JavaScript Every Month

Web in March 2026

Apr 6, 2026Originally sent via Buttondown

Hello April 👋

Spring is here and AI updates don't stop coming!

March began with the Pentagon choosing which AI models would make its decisions. Anthropic refused to strip safeguards from its models, citing ethical concerns over government actions. OpenAI stepped in and reaped the rewards after Anthropic was deemed a supply-chain risk. Anthropic appealed, and the court has temporarily stayed the order.

Where things stand with the Department of War - Anthropic Blog
Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War - Anthropic Blog
Sam Altman's statement on signing agreement with Department of War.
OpenAI Vs. Anthropic: How the Pentagon Picked Its Partner - Hard Fork podcast
The Composio tweet on the situation

https://x.com/composio/status/2027543451588493529

Claude didn't just plan an attack on Mexico's government. It executed one for a month — across four domains your security stack can't see - VentureBeat

Fresh on summer here 🫠 but it's been raining CSEs and supply chain attacks:

Meanwhile, we lost an AWS region me-central-1 due to the ongoing war - Get your data out now, says AWS on ME-CENTRAL-1 - The Stack

Releases

Browsers

Chrome 146

scroll position triggered animations
meta name="text-scale"overriding browser font scaling
multiple custom element definitions for a single tag name exist within a page with scoped custom element registry
Sanitizer API offers a way to remove content that might execute script from arbitrary, user-supplied HTML content

Firefox 149

popover global attribute now supports the hint value. Popovers with the hint value will not close auto popovers when they are displayed, but will close other hint popovers
font-family: math is supported and auto applied to <math>
<container-query> part of the @container at-rule condition is now optional. This allows matching against containers based solely on their names
HTMLSelectElement.showPicker() method is now supported for a list of options defined in a <datalist>
HTMLMediaElement.captureStream() is supported

Safari 26.4

scroll driven animations support
Added support for an automatic initial value for grid-auto-flow in CSS Grid Level 3 to switch flow orientation based on grid-template-rows and grid-template-columns for grid lane layouts
Added support for using the min(), max(), and clamp() math functions in the sizes attribute of <img> elements
keyboard lock API
readable byte stream
iterator sequencing

IDE

Claude has Computer Use capabilities on the desktop app. Also launched Remote Control - ability to control claude code agents from your phone. They have also launched channels which you can sync with apps like Telegram. Basically CC getting the claws.
Air is the new Desktop from Jetbrains that can coordinate sessions between Claude Code, Codex, Junie etc.
OpenRouter will default to Exacto endpoints for tool calling requests.
Claude code has /btw mode where you can answer questions without interrupting progress.
Jetbrains makes JavaScript, TypeScript features free for use on their IDEA
Cursor has a new agents interface named Glass which kinda looks like all the other interfaces.
Google Stitch got a major update with voice support, faster prototypes, variants and AI native canvas (whatever that means). There is also a TypeScript SDK so you can use Stitch programmatically.
Codex releases plugins - bundle skills, MCP servers and Apps.
Zed has a new Zeta2 edit prediction model that they build from ground up.

Node.js Security Releases

All currently supported versions of Node.js have received security updates to address various CVEs: 25.x, 24.x, 22.x, 20.x

Update your tool-versions now.

Node.js has announced that they are moving from two versions a year to just one. Every release will be LTS: Evolving the Node.js Release Schedule

Inertia 3

@𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚒𝚊𝚓𝚜/𝚟𝚒𝚝𝚎 plugin to handle page resolution, code splitting and SSR setup automatically
Built in optimistic updates
useHttp hook for plain HTTP requests with reactive state.

Laravel team has released a benchmark for which model is best for working on the framework

Vite 8

Switch to Rolldown by default
Integrated Vite devtools
Built in support for tsconfig paths
15MB larger than Vite 7 (Why?)

Void is the newly launched Vite hosting platform built on Cloudflare.

Astro 6

Experimental Rust compiler
astro dev can run on runtimes like Bun, Cloudflare workers
Built in fonts API
live content collections

Strong quick follow up with Astro 6.1

Expo UI in SDK 55

Jetpack Compose and Swift UI directly in your React Native app

VideoJS 10 Beta

Teams of Plyr, Vidstack, and Media Chrome combine to rewrite Video.js ground up to one video package.

Bun 1.3.11

4 MB smaller on Linux x64
Built in cron job API
Bun.sliceAnsi — ANSI & grapheme-aware string slicing

TypeScript 6.0

Alignment with 7.0, flag stableOrdering for matching behaviour with 7.0
Less Context-Sensitivity on this-less Functions
Subpath Imports Starting with #/
Types for temporal proposal

shadcn cli v4

shadcn/skills
presets: pack design system into a short code
shadcn init has templates for Next.js, Vite, Laravel, React Router, Astro and TanStack Start
fonts as registry types

Next 16.2

400% faster next dev startup
50% faster RSC rendering time
Attach the Node.js debugger to your production server with --inspect
create-next-app ships with an AGENTS.md file
browser log forwarding
next-browser as a wrapper on the browser skill to debug a running Next.js application

Redwood SDK v1

Another framework based on primitives on Cloudflare.

GeaJS

A new JavaScript framework has arrived, packed with features.

npmx

Quick fresh npm registry browser.

Stripe Projects

Initialize third party projects through Stripe CLI plugin.

11ty → Build Awesome

11ty, acquired by Font Awesome gets rebranded to Build Awesome. It's live on Kickstarter.

Dynamic Worker isolates - Cloudflare

Instatiate a worker with specific code and sandbox from another worker. Used in Cloudflare's MCP codemod.

In the Spotlight 🔦

Cheng Lou released a text measurement library that spawned a dawn of dancing text demos on the Internet.

https://github.com/chenglou/pretext

Instead of relying on the DOM to measure text, pretext measures the font size (and more) and stores it in the cache, making every subsequent change to the text size instant.

You should see these to believe it:

https://x.com/EsotericCofe/status/2038076140661932273

https://x.com/birdabo/status/2038219452337074677

Tutorials

Designing delightful frontends with GPT-5.4

OpenAI’s tips for polished, production-ready front-end layouts that rise above generic templates. Spotlight native image reasoning and computer-use verification with Playwright, plus a dedicated "Frontend Skill" that enforces premium design rules like edge-to-edge compositions and purposeful motion.

To be read alongside:

Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity - Dropbox Tech

As code output grows, keeping CI, linting, and sandbox cloning fast and efficient is critical. Dropbox found its repo had ballooned to 87 GB 🫨, then teamed up with GitHub to shrink it. Their blog explains how they did it and the steps they took.

How VS Code Builds with AI - VS Code

The Visual Studio Code team (Microsoft) on how the use of AI has changed how and what they ship. Their release cadence has gone from monthly to weekly updates to Twitter posts for Insiders. Mostly non-technical, but some useful tips there to maximise your meeting time.

Small Programming Tricks - Will Keleher

This short and useful collection of programming snippets offers at least one idea you can adopt or adapt for your own post.

Source Maps: Shipping Features Through Standards - Bloomberg Tech

We use source maps, sometimes shipping them; sometimes the ship springs a leak (IYKYK). This is the story of how bundlers and browsers implemented source maps without following a standard, relying only on procedures created by different companies. It continues with the new task group and the future of source maps.

Post-React Compiler React Coding Guide (For AI Agents)

I wonder if this is the new trend in town: Skills written up as blog posts. This one's for optimising for React compiler, I did not know there were so many steps to use the compiler.

In short

Celerbate 20 years of AWS with the story of S3
In a puzzling move, Meta has acquired Moltbook, the AI-driven social network that went viral for fake posts.
NVIDIA launched their version of OpenClaw - Nemoclaw and the promotional material has Jensen's likeness (?!)
Google allows you to change your email address while keeping the older one for login.
React Compiler Rust edition is coming soon. Soon to SWC and OXC toolchains.
Anthropic migrated Claude desktop app from Next.js to Tanstack Router and Vite and note that prompts show up 50% sooner.
Anthropic released their own agent review with an insane price tag attached to it.
Cloudflare - the company building bot protection launches an endpoint to crawl a website with single link
Tanstack improves their SSR throughput by 55x
OpenAI acquires Astral. Anthropic owns Bun, OpenAI owns uv.
ARC AGI 3 Benchmark - Frontier model scores 0.26%
Solid JS 2 Beta - The Suspense is Over

In Other News

Project Hail Mary

Amaze Amaze Amaze!

A beautiful fun movie, worth the experience on an IMAX

Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Your work should not be measured by lines of code or the millions of AI tokens you burned. This seems obvious, yet we default to this metric because the alternatives are complex. Mario, creator of Pi reasons on why we should slow down and think about our creations.

How is Google not done mapping the world yet?? - MorningBrew - YouTube

This fun watch follows the Google Maps team as they cross Bosnia and Herzegovina to capture street views. The video explores the high-tech puzzle of mapping, its tools, and its ethical implications.

MWC 2026 Recap: CNET

Leica Leitzphone by Xiaomi camera samples look amazing, merging more camera into a phone body. Honor Robot phone, despite its clickbaity name, has a built-in gimbal. Xiaomi, being Xiaomi, launched a car at the tech event.

AI updates

GPT 5.4, mini, nano - The 5.4, it's smaller sleeker variants
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite - Google's take on what if we had a confusing model situation lighter than Flash but better than Gemma.
Docs, sheets all got the Gemini update, but the one that impressed me is Google Maps update
GLM 5 Turbo GLM 5 but faster and the next iteration in GLM 5.1
Minimax 2.7
Xiaomi Mimo V2 Pro | Omni | TTS - These were stealth models under Healer codenames.
Lyria 3 - Google's audio generation model with longer tracks
Gemini 3.1 Flash live - Lower latency, more natural live model.
Gemini Embedding 2 - Native multimodal embedding
Veo 3.1 Lite - Cost effective video generation model.
Unsloth has released a web UI for local AI - Unsloth Studio
Qwen 3.5 Small and Qwen 3.5 Omni
Composer 2 a fine turned model from Cursor team fine tuned on Kimi K2.5

Looking Ahead

SmashingConf Amsterdam - April 13-16
CityJS London - 15-17 April