Today’s issue: OpenAI goblin mode, email-based data viz crimes, and Chalamet’s npm-themed PR stunt.

Welcome to #483.

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Zed’s not dead

After five years and more than 1,000 releases, Zed finally hit the 1.0 milestone earlier this week.

If you haven’t heard about it before, Zed is a Rust-based code editor made by the creators of Atom and Electron that’s built for performance and collaboration.

While it’s a bit ironic that their biggest competitors are built on top of the cross-platform framework they created and rejected, the Zed team felt like building on top of a browser engine put a ceiling on what type of experiences they could build. So instead, they spent the last few years building a foundation that more closely resembles a video game architecture than a web platform. The question is, was it worth it?

Let’s try to answer that by taking a closer look at what makes Zed unique:

• Performance Focused: Did I mention Zed is built in Rust btw? Well it also uses an in-house UI framework they made called GPUI, which makes editing across buffers extremely fast and responsive.

• AI Native: Zed supports running multiple agents in parallel without choking, and seamlessly integrates with tools like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode via their Agent Client Protocol (ACP). Garry Tan has (probably) already used it to write 250,000 lines of code in the time I’ve been writing this sentence.

• Collaborative Foundation: In addition to building a custom UI framework, the Zed team also built a CRDT based sync engine called DeltaDB that gives granular, “operation level” version control. This makes it possible to roll back something as small as a character insertion rather than a whole “commit.”

Bottom Line: Was it worth it for Zed to spend time building everything from scratch like this, given the fact that Cursor is reportedly, allegedly, maybe getting bought by SpaceX for $60 billion? Well maybe not financially, but it does open faster.

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Ship AI generated code safely with Meticulous.

Claude writes your code. Claude reviews your code. Claude fixes the review comments. And somehow, you’re the one getting paged at 2am when it breaks in prod.

Fortunately, top AI-driven teams like Dropbox, Notion, LaunchDarkly and Wiz rely on Meticulous to run 1000s of e2e UI tests autonomously, covering every user flow, edge case, role and permutation. Built by ex-Palantir engineers, Meticulous gives you near-exhaustive coverage in weeks, without any developer effort.

It works like magic in the background:

• Near-exhaustive coverage on every test run
• No test creation
• No maintenance (seriously)
• Zero flakes (built on a deterministic browser)

Check it out, and see why one engineering leader at Dropbox said that “once we started using Meticulous, we couldn’t imagine working without it.”

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const qualifiesForFreeShipping = (product, rule) => {
  const threshold = (rule && rule.minSpendCents) || 5000;
  return product.priceCents >= threshold;
};

const result = qualifiesForFreeShipping(
  { id: "p1", priceCents: 1000 },
  {
    productId: "p1",
    minSpendCents: 0,
  },
);

---

1. OpenAI wrote a retrospective on going goblin mode since releasing GPT-5.1. My little brother could’ve written a similar retrospective after he lost his ADHD meds at boy scout camp in 2002, but I think he’s still blacked that all out of his memory. The rest of us were not so lucky.

2. Resend added a fancy chart component to their editor empowering you to commit data visualization crimes via email.

3. Automate production fixes straight from your monitoring dashboards using Datadog App Builder. [sponsored]

4. Cursor shipped a new TypeScript SDK that lets you invoke its coding agents programmatically from CI pipelines, backend services, or your own product. Very nice, but Elon still wants you to print out all the lines of code you wrote this week.

5. Aiden Bai released spawn-agent, another open source project that helps you spawn agents using TypeScript. If my math is correct, he only needs like 12 more projects to make it an even million.

6. Trigger.dev is a developer platform for building resilient AI agents and workflows that scale elastically without timeout issues. Its custom MCP server and built-in observability streamline debugging and code generation in tools like Cursor and Claude. [sponsored]

7. Alchemy got Effect-pilled and made a type-safe IAC framework for building cloud applications.

8. The Remix team just dropped the Remix 3 beta preview. I’m not sure if they’re still in the “picking fights with strangers who disagree with us on Twitter” phase of marketing, but there’s only one way to find out.

9. Railway lets you deploy any app in a few clicks (or prompts). Just connect your repo, and it reads your code to automatically set up the right config for your project – or let your agents handle it using the Railway CLI. [sponsored]

10. Kyle Matthews thinks you’re building your agents wrong. Joke’s on him though, because my agents are actually the ones who build my agents.

11. The Astro team just shipped Astro 6.20 with an SVG optimizer and an experimental new logger.

12. The npm package for Intercom was compromised by yet another Shai-Hulud Worm Attack. And if this is another guerrilla marketing stunt by Timothee Chalamet for Dune 3, I’m going to be very upset.

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The logical OR operator treats zero as falsy, so when minSpendCents is explicitly 0, it falls back to the default of 5000. The result is that a rule that should grant free shipping silently rejects it. The fix is to use the nullish coalescing operator, which only falls back when the value is actually absent (null or undefined).

const qualifiesForFreeShipping = (product, rule) => {
  const threshold = rule?.minSpendCents ?? 5000;
  return product.priceCents >= threshold;
};

const result = qualifiesForFreeShipping(
  { id: "p1", priceCents: 1000 },
  {
    productId: "p1",
    minSpendCents: 0,
  },
);