Next.js 15.5 goes back to school

Today’s issue: Anime catgirls come for Linux, discovering the secrets of a billion-dollar makeover app, and Svelte’s connection to Swedish Reddit.

Welcome to #418.

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Next.js 15.5 goes back to school

Back-to-school week was always a pivotal time to establish your place in the social hierarchy – you had to decide which friends to keep/dump from last year, which cliques to infiltrate, and which bathroom stall to eat lunch in alone when it all goes up in flames.

So it’s fitting that Next.js chose this week to release v15.5, which doesn’t come with a laundry list of hot new features but does give us a transitional update that’s designed to prep everyone for Next 16.

On one side, they’re kicking some old friends to the curb by deprecating next lint, AMP support, and legacyBehavior for next/link. But they also introduced three notable improvements:

• Turbopack builds are finally beta – It now powers all of Vercel’s websites and promises 2-5x faster production builds than Webpack by spreading the work across every CPU core throughout all phases of the build.

• Stable Node.js middleware – Next.js middleware isn’t stuck on just the Edge Runtime anymore, which means you can now use any npm package or Node API without hacky workarounds. This also allows middleware to handle more complex use cases without complicating the DX.

• Fully typed routes – Invalid <Link>s now break at compile time instead of in production. Route exports and props get automatic typing, and the new next typegen command lets you bake type safety into the CI.

Bottom Line: Turbopack, middleware, and typed routes are the cool kids now, and everyone’s gonna be fighting to sit at their lunch table when Next.js 16 drops later this year.

And if anyone asks, I do have a real-life girlfriend – she just goes to another school.

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1. Tavis Ormandy wrote an article asking Why are anime catgirls blocking my access to the Linux kernel? If I had a question for every time I asked myself that question, I might be able to finally pay off my AI therapist bills.

2. Clerk just launched prebuilt iOS components like AuthView and UserButton that make it super easy to add authentication flows to your iOS app. [sponsored]

3. vlt added scoped version, pack, and publish commands — which is huge news for the monorepo apologists who walk among us every day like normal people.

4. Nadia Makarevich wrote a deep dive answer to the question, Can we use local storage instead of Context/Redux/Zustand in React? I mean, technically, you can do whatever you want.

5. The WebKit team wrote about rolling the dice with CSS random(). Because the financialization of everything means that even our layouts need to give us a way to gamble.

6. CarbonQA provides high-quality QA services for dev teams, so you’ll never have to test your own app again. Their US-based testers work in your tools, talk with your team on Slack, and let your devs be devs. [sponsored]

7. Expo SDK 54 beta just dropped with a bunch of new features, including iOS 26 Liquid Glass icons, which will be perfect for the new Mr. Freeze makeover app I’m building.

8. Loren Stewart wrote about hx-optimistic, their new HTMX extension for optimistic updates.

9. Svedit is a tiny library for building rich content editors with Svelte – not the name of the Swedish version of Reddit (which is just pictures of beautiful people sitting in minimalist furniture eating meatballs while enjoying their high-quality free healthcare).

10. jyn wrote this article about the core of Rust, but I was upset to learn that there’s a disturbing lack of anime catgirls gatekeeping PRs.