🪦 RIP SPAs?

Is Next.js overkill for simple sites? The dev world rethinks SPAs, JS everywhere, and whether AI is really making us faster.

Author

Journals GG
July 28, 2025

Hey there.

Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋 

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

Programming

👨‍💻 Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)
Frontier LLMs like Gemini 2.5 PRO are now powerful enough to digest thousands of lines of code in seconds, enabling developers to eliminate bugs early and rapidly prototype ideas via throwaway code. Antirez shares how he uses these models to review his Vector Sets implementation for Redis, clean up errors before release, and explore alternative approaches faster than ever. Despite their strengths, he still advocates for human judgment.

🔎 How Anthropic teams use Claude Code
Anthropic teams use Claude Code to debug, automate, and ship faster, from Kubernetes fixes to onboarding and repo exploration. Engineers write goals in CLAUDE.md and let Claude handle the rest across multiple agents. It’s agentic coding in production, and a rare look at how the team that built the tool actually uses it.

🔥 Fireship was bought by a major investing firm (video)
It recently came to the dev community’s attention that Fireship was quietly acquired by a private equity firm that also owns Veritasium and Simple History. Many viewers say the content had already changed, short videos packed with long ads, and a drop in depth. For some, the acquisition just confirmed why they’d lost interest.

Front-End

😂 How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy
Jim Nielsen shows how to intentionally make your life harder by building websites the slow way, install loads of npm packages, choose frameworks too early, and enforce compile steps that force endless rebuilds. It's a tongue-in-cheek playbook for programmers who want to waste time on complexity rather than write simple, effective sites. It’s a spree through dependency hell, and a comedic critique of modern frontend workflows.

🆕 The New React Compiler is coming soon
The React team has officially introduced the React Compiler, a build-time tool that automatically adds memoization to your components, no more useMemo or useCallback required. It's designed to follow the Rules of React and integrates cleanly with existing apps. While not stable yet, it’s available as a Release Candidate and expected to roll out more broadly soon, with support for React 17–19 and gradual, opt-in adoption.

👋 Leaving Next.js behind
Jean Tinland recently moved away from Next.js and Vercel for his personal website, opting instead for Hono, JSX, and a self-hosted static site on a small VPS. He wanted more simplicity, less JavaScript, and fewer dependencies, ditching complexity in favor of full control. The result is a lean, fast, minimal site that embraces HTML, CSS, and local build tools over bloated frontend stacks.

🧑‍🎨 It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA
Jono argues that modern browser features like native CSS page transitions and the View Transitions API now eliminate the main reason developers reach for single-page applications, smooth navigation, without heavy JavaScript bundles. Instead of loading megabytes of client-side code just to fake app-like feel, you can achieve seamless interactions using pure CSS and native browser behavior. His point: many marketing sites, blogs, and documentation portals still overuse SPAs when a much lighter HTML‑and‑CSS approach would offer better performance, reliability, and SEO.

AI

More Tools & Stories

Have a great week, see you the same time next week!

- Full Stack Focus team :)