Grading our 2025 predictions

Today’s issue: CSS Christmas hymns, a new way to pay for data center lawsuits, and the fine line between onboarding and torture.

Welcome to #449.

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Grading our 2025 predictions

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – when newsletter writers, YouTubers, and people who unironically refer to themselves as “thought leaders” start sharing their predictions for the upcoming year.

But only a precious few are shameless courageous enough to publicly review last year’s predictions and confront those freezing cold takes in the light of day.

But hey, you can’t spell “accountability” without “Bytes” – so let’s dive in.

Prediction #1: SPAs will make a comeback.

Grade: B-. We definitely saw some developers give up on the complexity of SSR-first frameworks and return to the simplicity of SPAs with tools like Vite and Solid.js. But it didn’t really make a dent in the ubiquity of React – which somehow grew its npm downloads and its CVEs by 3x this year.

Prediction #2: 2025 will be the year of the Singularity TanStack.

Grade: A. TanStack Query continued to dominate, TanStack Router downloads jumped another 7x, and TanStack Start feels like the last great hope against the full Next-ification of web dev. The team also launched a headless form library, a client-first store, an AI SDK, and a unified devtools panel. The Great Stackening is upon us.

Prediction #3: We all get sick of paying for serverless and start moving off it.

Grade: D. Lots of developers complained about serverless prices, but very few actually followed DHH’s example and pulled the ripcord. And with the rise of vibe coding, one-click deploy platforms, and the general tokenization of everything, you could argue that developers are willing to spend more money than ever to write and host software – even if they complain about it.

Prediction #4: React Router will bring RSC to the masses.

Grade: C-. Framework Mode in RR v7 did make RSC more approachable (in theory), but it didn’t exactly “bring it to the masses” – since the vast majority of RSC connoisseurs are still using Next.js.

Prediction #5: Every VC-backed OSS company will magically become an AI company.

Grade: A+. Not only did every tech startup pivot to becoming some sort of LLM wrapper, every public tech company desperately tried to prove that they were building the most exciting AI play of the year – lest they have their market cap cut in half. I guess that’s why Doordash just launched Zesty yesterday, “an AI social app for discovering new restaurants.” I wish I was making that up.

Prediction #6: Everyone learns about DOM components.

Grade: F. I choose to blame this one on my intern, who may or may not be real.

Prediction #7: TypeScript will get even bigger.

Grade: A. Not exactly our boldest prediction, but we’ll take what we can get at this point. TypeScript overtook Python and JavaScript to become the most used language on GitHub in 2025, which was “the most significant language shift in more than a decade.” Every major frontend framework and coding LLM now scaffolds with TypeScript by default, and platforms like Convex let you write your entire backend in TS now too. I knew the Type nerds would get the last laugh.

Prediction #8: Netlify will acquire Astro.

Grade: D+. Ok fine, we were wrong about Netlify’s M&A plans for the third year in a row – but I refuse to take another F, because they did become Astro’s official hosting partner and their largest corporate sponsor. So I’m still holding out hope that this marriage will eventually happen. Nastro 2026.

Bottom Line: Overall, I think we deserve a B- for accuracy, an A for delusion, and a “see me after school” for classroom behavior. Look out for fresh 2026 predictions in January.

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Sometimes you need to remove a key/value from an object. Using the power of JavaScript™ (and ES6’s rest operator), you can accomplish that with something like this.

const user = {
  name: 'Tyler',
  age: 30,
  date: 1765989526349,
  funny: true
}

const { funny, ...updatedUser } = user

console.log(updatedUser) // {name: "Tyler", age: 30, date: 1765989526349}

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1. Microsoft announced a JavaScript/TypeScript Modernizer for VS Code that analyzes your project, automatically updates your npm packages to their latest versions, and recommends other code changes that can help you cut down on technical debt. It’s basically Queer Eye for your musty old JavaScript codebase.

2. Google open-sourced its new Google Sans Flex font, and I’m 60% sure Marco Rubio has already tried to ban it.

3. CodeRabbit reads your CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, and Copilot-instructions files, and it uses them to enforce code quality in every PR review – so your comments line up with the rules you have already written. [sponsored]

4. Joone Jur and Patrick Brosset wrote a proposal for making complex web apps faster on the Windows blog. Don’t worry, they don’t mention Web Components anywhere. I double checked.

5. Culi wrote about how JSDoc *is* TypeScript.

6. Lazar Nikolov wrote on the Sentry blog about how to get sub-100ms load times using the Speculation Rules API – which lets the browser prefetch the pages users are about to click. [sponsored]

7. Greg Pstrucha spent his Thanksgiving weekend torturing Claude to create the highest quality codebase. But what some called “torture,” my first manager called “onboarding.”

8. Just when you thought the world was running out of ways to make itself more expensive, GitHub plans to start charging for self-hosted Action runners in March 2026. Gotta pay for those data center lawsuits somehow.

9. Terence Eden is once again asking AI web scrapers to stop crawling his HTML.

10. Rocket is pioneering Vibe Solutioning, turning prompts or Figma designs into production-ready web and mobile apps. Use / and @ commands to execute tasks with precision and context, making repetitive workflows fast, accurate, and effortless. [sponsored]

11. Ali Ben wrote about how Go is portable, until it isn’t.

12. Mike McCourt wrote an article called In Praise of HTML and CSS. If anyone knows how to play the organ, I’m trying to convert this into a church hymn in time for Christmas.