. Give me that all day. Google Docs will ever get to dark mode? Like Oh, that's a good question.

Well, like, what are they doing?

No. Who's writing Google Docs in dark mode? I would. Chance.

Every time I go to the the Google Docs, I'm like, come on.

No. No.

Node. Never. Never doing that. Well, maybe. We'll see. I don't think it'll ever come. That's such a huge under yeah. To do all the icons.

You know? But then they oh, they also have to you also have to account for people have made documents and slideshows assuming the background

is white. Well, slide I'm not talking about slideshows. I'm talking about, like, the canvas areas.

Yeah. Stuff like that. Like but like a doc. Somebody made a a doc or somebody made a spreadsheet, and the colors that they've chosen on that spreadsheet are based on it being a white background. So what do you what do you do? Can you calculate a color that is similar? Yeah. You actually can. So maybe they can figure that out. Gum. Gum. That's what.

Please peep that out.

We don't swear on this podcast, Scott. I I know. I thought it would be funny with a beep. I thought that would be funny. That would be funny. Okay.

Next one we have here is CSS.

Modern CSS standards are going to kick ass. Man, there is so much that has happened in the last, I don't know, maybe fourteen and a half months. So much that is coming. Go to chrome.dev/csswrap2020five, and you will you will feel, like, almost stressed out about how much stuff has been added to CSS. It's unbelievable. Right? We've got customizable Vercel, CSS anchor starting style, if statements, pop over, scroll animations. And related to popover, there's, like, eight different things, you know, like hover intents and, hinting and style queries, and we Scott CSS functions that are are currently being added to the spec.

So I think that CSS is gonna have a year this year, and I'm here for it. I think a year from now, people are gonna be like, wow. We can actually use this stuff.

I think the Shad CSS, all these u UI frameworks are going to have major iterations, or we're gonna see some new version of these UI frameworks that are entirely built on these modern standards. You don't need to use some floating UI or a whole bunch of, like, external JavaScript libraries.

I'm just gonna take a minute to plug my my thing. Graffiti is kind of built on that idea. Is that, like, I'm not this is not a slam, but that utility classes should have more utility. Right? Like, they shouldn't be just a DSL for CSS. It should do more stuff. So, like, you should be able to have a swiper or a, like, I have an Instagram style reel that's just dot reel or, you know, their header is applies a lot of style. So it's almost like components based out of, actual actual out of CSS without using any things other than, you know, the CSS modern features. And let me tell you, there's some cool stuff in this thing from the color system that's, like, alpha based Yeah. Rather than, like, shades based using relative color, easy to configure, but also, a whole text based system that does, like, fluid text based on its, container query or automatic contrast color with really, really cool relative color syntax. So I whether or not it's graffiti, which I don't think it will be, but I think things like graffiti will, like you mentioned, will become more ubiquitous, or systems that are already ubiquitous will lean less on JavaScript, which, man, people in the comments invokers about, oh, you can you don't have to use JavaScript for this now. People are like, stop trying to kill JavaScript. Like, JavaScript can do it fine. And it's like, brother, this is less Node. It's easier, and it's more performant.

They're like, what do you want? You wanna do it yourself? You wanna have it be worse just for the sake of using JavaScript? Like, that's great. JavaScript,

and I agree with this. Yeah. Like, these things are primitives. The only reason we added JavaScript in the first place was because we couldn't use those things. Now we can. So, yeah. Let's do it. I I think you gotta make this thing look, like, sick because, like, there's, like, this, like, functionality point of view to it. You know? Yeah. But then there's also the reason people pick up ChatZen or or Tail menu UI or any of that is because it just looks good by default.

And those defaults are becoming so ubiquitous. If there were something that looks different not to say that you can't make Scott CNN look like anything. Literally, you can make it look like anything you want. That's the whole point of it. Just people stick with the default. But if there's something that comes out with whatever that looks, like, next level, looks really cool Yeah. I think that will Yeah. That will pop.

Yeah, man. There's so much cool CSS stuff. One thing I think that is underrated in the the potential modern CSS landscape is scroll animations.

I think because they aren't available in Firefox yet or just that we haven't seen enough with scroll animations, or I think there's a misconception that the thing that you can do with them is just Parallax. Scroll on the page, animate stuff in, or parallax or whatever.

I think scroll animations have the most potential for, like, a major shakeup in terms of, like, interesting things that we can do in CSS. Like, interactions, you mean. Right? Yeah. All kinds of stuff. I I was I just saw an example using them in, like, form inputs or something. So, I mean, there's, like, a lot of, like, really interesting opportunities.

But as this stuff gets better and better, I I I think we're gonna see not just these features hit. We're going to see UI patterns like the swiper thing that I built all of a sudden being like, oh, wait. We can do this. Oh, no. Wait. We can do this. We like, this always happens in CS. That's a new feature comes in, and then people find out, okay. That's great. And then, like, three years later, they find out, oh, there's so much bigger possibilities with this now that we've really gotten comfortable with this API.

And now we can really explore some interesting concepts and ideas with it.

You know what JS another cool thing I just saw on this Chrome CSS wrapped is scroll markers. So if you're doing a carousel, one of the things you still need JavaScript for is you gotta, like, put all the buttons, and then you gotta, like, listen for, like, the scroll. What's the what's the event in JavaScript when the scroll snap snaps? I don't even know. Wes, there's a there's an event first, scroll snap snap. Yeah. And you listen for that. And then when that happens, you you update your, like, your dots as to which one is currently active. There's a new thing being added to CSS called scroll markers and and scroll market marker target current, which will allow you to make buttons that, yes, click next and whatever. Man, CSS is so good.

Speaking of CSS, let's talk about JavaScript.

Yeah. Speaking of CSS, Wes. JavaScript.

We said Temporal will ship in every browser

because every year, it seems like that is what is this? How many years have we predicted that it was in the browser? Probably four years now. And last year, it hit, what, it hit Chrome kinda? It hit it's going to hit Chrome in twenty twenty six January, so maybe not. But it's it's not in Safari yet, and it isn't

it is This is a tap in, Wes. This is a tap in because it is teed up on everything. I feel like I feel like this will have to happen. Just a little tab here. But

Yeah. But will there be, like, a gotcha? You know? It works, but Safari doesn't do seconds or something weird like that. You know? Yeah. Safari thinks that there's a security reason, so we're gonna completely limit the API. So that way Safari does this one weird thing that just renders the whole thing unusable.

But temporal will ship. This will be our year of temporal, and I'm so stoked for it. Also, standard stack will gain popularity by framework author. So this is something I did a talk about this probably about a year ago. I've been talking about it a lot. There is a lot of new features in JavaScript, navigation API, URL pattern. There's a new sanitizer API, which will like, you know, we always have to reach for, like, DOM Purify to, like Mhmm. You're taking user pnpm. You wanna put it in the DOM. You gotta strip out, like, a image on load, something like that. There's a new Sanhedrin API that's coming out. All of these new standard primitives are going to primitive in 2026.

So, you're already seeing this with, like, Hano and Eliza and and a lot of these standard server frameworks, but now like, Remix as well. Now that they have become standards in JavaScript, I think a lot of these frameworks are going to pick them on up. So the standard stack is going to be gain popularity, and that makes sharing code between multiple frameworks. It means it means moving code from one framework to another. It makes all of that stuff super easy.

I think in general, frameworks will continue their push to RPC territory Wes we've seen this with SvelteKit. We've seen it with everything, 10 stack query. People are moving to RPC, which feels like it's about time. Man, I use this kind of API in Meteorland.

And, like, when I moved to have a separate API or a, like Yeah. Like, I was always just like, come on. This feels so much worse than how I was doing it in 2015.

So I do think this is gonna just continue to to grow. And there's all kinds of things whether that is, like, convex or supabase or these things that kind of obfuscate some of of that, and you're just calling functions and it handles it all pocket Bos, those types of things. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is just gonna continue to become more of the commonplace.

Do you think that we will see a a push for standardized RPC? Because we have like, you have, like, the Svelte version, and then, like, Cloudflare has their own called that they rolled out called cap'n Wes, and and then there's obviously rack server components.

No. I don't think we'll see a standardized version of this. You don't think we'll see that. There are some there's, like, JSON RPC. There are some specs out there for it, but I think as we move a lot of this stuff to RPC, probably not this year. But I think at some point, there will be some sort of call of, like, let's let's standardize these things. And and maybe we don't necessarily need to because of the fetch API.

Like, we have web request and web response, and we have get, put, post.

We have the body. You know? Like, those things are are fairly standard already, so maybe that's that's good enough.

I will say that I do think that standard schema Yes. Will become way more, ubiquitous in regards to RPC. Even Deno sync in their new mutations has moved to having a standard schema Bos the same way that Svelte remote functions are.

So that way you could use archetypes, Node, whatever you want, and to validate your data between. Because that is really, as we Wes as we talked about in the remote functions episode, that is really such a killer way to validate your data between the client and server. So I I I would hope that that would that aspect of it might be standardized.

I think so. For those who who don't know, standard schema is this idea that, you take your your library, like like Node or, ValleyBot or there's several other there's, like, 20 of them out there. And that all of the tools that both ingest data, validate data, but also return data, they all speak this thing called standard schema, and you can convert between them. And it's been so nice to be able to, like, use whatever library I want, but just know that all of these tools work together.

Whereas previously, a tool would be like, we only use Node version three, and, like, the and that's it. You know? Like like, the OpenAI API is like that right now. You can only use Zod version three, but then you're starting to see a lot of these AI APIs being like, just pass us standard schema, and and it will it will work be between all of them. Even, like what did I use the other day? Chrome's local AI API uses JSON schema. If you wanna be able to specify the return value as, like, a like, a structured content rather than just text, you have to use JSON schema. And I was like, come on.

Mhmm. Use use let let me use Zod or whatever I want, and then just pass you the standard schema version of that. Don't pigeonhole me into using your weird version of this.

I feel like

these libraries, whether that is archetype or whatever, are all just gonna move to support both. And then it's like you can just use whatever you want. Right? But that's that's the whole point of standard schema is that I know. Yeah. You can use whatever you want. You can specify it in whatever way you want. And then when you pass it to the tool, it doesn't matter because it Doesn't matter. Right. You can convert Node or archetype or whatever to standard schema, and then the thing will just ingest the standard version.

Yeah. What do you think about what do you think is gonna happen in React land, this year?

That's a good question.

I don't think much. I think, like, the pace at at which we move with a lot of these frameworks, especially that so much more of the attention has been off of features and onto how do you do this with AI. I don't know. Like, there's obviously, we had the huge React security hole. That's certainly gonna leave a bad taste in a lot of React users' mouth, but I don't know. I don't think much. I I think it's still gonna be the number one, but I'm rooting for a lot of these other other players in the space as well, you know, whether that's Felt or Remix or whatever.

Yeah. I think there will be another security issue. And I only think this because I was talking to CJ, and he he kinda opened my mind up to the idea that when you're inventing such a unique transport that the possibility for something like this is opened up. So I I do think there probably might be something else Yeah. Based on nothing. Around, like, server components

initially. Like, you React Vercel components invented the whole transport end to end. Right? And a a lot of people were Vercel. Even, Rich Harris, creator Svelte, was like, we will regret reinventing RPC.

Yes.

And here we are with a a major security hole in it. Well, maybe we'll Yarn lay that into one of my other one JS we will see a lot more security mishaps in web development in general. I think that is because of several things.

AI code slop, obviously, that's a big one. Understaffed tech teams, that's I think that's been a lot of the reason we've seen so much downtime lately, and as well as, like, so many of these companies are just shipping at insane speeds right now because everybody's trying it's a race to to be the winner of all of this AI stack. And and because of the insane speeds that they're shipping at, things obviously get missed and and whatnot.

So that's that's a bit of a trade off or or a huge trade off right there, and I think a lot of that stuff is starting to catch up with us. You know? We've seen major downtimes in a lot of the the cloud providers, and I think that is going to continue through the the web development industry, unfortunately.

I think we will find at least Node, at least one. I think there's gonna be more. At least one major story that comes out about an app that people are, really using that's maybe not mainstream, but taken off, that once the security issue is found, the entire Apple have found to be Vibe coated garbage. So, like, held together with duct tape, and then we'll all laugh about it and etcetera. It'll be all over online. Like, I can't believe they, did this. They they called this, database query from the client for some reason. You know? I think Svelte for Svelte, we didn't talk about that. I think SvelteKit three will be released. I don't think that's a difficult prediction to make and will include all of their async and remote data stuff all buttoned up and fully, launched in in

a stable. Let's talk about tooling as well. Yeah. Like, around all these web development tools, a couple years ago, we predicted people will fall out of love with ESLint.

That's happened a lot slower than I imagine, and and it that just says something about the ecosystem that things are built around. It's the same thing with WordPress JS that as as much as you don't like some of these tools based on, like, the the UX and the DX of working with them, they're just so big that it is very hard to to move forward GitHub. But we're starting to see some pickup in in people. I've moved a couple projects to Biome, which I've been been really enjoying.

ESLint is another one that's built into Vite plus. We'll see. So Vite plus is their Vite's, like, paid initiative, I guess, where it's like an all in one tool that handles all of your linting and formatting, and and it's supposed to replace everything.

I'm curious to see if that gets picked up or not.

I think bold prediction.

I think by this time next year, Biome is going to get snow packed by

ESLint, I think. Interesting. What do you mean? And what is snowpack? Explain what that is.

Snowpack was kind of like the first Wes bundler that was came out, and then Veet came out and was better. And Veet kind of instantly took over, and people stopped talking about Snowpack.

Yeah. I think Biome and their approach does not allow for what I have heard. I'm not an expert on this. Does not allow for plug ins to be compatible in the same way that they were with Prettier. This is me speaking, completely uneducatedly on this, and and I should probably do some research. But I think because of how ESLint is built and the people behind it, I think Oxlent will become the default nonprettier formatter and the default nonprettier linter.

Yes. And the re I think the reason you're saying that is because biome plug ins are written in something called GRITQL, which is essentially, like, you have to write some language that you are probably not familiar with in order to make these plugins, and that makes the ecosystem by default not as strong. And that's why ESLint is so big is, like, any idiot can go and make, like, myself included, can go write a JavaScript plug in for this. Whereas ESLint is written in Rust but allows you to write plug ins in JavaScript, and they are working towards implementing the entire spec of ESLint so that you will be able to just take your like, I have some weird ESLint plugins in some of my projects where it's just like I'm not I don't want to fuss with that. I hate I my most hated thing is working on the tooling and trying to get it to work. And when I hit save in my editor and it just formats and ESLint properly, I'm not touching it until until the next time that it breaks, and then I'm like, oh, damn it. I gotta spend some time figuring out why this isn't working. Yeah. Yeah. Do we think that anything,

will replace StyleLint, or are people just gonna continue to ignore StyleLint? Because StyleLint is fantastic.

I don't know. StyleLint has such a big ecosystem plug ins. Mhmm. And even if these things say that they can lint CSS, I feel like that would be tough to replace everything that StyleLint is doing. I would love to see that, though. I would love to have everything linted in one tool, but I do think that Oxlint is going to be it and not Biome.

Interesting. Alright. That's we'll put money on that and we'll flag. I'll see you on New Year.

Yes. Yeah. The next one is Wes saw anthropic purchase bun.

I think we will see more acquisitions like that happen.

I don't know who or what, but I do think more web technology properties, whether that is things like BUN or otherwise, will get scooped up by who knows who. Yeah. Like,

who needs Deno right now? You're thinking about Yeah.

Looking at all this. Does anybody need Dino? Who needs Tailwind. Someone should buy might buy Tailwind. Like, OpenAI or Anthropic has to buy Tailwind simply as a thank you for all of the vibe coding that crapped out in the last two years. You know? Oh,

yeah. I did. It it JS interesting, and I I do wonder about about some of these. I feel like Cloudflare is poised to buy some stuff. You know? Cloudflare bought do they they didn't buy Deno, or they they they Well, no. They employ

the the author behind it. They aqua hired couple people from Vercel. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. There there will definitely be some Sanity kit. Aggressive moves. As as much as these AI things are good at writing code, people that know what's up and how to write code are still in heavy demand. Here's one of my thoughts JS 2026 is going to be the year of durable compute. And and what I mean by that is this whole idea of possible, waitable workflows that you can can pause and resume. So probably the big ones Yarn, like, temporal and ingest Wes you could simply have a function and you can await inside of it or you have, like, a step and you can await for, like, four days, and then four days later, you can you can pick up and keep going, or you can try something every every hour and then loop over five times. You Node? A lot of the stuff that we previously would use cues for, it makes a lot more sense to just use a function that reads top to bottom and can sort of go to sleep, And then you can wake it back up, and you have all of your state and all your variables and everything that you warp used to in the past. So ingest and temporal were two of the, like, sort of forefront in this, area.

Cloud Vercel launched their own workflow dot dev, which I previously said was Next. Js only. That is not the case. It literally works with with anything.

In fact, they're working on a Cloudflare adapter, which I think is is the move if you want people to trust it.

Yeah. Yeah. Armin, he used to work at Century. He's writing one called Absurd, which is based on Postgres.

What else is there? Trigger dot dev. There's so many people going to this. And, partially, that's because of agents and, partially, because, like, this is just a nice way to write code. You know? You have to send an email. You wanna wait for that email to send and Node back, or you wanna try it several times over. The durable function is the is going to be big in this the year of 2026.

Yeah. I think that's interesting. I am curious. And by the way, just to be clear, you're talking about Temporal, the

company. Node, which JS has nothing to do with the Temporal API we just talked about. Yeah. This is a a company that provides the the ability to pause code.

Yes. The ability to pause code. Yeah. I think I think you're right on this. I I have not used any of these tools before. So may maybe, maybe I'll pick them up. Maybe it'll hit the the mainstream.

Yeah. Any any like, I even think about our, like, transcription service right now. You Node, if you have a function that runs for sometimes you have a function that runs for, like, sixty seconds because you're waiting for some heavy thing and you don't want it to time out. Anytime you have, like, what would normally be a long running function or a function that needs to retry every so often or a function that needs to that could possibly throw and you wanna retry in in a couple minutes, a durable workflow is probably the move there.

I look forward to, hearing more about this in the in the future, Wes. Yes. Possibly from you. Yes. And since I've been working on a show on it right now, I have a card. That's why I was able to rattle off all of the names of those because I've been been

I love it. Let's talk about AI stuff. I think the AI here's what I think. I think the framework will matter less because the AI tools will be better. Last year. And that the AI tools will simply just pick whatever is going to work the best. Now I I do think that, and and I think I've personally seen it, where I'm I'm not having to write a a framework all the time, or I'm not having to I'm not having to worry about the quality of the code based on which framework I'm picking. Now there's a lot of, alpha libraries and stuff I'm picking up that, obviously, I still do, but I think the tools will just continue as we saw over the past year to get better to the point where I can say, write me a whatever app with this version, and it's just gonna get it right instead of making up, as much syntax. Because the amount of improvement I saw over the course of this year was massive in that territory. So I I think it will continue,

that path. I'm curious. So I am pretty bullish on Scott, like, Remix itself, but the idea of of Remix where it is so much based on standard APIs

Yeah. That

it just knows about, fetch, web request, web response, URL search params, routing parameter matching. It knows about all of these things because they're just they're they're primitives built ESLint the language.

And then if you can build your framework on top of that, it needs to know a lot less about the framework, and it needs to know a lot less about, like, the oddities of of how things work. Mhmm. So I'm hoping that that means that you're able to just give it these brand new frameworks, and it can do a good job at writing that code. I don't know. We said this last year, and and it's still kicking out React and Tailwind three for me unless you explicitly go and and and do a whole bunch of work. And it's not good at writing Svelte five. You know? Yeah. It's good at Svelte five. I'll tell you that now. Opus 4.5. Good at Svelte five. It's good at Svelte five. Dude Yeah. So you you provided,

like, the docs with it, and it it knows how to to reason about it. Even without the docs now. The Svelte team made, like, an API benchmarks that was, like, determining what percentage of Svelte features that it got correct. Yeah. And it it reached a 100% with all the 25. So yeah. That's what we need because it's so much of this is just like, I feel like it's Wes, or I feel like it's better. No. The team has benchmarks, and they've been updating it anytime anything new came out. Benchmarks, we will see more benchmarks. We will be continuing to benchmark, AI stuff.

I think end to end will become much more popular. I call this tip to tail on a previous episode, meaning that, having AI involved at every step, not just like you just boop boop boop, and then it goes off and rips the whole website for you, but, having AI involved in your planning, your writing code, your iterating, ESLint. It's getting really good with with Playwright and and integrated browsers into these agents where it will can actually scroll the page, take screenshots, click things, drag and drop. I think having AI in the loop for every single part rather than just writing the code and you having to copy paste an error from your terminal into into the chat, I think that those improvements will get much better, and I think that will significantly improve the speed at which we write this software and quality.

I totally agree. Node I think there's even gonna be new tools and new ways of working with AI that we haven't seen before. I feel like all the time stuff comes out that improves the tooling around the AI, and therefore, the output of the AI ends up becoming better.

Have you heard of beads? No.

Yeah. Beads is something that I just

found out about. A memory upgrade for your coding agent. Is that it?

Yeah. So what it does, if I'm if I'm understanding this correctly, because I've only just started to use it, is it it is basically taking that to do list that many of these agents are keeping in context and moving it into, JSON and SQLite, and you're able to commit it to your repo and stuff.

So, therefore, that to do list of what the agent is using at any given point in time is less ethereal and more concrete and shareable across your team.

And it is kind of like these systems that many of us are just kind of haphazardly doing in markdown right now. Yeah. You know, like, this this status of this, open, close, whatever, blocked by. It it basically allows you to have a Git structured version of,

that type of warp. So process through something.

Yes. I've just installed this on a project of mine. So I'm yet to see if this thing will, really solve my problems, but I've heard a lot of really good things about it. And it's got 4,300 stars on GitHub, seems to be a rising, star in this space. But I think things like that as well as tools like, Century, at sentry.io, Century. Yeah.

Century has some really great AI tools, and they fit perfectly into your normal workflow where, like, even in development, you can use the Scott MCP to be like, I what is this issue that's going on, and how can I how can I solve this? But in your your production code too, like, I I found that their their SEER platform, the ability to take any given issue and find the root cause of it has been really nice.

I think we're gonna see, like, a lot more things like this. Because when you use these tools in practice, they even if it's just a little button in your century that says, what's the root cause of this? Like, I was on Netlify today, and I had a deploy that failed.

And, you know, with deploys that fail, sometimes it's who knows why the hell this deploy failed.

There you have an AI button that says, why did this deploy fail? And you click it, and it gives you an AI summary of why it failed. I didn't have to go pawing through the logs and make a guess.

And I think we're gonna see little things like that just pop up and continue to get better. Next one we have here is regular people will realize that they can make personalized

software.

And I know people hate this I don't know if Wes give it people will, but But developers will.

Developers already know this, that, like, I have made so many little apps. My Christmas lights, I needed to do the spacing of the window frames for my Christmas lights. And I just had to input the width and height, and it told me exactly how far along, and it it kicked out a three d printed jig that I could then print and and use to drill holes exactly spaced correctly in it. And, like, that piece of software, I would never find anywhere, and it it was so helpful to myself. And I think regular people also have the need for that, and regular people already do this with spreadsheets.

You know? Like, the you should see some of the crazy stuff people do in spreadsheets to simply and spreadsheets are an awful way to, like, to to do stuff. Right? You have to nest all these things in one single line.

Imagine the people that have the smarts of making complex spreadsheets can now just move that over to, like, vibe coding and actually build software that's useful for them. I don't know what the avenue for that will be. Right? Like, you have, like, Bolt and v zero, which is kinda something like that already, but there's gotta be one more step where like, I'm still not talking to parents at school pickup or or whatever. You Node? They're maybe using chat GPT for these things, but, no, they're not making software yet. Yeah. They're not making software. Maybe that will happen. Yeah. I feel like

I feel like that's too soon, but who knows? You know? Yeah. Maybe we'll have the one thing that makes it really easy. You do see a number of these apps pop up. It's gotta roll out in, like

like, Microsoft whatever.

You Node? Microsoft App Maker. It's gotta come with, like, Microsoft Teams and, like, oh, just make a quick little app. You know? It's gotta be integrated with that. Well, I don't know what that will be. But I do know that MCP and MCP UI will will pop this year. You know? We've seen major improvements in MCP, and we're starting to see quite a bit of work on the MCP UI front. Meaning that, like, we saw OpenAI released their half assed version of being able to integrate custom UIs into chat GPT, but that spec is severely limited. And if we want to be able to just embed our own custom UIs into any chat or any AI agent. MCP UI is is the move for that, and I think that we're gonna we're gonna see a standard. I think the MCP UI standard is gonna be accepted by the MCP spec, and I think that we'll start to see it implement in a lot of these chat agents. I'm curious to see what OpenAI does around this because I know that they wanna have the upper hand of control. They they might have, like, an Apple moment where they're like, no. We're we're gonna implement it, but are in our own crazy way.

And, unfortunately, they can do that because they are the big Node, the big dog in this space.

I'm woefully under,

researched on MCP UI. Not something I have really looked at at all yet. Awesome. So, like, like, imagine imagine you are in chat and you ask it to, like, I don't know, show me the latest pizza places or display the latest syntax Node. And imagine that we could just return instead of just returning data from our MCP, you could just return, like, an iframe Mhmm. With HTML and CSS inside of it. I don't know that this is the end. A lot of people are saying, like, this is the replacement for the web. For the browser. You know? This isn't the browser is dead, and we're simply just be returning widgets from from that. And, partially, I think, like, WeChat in China, a lot of commerce, a lot of ordering is all done on WeChat widgets, and it it works over there. So I think there there will be a lot in which I don't think it's gonna replace the entire web. I think it's a crappy experience for a lot of stuff.

But I think for some commerce, ordering food, doing research, simply just returning UIs from, from a chat instead of just text is is going to be great.

Yeah. There are so there is a lot of times Wes, like, even just wanting to know quick answer. I mean, AI has gotten good to the point where many times you're not searching the web for things. You know? Yeah. Asking quick questions, stuff that's

easily verifiable or And, like, they're people. Yeah. They're already kind of doing that. Like, they're returning graphs sometimes, you Node, and but, like, imagine that you could just open that up to the entire web and say you can return if you install your Expedia or your Airbnb or you install the syntax MCP server Mhmm. It should also be able to return, like, a custom UI, whether that's just nicely formatted data or whether that's actual, like, buttons that you can click and edit your data inside of that.

Yeah.

That's reasonable. Yes. Next Node.

Devs will fall off. I think this is something that anybody who, as a developer, who gets deep down the AI rabbit hole, doesn't realize it's happening until they're like, oh, I'm not using really my brain.

I'm feeling productive.

Things are are coming out. Sometimes the code is really bad. If I look at the code for too long, it hurts my eyes.

But you're not really you're not realizing that you're not gaining the same types of skills if you're just having it spit out. It is so funny. We talked about this a number of times on the show, but when you when you talk or when you read comments in YouTube from people who are using a lot of AI, you can tell exactly where they are as a developer or in their AI journey by based on, like, the types of things they're saying. And you always wanna know, you'll figure it out eventually. You'll you'll you'll get to why we're saying this. And people, like, just

assume that you're either a hater or you're a maximalist or whatever on all of these things based on what you're saying. People are obnoxious on the entire arc of I hate AI Right. To it's going to replace absolutely everything. And if you're an absolutist at anywhere on the warp, you're obnoxious because it's we haven't figured it all out yet. It's very bad at some things. It's also very good at some things, and it's a lot of it, it depends. But you're getting stupid by being an absolutist along that arc.

Yeah. You are. There's there's a comment, on one of our videos about I was saying to only use AI to help you learn rather than to have it do it all for you when you're trying to learn a new topic. That seems reasonable. Right? If if you have the AI do it for you, you're not gonna learn it. That's if the goal is to learn the thing. And, somebody responded with, this is a boomer take.

AI is a revolution.

Boil, frog, boil, as in I'm a frog boiling in a pot of water because, the heat is turning up slowly.

That's hilarious because you're, like, the most anti AI guy I know.

It's just like it's it's crazy town out there. But I do think that where you are in your journey will dictate, and you'll eventually be like, oh, shoot. I'm maybe not picking up the same stuff. And maybe we'll have to learn less, and we'll just be kind of dumber because of it, but we'll still be effective. Who knows?

Some of the stuff will literally not matter that we don't know how to do it anymore.

I I agree with those those comments as well. Some of the stuff is like, oh, nobody can can write a nested selector, or nobody can do x, y, and z anymore. And, like, maybe that doesn't matter anymore. However, I I do know that you have to continue your skill set, and AI is very good at helping you push into new skill sets and and learning them. Because if you just say, well, it does all I want Node, and I'm just gonna push the button at the end of the thing, you're gonna be the one that's gonna fall off with this, because you're not going to continue that arc into becoming smarter and learning new things.

Yeah.

Sound work? Keep learning things, folks. Learn learn you know what I learned the other day, Scott?

What did you learn?

RFID and and and why am I why am I so stupid? RFID and NFC.

This is like a little Proxmark three. And, like, I spent a day diving deep into how NFC works, the different types of it, how, how these different cards work, which which ones are writable, how bits and bytes are stored on an NFC card. You know? I've got I've got, like, a whole bunch of them. Scott one right here and these little tags.

And, like, I feel a lot smarter after having known all that works. And I've I've got a lot more lower level than I do with a lot a lot of my skills.

And, you just gotta keep doing stuff like that. Yeah. Keep doing stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. I think the intuitification will continue, as we've seen all kinds of avenues here. Software feels like it's falling apart. Products feel like they're falling apart in general.

And unless something big happens, like, I think we're we're due for another year of things feeling like they're getting worse for some reason as everybody's just trying to get that bag, baby. But that's that's a yeah.

Everyone's trying to get that bag right now. Yeah.

It's tough. It's tough. I I I do see and this is kinda crazy. I do see a world where AI eventually helps with the intunefication.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot You mean, like like, makes things better. You know? Because, like, we're talking about all of these security things and and whatnot, and all these bad things, but, like, the hilarious thing is that that these tools can also significantly help you find Totally. Slow code and help you find security issues in Bolmbaros. So that's what you're talking about? Yeah. Help you fix problems, help you write more,

more defensive code from the start instead of just something that works to Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Agreed. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Let us know. That's our twenty twenty six predictions. Let us know down below what your predictions are, Wes you think we are wrong or right about something JS well as if we didn't hit any of these things. Because maybe what we'll do next year is we'll come back to the comments of this video and say, what did what did the folks in the comments what is mister TypeScript who wrote something about it? What is it where Wes we at right now with this type of thing? Yeah. Mister paperclip. Yes. Yeah.

Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We will catch you later. Peace.