WebDev Weekly - Issue 66
DHH gave a keynote with shockingly little Rails in it, and Jared Norman's piece on what that says about where Rails sits now opens this issue. Elsewhere the industry split neatly in two: one half building guardrails for coding agents (JetBrains Air, José Valim on what agent-written code means for language design, a ten-point field guide to slop UIs), the other half just enjoying the platform, with Chris Coyier scattering elements along borders using random() and GitHub getting faster by shipping more CSS, not less. Lofi Cities closes us out: pixel-art city nights with music composed live in your browser.
Articles
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What About Rails?
jardo.dev
DHH's opening keynote had shockingly little to say about Rails. Jared Norman's take on where Rails sits in 2026's framework discourse.
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Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
github.blog
GitHub's engineering team makes the counterintuitive case that shipping more CSS (dropping in-JS styling for plain stylesheets)
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How Cloudflare addressed a cross-tenant data exposure vulnerability in Containers
blog.cloudflare.com
An honest post-mortem of residual-disk-data leakage between container tenants
Tools
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Is my migration safe?
safenotsafe.dev
A quick reference that answers whether a given Postgres migration locks your table; handy for every full-stack dev
Tutorials
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Randomly Place an Element Along Edge of Another Element
blog.master.dev
We can animate an element along the border edge of another element to random positions... pretty easily? Might as well be a cute dog.
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Show keystrokes on a website with the `<show-keystrokes>` custom element
bram.us
Bramus ships a zero-dependency custom element that visualizes keystrokes/shortcuts
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Memoize Tagged Cache Reads in Laravel
laravel-news.com
A practical explainer for Laravel 13.33's
Cache::memo()->tags(). Easier to digest than the release notes -
Beyond the Circle: Building a Custom-Shaped Cursor Trail with Three.js and TSL
tympanus.net
Learn how to swap the usual radial cursor-trail blob for fully customizable brush shapes with Three.js, WebGPU, and TSL.
AI
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JetBrains Air: Building a System of Products for Agentic Software Development
blog.jetbrains.com
JetBrains' "most significant step in 26 years": an open system for directing and governing multi-vendor coding agents
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Evolving programming languages in the AI era
dashbit.co
José Valim on what agent-written code means for language design, ergonomics and communities; substantive, not a hot take.
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10 tells of a slop ui
hereticpleb.vercel.app
AI agents produce slop when not restricted. Here are 10 things to watch out for
Releases
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Lofi Cities · Pixel-art city nights with endless lofi music
loficities.com
A little browser app to finish us off. Pixel-art city nights with lofi composed live in the browser (not a playlist)