2025 is a strange time to start a newsletter about web technology. The past four editions of WTN have focused on the intersection of the web and AI, because frankly that's where most of the excitement is on today's internet. But as a few people I link to this week point out, the web platform has improved to a point that it now does much of what frontend frameworks do. So why isn't there as much exciting activity to report on regarding the web platform? The problem, I think, is that web platform improvements are being undermined by AI development trends. I see two main issues:

1. The leading large language models, like GPT-5, are defaulting to React and Next.js when asked to create web apps or sites. That entrenches the power that React has on the web development ecosystem, which means web platform improvements aren't being utilised by AI. Which leads to point #2...
2. I've heard both Vercel and Netlify (two of the leading web developer platforms) say in recent weeks that their user bases are massively increasing. Why? Because of vibe coders. The definition of a "developer" has expanded to include people who rely on prompting rather than programming. But the problem is that vibe coders get React solutions instead of web-native ones. What's happening is that vibe coders ask their magic lamps to build an app or agent, and the AI genie gives them a React app.

As Alex Russell noted when I tooted about the massive increase in vibe coding "developers" on Vercel and Netlify's platforms: "It's hard to think of this as anything but terrible news for users." I agree, and replied that it's analogous to what's happening to web content — AI slop is drowning out human-created content. None of this is good for the Web: worse content, worse code, worse Web.

So what can we, the web technology community, do to promote web platform features over React code? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Teach vibe coders to explicitly prompt for web-native solutions (“use vanilla JS”, “no React”, “use HTML/CSS APIs”).
2. Find a way to get the LLMs to (dare I say it) ingest more web platform code — one way is to build open datasets of framework-free web code, and invite AI models to use that.
3. Spotlight teams or projects that ship modern web experiences without heavy frameworks — proving that the native platform is indeed ready. (This is definitely something WTN can help with, so please hit me up on Mastodon, Bluesky or LinkedIn if you know of such projects.)

Ok, time to surf around the webtech-osphere. Let's start with some of the people who inspired this week's WTN theme...

Web Platform

🌎 John Allsopp has a thoughtful post on how frontend frameworks (especially React) have become too much of a constraint on innovation, given the big improvements on the underlying web platform in recent years. Like me, John is more energized by AI Engineering than frontend these days. I would just note that web technology is a key part of AI development, so I am energized by that. But I do agree that framework fatigue is a real thing. John writes:

"But what aren’t we building? What new kinds of experiences, what new kinds of applications, what new kinds of interaction could we create if we were deeply exploring and engaging with the capabilities of the platform? I don’t know, because we’re not building them. We’re building what the frameworks enable us to build, what the assembly line can produce efficiently."

🌎 Jeremy Keith has a similar take, and further suggests that frameworks are often slow to adopt new web platform features:

"These days, client-side JavaScript frameworks don’t abstract away the underlying platform, they instead try to be an alternative. In fact, if you attempt to use web platform features, your JavaScript framework will often get in the way. You have to wait until your framework of choice supports a feature like view transitions before you get to use it.

This is nuts. Developers are choosing to use tools that actively get in the way of the web platform."

🌎 Jeremy links to a Jim Nielsen post on the same topic, that specifically mentions @view-transition:

"Browser makers have teams of people who, day-in and day-out, are spending lots of time developing and optimizing new their offerings.

So if you leverage what they offer you, that gives you an advantage because you don’t have to build it yourself."

🌎 Meanwhile, here's an unexpected use of slick web technologies... Apple has recreated the App Store on the Web! Although as MacStories points out, there is currently no way to download or buy apps on the web version.

As an aside, for a brief time you could view the source code of the web App Store, which revealed the site was made with Svelte. However, that GitHub repository was then disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice (via Reddit).

AI x Web

🤖 This week Microsoft Research launched an open source simulation environment for AI agents, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, who manages the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Before the interview, I must admit I wasn’t sure why Microsoft would be releasing a simulated marketplace instead of the real thing. But Kamar convinced me that it’s not only sensible to fully test how agents collaborate before a public marketplace goes live, but it’s actually dangerous not to run the simulations first!

🤖 Dennis Crowley, who founded Foursquare during Web 2.0, has a new startup called Hopscotch Labs. It's released BeeBot, "an app for AirPods" that combines AI, audio, and location-based social features; it's iPhone-only and US-only currently. (via Techmeme)

🤖 Vercel on what it's learned building agents: "The highest likelihood of success for current-generation agentic AI comes from work that requires low cognitive load and high repetition from humans."

Open Social

🦣 Mastodon 4.5 has been released, featuring quote posts, a solution to missing replies, and native emoji support. There's also an updated roadmap.

🦋 Bluesky reaches 40 million users (note: there was no indication of how many are active).

🦋 Laurens Hof gives "an overview of the current state of blogging on atproto, and how it gives insight on what decentralisation on atproto actually looks like in practice". He mentions several blogging tools on AT Protocol, but Leaflet (where he wrote this post) is definitely the most interesting:

"Leaflet has quickly become the most popular blogging platform on atproto, and it is actively seeing further development. Leaflet is a block-based editor, that does not use markdown. Leaflet is now also starting to move towards the social side of blogging, with its own comment section (that exists outside of Bluesky), a reader feed that shows all recently published Leaflet posts, and a discovery page for finding other Leaflets."

🦣 Bonfire Social 1.0 has been released; it's a community-focused network on the fediverse. The group says:

"It's time to go beyond microblogging and build apps for community organising, open science, mutual aid, and collective decision‑making. Let's take back the internet with open protocols, consent‑based governance, and portability by design."

🦣 🦋 Bridgy Fed has rolled out two new features: DM to block multiple users at once and ATProto block list subscriptions.

One More Thing

🎈 BBC reports that 'vibe coding' has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. While it's easy to scoff at this, someone on Bluesky pointed to this 1988 comment about HyperCard, the classic Apple dev tool:

"The beauty of HyperCard is that it lets people program without having to learn how to write code — what I call "programming for the rest of us"."

Perhaps we're all developers after all! Although, I will always prefer the devs who can actually code.

Thanks for reading Web Technology News (WTN), your weekly briefing on the Web’s future: infrastructure, open networks, and AI. If you liked what you read today, please consider sharing the newsletter on your favorite social media platform.

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Until next week, keep on blogging!