An AI-less Google I/O

Issue #394.May 22, 2025.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Today’s issue: The ergonomics of impetigo, Rust script kiddies, and the song Dan Abramov used to sing to me every night.

Welcome to #394.

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The Main Thing

AI generated sailor at sea

When the least creative person you know says that AI just killed Hollywood

An AI-less Google I/O

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a little piggy who likes to roll around in the AI slop as much as the next guy – but I think Google I/O broke me.

After about the 12th announcement of another groundbreaking, benchmark-shattering AI tool, my eyes started to glaze over and everything got blurry. I’m not an AI doomer by any means, but I’m just a little tired.

So for this year’s Google I/O issue, I’m staging my own little Butlerian Jihad and banishing all the thinking machines – at least for the next 200 words.

Here’s a quick speedrun of the most exciting non-AI web and mobile dev announcements from Sundar & Friends:

Two powerful new platform features.

  1. CSS Carousel primitives (like the new scroll-marker pseudo-element) let you build rich, interactive carousels – with no JavaScript
  2. The new Interest Invoker API can be paired with the Anchor Positioning and Popover APIs to create layered UI elements like tooltips and hover cards, also without JavaScript 🙏.

Material 3 Expressive. This latest evolution of Google’s Material 3 design system comes with new components, animations, and layout tools aimed at creating “emotionally impactful UX.” So make sure you have those tissues ready next time you see the YouTube like button pulse with quiet yearning.

Flutter 3.32. The Dart-based, cross-platform framework now comes with experimental hot reload support on the web, improved accessibility, and a batch of new components widgets that move more logic from the old Material library into the shiny new Widget library.

Bottom Line: Sure, all of these updates fit squarely into Google’s “everything is AI now” strategy. But if that’s the price we have to pay for native CSS carousels, I’ll take it.

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Our Friends
(With Benefits)

Simpsons character smiling painfully

My QA team after yet another bug slips into prod

How to get better QA with vertical integration

Here’s an industry secret: most outsourced QA services all license the same cookie-cutter devtools to write, run, and maintain tests.

But most of these tools aren’t optimized for QA, so they lack key features and don’t work together very well – which leads to gaps in test coverage, slower tests, and ultimately more bugs.

That’s why QA Wolf is hosting a free panel discussion on the Vertically Integrated Toolchain they built for their QA engineers.

They’ll let you peek under the hood at their AI-native web platform and check out all the integrated features they built for test creation, maintenance, execution, and measurement. It even covers the containerized environments they use to support unlimited parallel test runs at scale.

Check it out – and learn how the pros do QA.

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Cool Bits

  1. The Deno team created this Brief History of JavaScript in honor of this year’s 30th anniversary.

  2. TypeScript just shared a preview of the TypeScript compiler port to Go. It’s already producing a 10x speed up on most projects and Microsoft was so pleased that they decided to lay off some of the project’s most important contributors 😭.

  3. Letterbrace is a technical literature company that creates optimized technical content to help your team’s product show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and even old-timey search engines like Google. [sponsored]

  4. Roto is a new compiled scripting language for Rust. So who’re the script kiddies now?

  5. React Router has preview support for RSC.

  6. David Cramer (@zeeg) wrote this in-depth article on monitoring your MCP Server in production with Sentry. And to be honest, I have no idea what qualifies him to write this post, besides being Sentry’s co-founder and current CTO. [sponsored]

  7. Alex MacArthur wrote an article called I think the ergonomics of generators is growing on me. I thought I could feel it growing on me too, but my dermatologist told me that’s probably just the impetigo flaring up.

  8. svelte-sonner is an opinionated toast component for Svelte.

  9. RenderHooks lets you place hooks right next to the markup that needs them, without breaking the rules of hooks. And those rules are very important – which is why Dan Abramov used to sing to me every night, “Learn your rules, you better learn your rules. If you don’t, you’ll be eaten in your sleep.”