966: A Look Back at Web Dev in 2025

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Wes and Scott review their 2025 web-dev predictions, finding strong accuracy on CSS advances, Temporal shipping progress, AI tooling improvements, and TanStack’s rise, while missing on Web Awesome, React changes, and fully mainstream AI browsers. They argue that tools and workflows improved more than raw model leaps, CSS is becoming more powerful and programming-like, and AI’s impact is most visible in coding assistants and local/edge capabilities rather than universally useful consumer features.

Main Topics: 2025 Prediction Review and Scorekeeping: The hosts revisit their annual forecast format, evaluating each prediction as a hit, miss, or partial win and framing the episode as a retrospective on web development trends. AI Tooling Improved More Than Models: They debate whether model quality plateaued, concluding that productized AI—agents, IDEs, browser tools, and coding workflows—improved significantly and changed how developers work. CSS Becomes More Powerful and Practical: The conversation highlights CSS relative color syntax, style queries, functions, mixins, and if-statements as evidence that CSS is becoming a more capable programming layer. Browser and Local AI Are Emerging, But Not Universal: They discuss on-device AI, WebGPU acceleration, OCR/speech features, and AI browsers, concluding adoption is real but uneven and often less useful than hyped. Frameworks, Editors, and Ecosystem Shifts: They assess predictions around React, Remix, SvelteKit, Bun, Vite, VS Code, and TanStack, noting some ecosystem movement but also several misses and ongoing fragmentation. Web Components and Standardization: They note that web components and standards-based UI are gaining traction, but adoption is slower than expected and product timelines like Web Awesome lagged. Practical Sick Picks and Everyday Utilities: The episode closes with personal recommendations: a Woozoo fan and a UV black light used for cleaning and finding small objects around the house.

Key Arguments: Temporal is effectively arriving across major browsers, validating the long-term push toward a better date/time API. On-device AI became more visible in browsers and libraries, but not ubiquitous enough to count as a full breakout. The biggest AI gains came from tools like Cursor, Copilot, and agent workflows rather than from dramatic model-only leaps. Video/image generation is technically impressive but often low-value or socially harmful, especially for trust and authenticity. CSS now has enough advanced primitives that teams can ship more plain CSS and rely less on preprocessors. Web standards are improving, but real-world adoption depends on browser support, legacy constraints, and developer habits. React’s ecosystem did not evolve cleanly: server components created complexity and a major security incident, while broad simplification did not materialize. TanStack’s ecosystem momentum is strong, and its AI SDK is positioned as a cross-language standardization effort.

Data Points: Temporal in Firefox: May 26 - Temporal API was added to Firefox during the year. Temporal in Chrome beta: December 3 - Temporal entered Chrome beta near the end of the year. Temporal in Chrome stable: January 7, 2026 - Predicted stable landing date mentioned during the review. Browser support for relative color syntax: Baseline 2024 / every browser for a full year - Used to support the claim that relative color syntax is safe and widely usable. Prediction accuracy: 87% - Wes estimates overall prediction accuracy at the end of the episode. AI coding trust improvement: Opus 4.5 - Used as the latest example of stronger raw input/output quality for code and reasoning. Speed improvement example: 6 times faster - WASM vs WebGPU example for Transformer.js alt-text generation. Web Awesome release version: 3.0 - Mentioned as a recent release, though the product still had not taken off broadly. Browser support for CSS style queries: Partial support / only Firefox at all - Correction made during the discussion when checking caniuse support. Vite major version: 8.0 beta 1 - Referenced as the version that will default to Rolldown. Prediction about AI browsers: OpenAI browser was described as slow and unusable - They judged the launch as a miss and poorly received.

Pivotal Quotes: "Did it flop or did it pop?" — Wes: Opening framing for the year-in-review prediction segment. "I love relative color syntax. This might be my MVP for the year." — Scott: Scott praising one of the year’s most successful CSS features. "I think we got a healthy 87% accuracy." — Wes: Final tally of how well their 2025 predictions performed.

Implications: The episode suggests web development is moving toward richer standards, stronger CSS, and more capable AI-assisted workflows, but adoption remains uneven. For listeners, the practical takeaway is to learn the emerging platform APIs now while staying skeptical of hype-heavy products.