GitHub triples down on AI

Today’s issue: Blaming WebSockets for questionable life choices, discovering what a SPA is, and escaping data hell.

Welcome to #339.

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GitHub triples down on AI

It’s that time of year when the leaves are changing, the pumpkin spice is flowing, and the conferences are conferencing ✨.

But despite the dozens of keynotes, live demos, and thinly veiled marketing pitches, last week’s GitHub Universe is still generating a lot of buzz on Twitter, Bluesky, and the comment section of the NY Times cooking app (my personal fave).

That’s because GitHub Copilot used the conference to announce a bunch of game-changing new features that should help it evolve beyond the “fancy autocomplete” stage – and start fulfilling entire tasks across the whole GitHub platform.

Let’s check out the highlights:

• Multi-file editing in VS Code – Copilot’s AI is now able to analyze and understand entire codebases and make changes to multiple files based on your prompts.

• AI-assisted code reviews – Copilot can now comment on pull requests, suggest code changes, and even make updates to your code based on feedback. And if it can learn to drunk-argue with junior developers about semicolons at the team BBQ, my manager will be officially obsolete.

• Choose your fighter model – Whether you’re a Claude Sonnet stan or an OpenAI o1 truther, you can now choose your own model for Copilot chat and toggle between them.

• GitHub Spark – A new natural-language based toolchain and managed runtime environment for creating and deploying “micro apps.” It’s similar to other NL-based platforms like bolt.new and v0, but a lot more… micro?

Bottom Line: Even though it feels like a decade ago, it’s only been a couple years since GitHub Copilot first blew our minds with “T9 Word for developers.” The AI-assisted devtool space space has heated up a lot since then – but GitHub Copilot clearly isn’t going anywhere.

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function sumArgs() {
  let sum = 0;

  arguments.forEach((arg) => {
    sum += arg;
  });

  return sum;
}

const result = sumArgs(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

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1. Jake Lazaroff dared to answer the one burning question all the pundits are asking after this election – What’s a Single Page App?

2. Oso is hosting a free deep dive on How Google handles Authorization at scale. You’ll learn how Google built its own relationship-based authorization system called Zanzibar, plus the key tradeoffs of building a system like this for your own application vs. using an Authorization as a Service like Oso. [sponsored]

3. Sunil Pai just released a new project called Shwarma, which he described as “a little evening spike.” But the last time he said that about one of his projects we ended up with a CSS-in-JS epidemic, so I’d approach with caution.

4. Nuxt just added support for rspack in v3.14, and Rust stans stay winning.

5. Sarah Guthals wrote this in-depth guide to debugging microservices and distributed systems for the Sentry blog. It explores why we’ve seen a shift from monolithic architectures to microservices, why it’s harder to debug microsystems, and how to do it better. [sponsored]

6. Ben Grant wrote a 2-part article on the Bun blog about how Bun supports V8 APIs without using the V8 engine.

7. Nikhil Suresh wrote a plea for help fun article called, Get me out of data hell. I’m pretty sure I saw Nate Silver wearing a t-shirt that said the exact same thing last week.

8. A Map of Sync shares what Sujay Jayakar learned from 10+ years of working on sync at Dropbox plus his current work to extend Convex’s sync engine for better offline support. [sponsored]

9. React Navigation 7.0 comes with a new static API that simplifies configuration and makes it easier to work with TypeScript and deep linking.

10. Elliot Levin wrote about how WebSockets cost his team $1m on their AWS bill. For the record, I would also like to blame WebSockets for the ~$1m bill I just racked up taking my family to Disneyland this week.

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In JavaScript, arguments is not an array, it is an “array-like object” 😅. Because it’s an iterable, you can use a for loop to iterate over it, but if you want to use array methods like forEach, you need to convert it to an array first. There are a few different ways to do this.

function sumArgs() {
  let sum = 0;

  for (let i = 0; i < arguments.length; i++) {
    sum += arguments[i];
  }

  return sum;
}

const result = sumArgs(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

Or you can use the rest operator to get the arguments as an array:

function sumArgs(...args) {
  let sum = 0;

  args.forEach((arg) => {
    sum += arg;
  });

  return sum;
}

const result = sumArgs(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);

Or you can use Array.from to convert the arguments to an array:

function sumArgs() {
  let sum = 0;

  Array.from(arguments).forEach((arg) => {
    sum += arg;
  });

  return sum;
}

const result = sumArgs(1, 2, 3, 4, 5);