Hey friends,

My daughter recently declared herself a 'Carbivore', which should absolutely be a new dietary order classification. 🍞👍

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

With the year already well underway, it's never too late to make some hot 2026 predictions!

CSS is the new darling

There are so many features dropping in CSS. We recently got scroll-based animations, layers, popovers, but there's still so much still coming:

• Styleable select elements (finally!)
• Invoker Commands
• Native scroll buttons for things like carousels. (Even if you hate carousels!)
• Scroll state queries
• Tree counting groups for natively staggered animations.
• And so much more!

Many of the solutions that used to require special handling will now be built into the web, making interactivity more accessible and performant. Maybe Vanilla CSS will be all we need soon!

Frameworks will matter less

Just like how CSS is pumping out new features, the web platform is getting more native APIs, like the Temporal API, geolocation, deferring module evaluation, and others.

With a stronger base layer, frameworks will need to do less on their own and align more with the platform itself. We see this already in Angular's recent updates (using ES modules and native attribute bindings), in over-the-wire approaches like HTMX and Hotwire, and it is kinda Remix's whole jam.

To me, this means that with a strong understanding of the platform, what you add on top will become increasingly less of a hurdle to learn and implement.

The Sloppification will result in at least one major security breach.

Last year we saw vibe coding's meteoric rise and the flood of AI Slop invading the internet. This year, I think we'll see some of the fruits of that rise do very well, but then have some major security breaches.

Coding is easy, but security is hard, and people are already noticing vulnerabilities being accidentally introduced.

Developers aren't going away

Despite the industry trying to get rid of developers every decade or so, we will survive like cockroaches because thinking is hard—and that's ultimately what every knowledge worker does. The problems will be different, the solutions will be different, but the ability to thread the needle of an expansive problem space will remain as a pro-tier feature of the occupants of meatspace (I also love that there's an official definition of that word!).

Analog escapes

This one is more cultural, but I think we'll also see folks get tired of wading through the slop and looking for refuges where the Cult of AI cannot follow — analog media and specialty purpose devices. People are rediscovering the joys of CDs, the additive properties of landlines, and there's a growing sect of teenage luddites.

I think we'll see stronger oppositional voices emerge to the 'digitize everything' and the power-divesting users of agentic AI as the next generations hopefully learn from watching the effects that an 'always connected' life has had on people and our culture.

Interesting Web Bits 🍿

Web Stuff

• Ham Vocke talks about the experience of building home-cooked apps.
• Bearnie is a component library for Astro and Tailwind (which is a pretty nice stack, if I do say so myself).
• How an emoji issue led to 1600ms layout slowdowns.
• Shaders are Deep Magic, and this halftone shader exploration from Maxine Heckel is no different.

Other Stuff

• The art of roads in games.
• A remarkable look at some of the mechanics of pinball boards.

Weird, Watch, and Play

• 📺 Did you hear of the new Olympic sport, marmot wrestling?
• 📺 What do you do in -47°F weather? Build a two-story igloo, of course.
• 📺 I know that you know that you were dying to learn how to make choux pastry.
• 🎮 If you haven't played with Sandboxels before, it has a new home on neal.fun.
• 🎮 Speaking of pinball, the Cult of Pin is a rouge-like pinball game.