Welcome, Developers! đź‘‹
Today: Chrome's DevRel team wraps 22 CSS features that shipped in 2025, Google's frustrating API access compared to competitors and an AI experiment giving complete freedom to Claude Code.
Plus, what's new in Django 6.0 and why a company ditched preprocessors for vanilla CSS with modern features like container queries and :has() selectors. | | |
From our sponsor: Semrush | | |
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đź”– The Reading Room
Articles we have hand-picked for you: | | |
CSS Wrapped 2025: Year in Review
As 2025 nears its end, Chrome's DevRel team recaps 22 CSS and UI features that shipped in 2025, including customizable select elements, scroll-state queries, and CSS custom functions. These improvements allow more functionality without relying on JavaScript.
By Chrome Developer Relations → | |
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration
Gemini has been impressive in developer circles since the release of 2.5 Pro but compared to Anthropic and OpenAI, Google has easily the worst platform to access an API. Google has pushed all its services under one platform which is probably great for the enterprise sector but a frustrating experience as a solo user.
By Bharat Kalluri → | |
The highest quality codebase
Greg ran Claude Code 200 times with instructions to "improve codebase quality," transforming a 20k-line app into an 84k-line monstrosity. The AI invented unnecessary utilities, implemented Rust-style Result types in TypeScript, added circuit breakers for a simple OpenAI API call, and grew tests from 700 to 5,369 while forgetting the crucial end-to-end tests that actually validated functionality.
By Greg Pstrucha → | |
Django: what’s new in 6.0
Django 6.0 introduces template partials, eliminating repetitive code by letting developers define reusable fragments within templates using {% partialdef %} tags. Perfect for htmx integration, partials can be rendered in isolation by appending #partial_name to template names, maintaining locality of behavior and reducing template file sprawl without requiring separate include files.
By Adam Johnson → | |
Vanilla CSS is all you need
Modern CSS now includes native variables, nesting, container queries, :has() parent selection, and color-mix(), eliminating the need for preprocessors. Using CSS features like OKLCH colors, container queries, :has() selectors, and CSS Layers, 37signals proved vanilla CSS is powerful enough for real-time chat, publishing platforms, and project management tools with sophisticated UI requirements.
By Rob Zolkos → | | |
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đź”— The Link Lounge Unordered finds from around the web:
Find something cool? You can send us links to feature here via email. | | | | | |
🧰 The Toolbox
Tools and products we're excited about today: | | | |
Devstral 2 and Mistral Vibe CLI.
Mistral AI launched Devstral 2 (123B) and Devstral Small 2 (24B), their state-of-the-art open-source coding models achieving 72.2% on SWE-bench Verified while being significantly more cost-efficient than competitors. They also introduced Mistral Vibe CLI, an autonomous terminal coding agent that enables end-to-end code automation across entire codebases.
Learn more → | |
Sonda
Sonda is a universal bundle analyzer and visualizer that generates interactive HTML reports showing accurate module sizes after tree-shaking and minification by analyzing source maps. It supports most major bundlers plus frameworks. Learn more → | |
ts-exec
ts-exec is a lightweight JIT compiler for running TypeScript and JavaScript in Node.js without compilation, built on SWC. It prioritizes Node.js module resolution compatibility, ensuring development code runs identically after compilation, unlike alternatives like tsx that permit extension-less imports which fail in production.
Learn more → | |
walrus Walrus is a fast, distributed message streaming platform that automatically balances workload across nodes, uses Raft for reliable coordination, and handles failures gracefully.
Learn more → | | | |
Win Every Search with Semrush One AI search is exploding, and if you’re not optimizing for LLMs, you’re already falling behind.
Semrush One lets you track brand mentions across search and AI assistants, spot new traffic opportunities and fix what’s holding your site back.
Use it to create stronger content, win more visibility and turn that visibility into real traffic and sales, fast! Try It Free → |
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