Share
Full Description
A new year, a new tactic to stem the flow of npm supply chain attacks. This time, the proposal is for “Staged Publishing” which introduces a review window that a package owner must approve before a package release becomes publicly available. Chime in if you think this would help or hurt the npm ecosystem more. Vercel Labs is out with a new AI tool called json-render that lets users generate dashboards, widgets, apps, and data visualizations from prompts, and is constrained only to components they define. So a user defines a catalog of components AI can use, prompts what they want, and AI generates JSON constrained to the catalog and renders it on screen. It’s a pretty slick idea! Finally, The Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum is the biggest thing in AI coding recently. Ralph is an AI development pattern using a while loop (like a bash script) to repeatedly run an AI agent on the same task, feeding its output back as context, and forcing it to iterate until a specific completion promise is met, rather than letting the AI stop prematurely. If nothing else, it’s an interesting technique to consider trying with agents. This week’s Lightning News celebrates Firefox 147 getting anchor positioning. Now all the major browsers support tethering elements like tooltips to anchor elements without JavaScript. Last but not least is the first Fire Starter of 2026, and it comes courtesy of friend of the show, Adam Argyle. The CSS @container scroll-state() function makes three states of a scroller queryable with just CSS: stuck, snapped, and scrollable, which unlocks lots of cool styling and other features we could only ever do before with the help of JavaScript. Another big win for pure CSS.