Friday Issue No. 160
This week leans very much into “modern stack meets modern constraints”. VoidZero officially joins Cloudflare, folding Vite, Vitest, Rolldown and Oxc into a single AI era tooling story, TanStack shows how far you can push both TypeScript performance and AI workflows, and npm v12 prepares to lock down installs with stricter defaults that will change how you ship Node apps. There is also a fresh “React libraries for 2026” guide, a Vue plus Tailwind-powered approach to email templates and a sobering LinkedIn backdoor story to round off the JavaScript side.
On the HTML and CSS front, functions arrive with plenty of gotchas, heading levels get a new context-aware tool in the form of a headingoffset attribute, and there is a handy reminder that HTML-first sites are often still the right tool for the job. Visual treats include decorative gap fillers for flex and grid layouts, sticky notes you almost want to peel off the screen, and a NoLoJS collection of components that prove how far you can go without sprinkling yet more JavaScript. Mixed news wraps things up with a reflection on how “code is cheap” until humans have to understand it, a shared vocabulary for designers and developers, and Nicholas C Zakas dissecting GitHub Copilot’s new pricing model.
JavaScript News
VoidZero is joining Cloudflare
The title really does cover the headline, but Evan You’s post fills in the details of what it means for Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc and the wider VoidZero toolchain to move under Cloudflare’s umbrella.
https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare
TanStack AI: your MCP, your way
A neat look at how TanStack is leaning into the Model Context Protocol and building tooling around it so you can wire up your own AI workflows instead of being locked into a single vendor.
https://tanstack.com/blog/your-mcp-your-way
TanStack table v9 performance
Super interesting deep dive into how the TanStack team tracked down TypeScript performance issues in Table v9 using tsc diagnostics and carefully reworked their types. They managed to cut type instantiations by more than half across packages, which is a nice reminder that “just types” can still hurt your build times if you are not paying attention.
https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-table-v9-typescript-performance
Building emails with Vue and TailwindCSS
Last time I worked on email templates, I was still using Grunt as a build tool, so it has been a while, and I have happily avoided it since. However, maybe it is less painful today? I doubt it; otherwise, we won’t have another framework for that. It combines Vue-style templating with Tailwind and a focused build pipeline, so maybe it is a less painful process now.
React Libraries for 2026
Freshly updated list from Robin Wieruch with a solid set of React libraries to lean on in 2026.
https://www.robinwieruch.de/react-libraries/
Breaking changes for npm v12
GitHub’s post on npm v12 walks through a set of security focused breaking changes that will ship around July 2026. Scripts from dependencies, Git based installs and remote tarball URLs are all moving from “allowed by default” to “explicit opt-in”.
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-09-upcoming-breaking-changes-for-npm-v12/
A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer
A bit of a scary story for a Friday, but the one we should keep in mind. As the author says: “a bit of paranoia and good security hygiene never hurts.”
https://roman.pt/posts/linkedin-backdoor/
A sane AI workflow
Not sure if sane at all, but I wrote down a few patterns I have noticed while working with AI tools day-to-day. Maybe this is outdated already, maybe you have better ideas to share.
https://shvarcs.com/thoughts/a-sane-ai-coding-workflow
HTML & CSS News
CSS functions
It would be suspiciously straightforward if functions in CSS behaved like normal functions everywhere else, so, of course, they come with a bunch of gotchas. This post walks through what works today, what works in slightly weird ways, and why imperfect functions are still better than copy-pasting the same values all over your stylesheets.
https://frontendmasters.com/blog/the-fundamentals-and-dev-experience-of-css-function/
HTML-first site
A great reminder that who we are building for and what they actually need should guide our tech stack choices. The post makes a strong case for HTML-first approaches, especially when a simpler architecture is enough and extra JavaScript only adds friction.
https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
Context-aware headings in HTML
This is an interesting one, even if it feels a bit confusing at first glance. Instead of hard-coding heading levels everywhere, the new headingoffset attribute lets the document context influence those levels, and the post walks through how to use it in practice.
https://www.matuzo.at/blog/2026/content-aware-headings
Decorating those gaps
Another nice post with a great explanation of how to add fillers between flex and grid items in a modern way and avoid all those :before and :after tricks.
https://utilitybend.com/blog/css-is-filling-the-gaps-with-rules-a-way-to-style-gaps-in-grid-and-flex
NoLoJs
A very handy collection of basic (and not so basic) UI components that we often reach for JavaScript to implement, but that can be built with HTML and CSS or just a tiny bit of script.
https://aarontgrogg.github.io/NoLoJS/
Sticky notes with CSS
Nicely done sticky notes that almost make you want to drag them around the screen. I especially liked the approach of setting a custom property directly from HTML or JavaScript, for example:
1 | |
https://codepen.io/editor/HejChristian/pen/019ead35-f1cf-7353-b299-f88e5e408247
Mixed News
Code is Cheap(er)
The author argues that AI has made it incredibly cheap to generate large amounts of code, which shifts the real bottleneck to understanding and maintaining that code over time.
https://htmx.org/essays/code-is-cheap/
Vocabulary between Designer and Developer
To be fair, for front-end devs, most of the terms on this page will feel familiar, but it's still worth skimming the page and maybe sharing it with new teammates to get on the same page faster.
https://index.how/to/articulate
GitHub Copilot’s pricing gamble
Nicholas C Zakas takes a careful look at GitHub Copilot’s new pricing model and what it means for both individual developers and teams. It is less a rant and more a structured argument about sustainability, expectations, and who actually bears the cost of AI assistants in everyday work.
https://humanwhocodes.com/blog/2026/06/github-copilot-pricing-gamble/