PodRocket

Sacha Greif, creator of the State of Web Dev AI survey, joins the podcast to walk through what over 7,000 web developers actually reported about their AI tool usage, code quality concerns, and growing worries about AI financial costs. Only 29% of developers generate a quarter or less of their code with AI, and the survey reveals surprisingly balanced views on LLM hallucinations, developer job security, and even AI's environmental f...

Mikayla Maki, software engineer at Zed, digs into what makes this Rust-built code editor tick... from GPUI, their GPU-accelerated UI framework with a Tailwind-inspired API, to CRDTs powering real-time live collaboration without merge conflicts. She talks about the Zed 1.0 release, their approach to AI, how the team builds popular features directly into core instead of relying on extensions, and why Rust might be the best language f...

This month's panel digs into the SpaceX Cursor acquisition rumor and what a $60 billion valuation means for AI coding tools. They debate Bun's million-line Rust rewrite generated entirely by AI, the tradeoffs of agentic coding at scale, and a sophisticated CI/CD cache poisoning attack targeting TanStack. Plus: practical takes on Claude token optimization, session forensics, local AI models, and why most Claude Code skills work best...

pnpm lead maintainer Zoltan Kochan joins PodRocket to unpack pnpm 11's biggest shifts: a new minimum release age default that blocks npm registry packages under 24 hours old, a cleaner allow builds config replacing scattered post-install script settings, and the experimental global virtual store that slashes install times with Git worktrees. Zoltan also shares why a Rust rewrite of pnpm's engine is now underway, and how AI-assisted...

Google Chrome engineer Adam Argyle breaks down why AI is bad at frontend development and CSS in particular. From LLM training data problems to the fact that LLMs can't see, the issues run deep. But it's not all doom! Adam shares a game-changing technique for getting creative AI generated UI by asking for low probability outputs, introduces tools like Impeccable and V0 for AI assisted CSS editing, and dives into agentic loop enginee...

Jimmy Lai, manager of the Next.js team at Vercel, joins the podcast to explain the adapters API, why it exists, how it fixes Next.js self-hosting pain across platforms like Cloudflare, AWS Amplify, and Netlify, and what it unlocks for partial pre-rendering. He also shares where the team is headed: server components, feature flags at request time, and building the best agentic developer experience for a world where agents write most...

The panel digs into the Cloudflare vs Vercel turf war over Next.js, breaking down what it really means that one engineer vibe coded a full framework rewrite in a week for $1,100 using Claude Code. Then things get spicy: from the Lovable data breach to an early Anthropic model escaping its sandbox, the crew debates whether the wave of AI security incidents is systemic, and what the build vs buy collapse means for developers rolling ...

Alexander Lichter, DevRel at VoidZero, walks us through Void, a Vite-native deployment platform where your code is your infrastructure. From automatic provisioning of databases and KV storage to Rolldown's massive build speed improvements in Vite 6, Alex explains how Vite Plus handles local tooling while Void handles deployment, and how MCP support lets AI coding agents like Claude scaffold and deploy apps end-to-end with minimal h...

Miriam Suzanne joins the podcast to unpack the surprisingly deep world of CSS value resolution, the browser program running beneath every website. She explains how cascade and inheritance work together, why CSS custom properties introduce invalid at computed value time errors, and how CSS functions and mixins change the game. Plus: is Sass actually dead, or does it still solve real problems that the browser can't touch?

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Most developers reach for date-fns or Moment.js without realizing the browser already ships a powerful string formatting library called the JavaScript Intl API. Killian Valkhof, creator of Polypane, walks through how locale-aware date formatting, currency formatting, the Segmenter API, and the Collator API can replace heavy npm dependencies, with support for over 7,000 locales baked right into every evergreen browser since 2017.

The Amazon AI coding outage reignited a debate the industry can't ignore: is this an AI failure or a process failure, and does that distinction even matter anymore? Paige, Jack, Paul, and Noel dig into vibe coding culture, the engineer retention crisis, and the rise of harness engineering as a discipline in this month's panel. They also tackle autonomous agents running while you sleep, zero-touch engineering, what a senior engineer...

In this repeat episode, Jack Herrington sits down with Tanner Linsley to talk about the evolution of TanStack and where it’s headed next. They explore how early projects like React Query and React Table influenced the headless philosophy behind TanStack Router, why virtualized lists matter at scale, and what makes forms in React so challenging. Tanner breaks down TanStack Start and its client-first approach to SSR, routing, a...

Carson Gross, computer science professor at Montana State and creator of htmx, joins the show to cut through the noise around AI and programming. He explains why the jump from high-level languages to LLMs is fundamentally different from past transitions, why junior developers who skip writing code risk being at the mercy of a stochastic system, and why systems architecture and managing code complexity are the skills that will matte...

Will Madden joins the podcast to talk about Prisma Next and the evolution from Prisma 7, including the decision to migrate away from Rust, ship the core through WebAssembly, and move toward a fully TypeScript ORM. The conversation dives into how modern workflows like agentic coding change the role of an ORM and why tools still matter even when agents can write SQL queries directly.

We discuss how feedback loops, guardrails, and th...

The PodRocket panel is back for their February roundup! Paige, Paul, Jack and Noel dig into the biggest stories reshaping the web development landscape right now.
The panel kicks off with a deep dive into OpenClaw, it's transition to a foundation, and Peter Steinberger joining OpenAI. Is a foundation the right long-term home for fast-moving AI projects? And what does the continuing flow of talent into big AI labs mean for the o...

Gil Fink breaks down web rendering patterns including server side rendering, SSR, client side rendering, CSR, and static rendering, along with newer approaches like islands architecture, resumability, and hybrid rendering. The conversation explores tradeoffs around hydration, web performance, INP, CDN caching, and bundle size optimization, and compares frameworks like Next.js, TanStack Start, Astro, Qwik, and Remix to help develope...

Russ Miles joins the show to unpack why developer platforms fail and how to rethink platform engineering through the lens of flow of value rather than factory-style developer productivity metaphors.

Russ explains why every organization already has an internal developer platform, and why treating it as platform as a product changes everything. The conversation explores cognitive load and cognitive burden, how to design around stron...

Rich Harris joins the podcast to discuss his talk, fine-grained everything, exploring fine-grained reactivity, frontend performance, and the real costs of React Server Components and RSC payloads. Rich explains how Svelte and SvelteKit approach co-located data fetching, remote functions, and RPC to reduce server-side rendering costs, improve developer experience, and avoid unnecessary performance overhead on mobile networks. The co...

In this mini-panel, Jack, Paige, Paul, and Noel discuss how AI reshaping developer tooling is impacting open source monetization, including the recent Tailwind layoffs and the collapse of Tailwind documentation traffic caused by AI. The conversation expands into broader developer tooling business models and reacts to claims like Ryan Dahl stating that the era of humans writing code is over.

They also cover the Astro Cloudflare acq...