Hey guys,
Welcome to another edition of Import React by Cosden Solutions!
This week the community could not stop arguing, and honestly the fights were great. r/webdev has 595 people asking whether beautiful websites are even allowed to be unusable. The creator of Zig wrote a very pointed goodbye to Bun leaving for Rust, and the internet thinks it backfired on him. And in the middle of it all, someone quietly dropped an animated component library you can start stealing from today. Plus TypeScript 7, npm 12, and the highest-paying dev job one engineer ever had (he was never actually needed). Let's get into it.
⚡️ The Latest In React
⚛️ Beautiful Three.js "scroll me" sites are unusable — and always will be
That's the claim that set r/webdev on fire this week: 595 upvotes and a small army showing up to disagree. The thread splits fast — one camp defends these as portfolio pieces cosplaying as products (judging them on UX is like judging a concept car on fuel economy), while the other goes straight for Apple's jugular. But the single most-upvoted reply doesn't argue at all. It describes, in one sentence, what a scroll-jacked site actually is — and it's the most quietly devastating line you'll read all week.
🦀 The creator of Zig wrote his "thoughts" on Bun leaving for Rust — and it may have backfired
Bun was Zig's highest-profile project and biggest backer, so when Bun (now owned by Anthropic) rewrote itself in Rust — reportedly ~$165k of AI tokens to pull off — Zig's creator Andrew Kelley published a response that reads, to a lot of people, as one long "skill issue." r/programming lit up: 380 up, 281 down, and the top comment quietly guts the whole "the code was just bad" argument. Because if a near-straight port to Rust made the bugs disappear… what does that say about the language he's defending? His defenders have a real answer, and both sides are worth your time.
📈 A 40-step map of everything that makes React slow
reactperf.dev is a free, single-sitting guide: 40 steps across 11 sections, walking from extra re-renders → effect problems → giant lists → bundle size → layout thrash, in an order that builds on itself. No fluff, no signup — just the checklist you wish you'd had the last time a profiler flare-up ate your afternoon. The kind of link you bookmark and send to the junior on your team.
🧩 A new animated-component library you own outright
GodUI is an open-source set of motion-first React components — TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Motion — shipped as a shadcn registry, so components copy straight into your project and you own every line (same flow as shadcn/ui; just add the @godui registry). The fastest way to judge it is to open the live gallery and start clicking things. It's early and small, so treat it as a discovery — but the animations are genuinely fun to poke at.
⚙️ They built the same app twice — Kotlin Multiplatform vs React Native
The Software Mansion team shipped an identical app in KMP and in React Native, then wrote up where each one actually won: the shared-code ceiling, native-module friction, performance, DX, and the parts nobody warns you about. If you've been side-eyeing KMP from the RN side (or the reverse), it's the honest head-to-head you rarely get.
🤝 A quick word from this week's sponsor, and a fitting one. If that $165k AI-token bill in the Bun story up top made you wince, the cause is usually the exact thing Unblocked is built to fix: agents that don't have enough context on your codebase, so they guess, miss, and you pay to prompt again.
Their free webinar just below, 8 levels of context maturity in AI-native engineering, is a genuinely useful hour if you ship with an agent in the loop: a clear framework for why your agent keeps handing back code that doesn't fit, and how the strongest teams fix it. 👇
[Webinar] 8 levels of context maturity in AI-native engineering
You pay for every token your agent burns. When it returns code that doesn't fit your system, you prompt again. And again. This is because your agents are still missing the right context. Join live (FREE) on Jul 23 to see how leading teams use a context engine to fix it.
Quick Links
📖 The highest-paying dev job one dev ever had — and he was never needed — a six-figure offer, a day-one "handoff" from a recruiter who wanders off mid-handshake, a week of full-Kafka mode in an empty office, and the reveal that he was hired purely as a pawn in a war between a clueless President and an IT team that refused to rebuild the app in WordPress. He eventually just starts working from home; it takes a month for anyone to notice. A genuinely funny read.
⌨️ TypeScript 7.0 is out — the Go port landed, so expect big build-time and editor speedups. Don't rush, though: 7.0 ships with no programmatic API yet (MDX/Svelte/Vue/Astro stay on 6.0), and 6.0 is still a fine stepping stone.
📦 npm 12 turns install scripts off by default — lifecycle scripts and implicit node-gyp builds no longer run automatically. A real supply-chain win, and a thing that will quietly break some installs.
🔐 Better Auth is joining Vercel — the framework-agnostic auth library stays open source; the team's next focus is auth for AI agents (secure, revocable access on a user's behalf).
🐛 Why Drizzle couldn't publish to npm for a month — a little-known npm limit blocks publishing once a package's metadata file passes 100 MB, which is what happens when you push endless snapshot builds. A great "the thing that quietly broke and why."
💥 "This CVE shouldn't have been a CVE" — Matteo Collina's candid post-mortem on an HTTP/1.1 fix that broke node-fetch, Firebase, and the official Docker images, and why he thinks it was mis-triaged.
🧠 AI & General Programming
🤖 GPT-5.6 and Grok 4.5 landed a day apart
OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 to everyone, a day after xAI put out Grok 4.5 (link) — pitched as an "Opus-level" model and aimed at coding agents. If you missed our read last week, Grok's real story is cheap and fast, not smartest-in-the-room. Worth a look at both before you re-pick your daily driver.
🧰 Vercel's AI SDK 7 is out
The big adds: better reasoning controls, tool and runtime context, file & skill uploads, MCP Apps, a terminal UI, tool approvals, and durable workflows. If you build anything agentic on top of the SDK, this is the changelog to actually read.
📧 Kick off an AI agent with an email
David Wells wires up a flow where sending an email triggers an agent to go do the work — a clean pattern for async, human-in-the-loop automation you can actually picture using.
🗺️ Explore a codebase like a map
James Long (Prettier, Actual) built a custom visual tour of the OpenCode codebase and published the interactive walkthrough. Click through it for the idea alone — it's a genuinely new way to onboard someone to a big repo.
See you next week,
Darius Cosden