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Hi there,
Welcome to Frontend to Fullstack Monthly #38! But before we get into the roundup, a special treat: we partnered with Anthropic on a free Claude Code course with Lydia Hallie. Now, on to your curated roundup of the most important news, releases, and learning resources from across the web for May, all chosen to be worth your time.
Industry News
GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing on June 1. Flat-rate plans are out, replaced by "GitHub AI Credits" at $0.01 each, charged per token. Some Copilot Pro+ users reported burning through a big chunk of their monthly credits in hours. Agentic workflows are the culprit: bigger context, faster meter. Worth reviewing your team's usage before the next cycle.
NVIDIA unveiled Nemotron 3 Ultra at Computex 2026. A 550B-parameter open-weights model (55B active, MoE) that now tops the US open-weights rankings. Available today on Hugging Face, OpenRouter, and NVIDIA NIM, running 300+ tokens/sec. China's Kimi K2.6 still leads globally.
Google I/O leaned hard into "the agentic web." Here are the 15 announcements that matter for developers, including the proposed WebMCP standard, automated DevTools debugging, the HTML-in-Canvas API, and a new Baseline Checker tool.
Chrome previewed Declarative Partial Updates. <template for> for JS-free templating, plus setHTML() and streamHTML() for safely streaming HTML into the DOM out of order.
The Shai-Hulud worm struck again. It pushed malicious TanStack versions to npm that spread to 170+ packages. It's all sorted on TanStack's end now (postmortem here). In response, npm and pnpm both shipped staged publishing, adding a mandatory review period before packages go live.
Two surveys to weigh in on. The State of CSS 2026 survey is open and slimmer this year, focusing on the features that matter most. And the 2026 State of Web Dev AI results are out now.
✨ Recent releases: WordPress 7.0, Safari 26.5, Firefox 151, Node.js 26.2.0, Deno 2.8, Storybook 10.4, Astro 6.3, Bun 1.3.14, pnpm 11.3, Electron 42, Tailwind CSS 4.3.
Tutorials and Articles
The TC39 ShadowRealm proposal would let you run JavaScript in an isolated 'pseudo-realm' with its own globals and intrinsics — handy for third-party code or anything you want to keep away from your global scope. Mat Marquis walks through how it works and why it matters.
Ahmad Shadeed explores how the now well-supported CSS round() function can create predictable fluid sizing, pairing with clamp() to produce cleaner type scales and more refined responsive layouts.
Nolan Lawson argues that LLMs aren't just for pumping out bad code quickly; they can help you write higher quality code more slowly. A thoughtful counterpoint to the "vibe coding" narrative, from a prolific JavaScript developer.
Some eight years after picking up Tailwind, Julia Evans migrated two of her sites back to semantic HTML and vanilla CSS and shared what she learned about structuring CSS along the way.
Josh Comeau takes a nuanced look at CSS vs. JavaScript for animation performance, walking through when each approach wins and the performance trade-offs involved.
New on Frontend Masters
Free: Claude Code with Lydia Hallie (Anthropic)
Customize Claude Code for your codebase. Build reusable skills tailored to your processes and wire up hooks so Claude behaves consistently across the whole team. Generate and ship higher-quality code!
Playwright: Automated Testing & AI Workflows with Steve Kinney
Catch broken UIs before they ship with Playwright! Build rock-solid verification loops that provide feedback to agentic coding tools and give you the confidence that your code is production-ready.
Complete Intro to Databases, v2 with Brian Holt
Get hands-on with relational, document, graph, key-value, and columnar databases. Gain foundational database skills, including schema design, query writing, performance optimization, and even AI-powered features with vector search and RAG. Confidently choose the right database for your next app!
AI Engineering Fundamentals with Scott Moss from Netflix
Discover the discipline of AI Engineering and build better AI features that get more accurate over time. Establish rigorous eval harnesses to improve AI agents through context engineering, advanced tool use, RAG, and reliable production feedback loops.
Blog Updates
Will the AI revolution in coding give birth to new job titles? Scott thinks so, and "AI Engineer" is one of them. It doesn't just mean "a developer who uses AI", either.
TanStack continues to gain popularity, and Adam keeps us informed. This time about TanStack Form. True to form, it has a unique take on things. And speaking of JavaScript on the server, Durgesh gets deep into Node.js streaming and the sneaky problems that can come up.
It probably shouldn't surprise you at this point, but there is some spanking-new CSS that's worth a look. Jane takes a serious look at @function in CSS noting a ton of "gotcha" moments worth knowing about, and don't miss the back-and-forth with Tab in the comments. If you didn't know :nth-child(2 of .class) was a thing, you probably should. Setting a background as a conic-gradient() isn't super new, but thinking of it as a way to make a repeating dots background is rather novel. Anchor positioning is a new concept, and it all happens with CSS property/values like position-anchor and anchor-name. But what if you want to establish and maintain those connections in HTML instead? We can now, thanks to an improved attr() function.
Focus styles are an important part of accessibility — never get rid of them. But it was fun to experiment with animating them from one position to another. Temani did a great job introducing the concept of infinite CSS animations and how to control them. Imagine a spinner that is infinitely spinning. That's not hard to do, but what if you want to increase the speed of it when you hover over it, gradually. Much tricker! This kind of polish on a frontend is what makes you a master ;)
Useful Projects
Google announced a new set of "evergreen and expert-vetted" AI skills dubbed Modern Web Guidance. It works with various popular coding agents and claims to help with best practices and patterns across accessibility, layouts, performance, UX and more. The repo is here, or you can give it a try via: npx modern-web-guidance@latest install.
Obs.js is a tiny inline script from Harry Roberts that reads browser signals (like latency, bandwidth, Data Saver, battery, CPU, and memory) and exposes them as CSS classes. Use them to serve smaller images on weak networks, skip animations on low battery, and adapt to real-world conditions without JavaScript overhead.
Anime.js 4.4 — the decade-old "animate anything from JavaScript" library continues to impress. This release adds a new scrambleText effect and an auto-grid layout mode for stagger grids. The docs remain genuinely top-tier.
NodeBook is a free online book by Ishtmeet Singh with eight in-depth chapters on Node internals — covering event loop internals, how V8 works, streams, module resolution, and async/await.
...and finally
Tearable UI is a web experiment that lets you rip, tear, and shred any webpage with your mouse — complete with impressive real-time cloth physics.
Have something we should feature next month? Reply and send it our way.
--
Marc Grabanski
CEO & UI Developer
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