AGI's economic implications and strategies to break the curse. Meanwhile junior developers face AI replacement, Bun cuts infrastructure costs by 22% in production tests, and standard web APIs aren't as open as you think.

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Welcome, Developers! đź‘‹

Today, we dive into AI's impact on the workforce from AGI threats to junior developer hiring, Bun's impressive production performance gains over Node.js, how observability vendors profit from data waste, and why many "standard" browser APIs aren't truly open web platform features but proprietary vendor services.

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đź”– The Reading Room

Articles we have hand-picked for you:

The Intelligence Curse

The imminent arrival of AGI threatens to make regular people economically irrelevant, breaking the modern social contract as powerful actors lose incentive to care about human workers. The two authors outline how automation will hollow out organizations from bottom to top, ending social mobility and concentrating power around non-human factors like capital and AI control. However, they propose a roadmap to break this curse through three strategies: averting AI catastrophes, diffusing AI to augment rather than replace humans, and democratizing institutions to maintain human relevance.

By Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine →

Experimenting with Bun: From Idea to Production in a Week

Tim Beeren took Bun from experiment to production in just four days at Bol, testing it against Node.js for React SSR workloads. The results were impressive: Bun delivered 23 requests per second versus Node's 16, reduced latency from 1100ms to 800ms, and cut memory usage in half (447 MiB vs 807 MiB). By optimizing Kubernetes configurations and leveraging Bun's 7-second startup times, the team achieved a 22% reduction in infrastructure costs while maintaining production stability.

By Tim Beeren →

The Question Your Observability Vendor Won't Answer

After a decade in observability, Tero's founder discovered that companies waste an average of 40% of their observability data while vendors ignore the problem. This willful blindness drives unnecessary costs, creates complexity, and drowns engineers in noise instead of insights. The solution requires vendors to help identify and eliminate waste rather than profit from it.

By Ben Johnson →

Junior Developers in the Age of AI

Companies are ditching entry-level engineers, claiming AI writes better code. But this misses a crucial point: coding isn't the same as engineering. While AI can generate code quickly and cheaply, it can't replace the institutional knowledge and system understanding that juniors develop into seniors. Companies prioritizing AI over junior hires are creating fragile organizations and failing an entire generation.

By Christine Miao →

Not All Browser APIs Are "Web" APIs 

Many "standard" web APIs we rely on aren't actually part of the open web platform. APIs like Geolocation, Speech Recognition, and Web Push have standardized interfaces but depend on proprietary vendor services. Chrome's geolocation uses Google's servers, speech recognition streams audio to cloud services, and push notifications route through vendor-specific infrastructure. This creates privacy concerns, portability issues, and competitive barriers for smaller browsers.

By Polyplane →

⏳ Back in Time

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đź”— The Link Lounge 

Unordered finds from around the web:

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đź§° The Toolbox

Tools and products we're excited about today:

better-sqlite3

better-sqlite3 is a fast and simple SQLite library for Node.js, offering full transaction support, synchronous API, high performance, and significant speed advantage over node-sqlite3.

Learn more →

json-render

json-render lets end users generate dashboards and UI from prompts while keeping AI output safely guardrailed to predefined components.

Learn more →

LogTape

LogTape is a zero-dependency logging library for JavaScript and TypeScript with universal runtime support across Deno, Node.js, Bun, browsers, and edge functions.

Learn more →

Waku

Waku is a minimal, lightweight React framework supporting React 19 features like server components and actions. It offers file-based routing, static and dynamic rendering, and flexible deployment options across multiple platforms including Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare Workers.

Learn more →

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1. Brizy - WordPress Offers Exceptional Design Flexibility


TL'DR: A clean, code-free drag-and-drop editor that makes building responsive pages fast, intuitive, and distraction-free—perfect for designers and developers who want flexibility without clutter.


2. Amelia - WordPress Booking Plugin for Appointments and Events


TL'DR: Smart, hands-off booking automation that manages appointments and events seamlessly—letting you focus on design and client experience rather than scheduling logistics. 


3. wpDataTables - User-friendly Table and Chart Creator


TL'DR: A visual, responsive data builder that handles even millions of rows smoothly—ideal for dashboards, dynamic product tables, and data-heavy interfaces without writing code.

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