The ultimate Gemini has survived

Today’s issue: No one mourns the package manager, abandoning Microslop, and surviving MIDI keyboard night at your friend’s house.

Welcome to #459.

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The ultimate Gemini has survived

Two days ago, we wrote about how Firefox decided to pump the brakes on its “modern AI browser” after getting a lot of pushback from its most loyal users.

24 hours later, Google did pretty much the exact opposite, announcing “a new era of browsing” that will officially put Gemini to work inside Chrome. Hooray.

And I know it’s tempting to give a knee-jerk take about how “no one asked for this,” but I also know that the great AI-ification isn’t slowing down anytime soon (particularly since it’s carrying the entire world economy on its back rn).

So instead, let’s try to objectively evaluate these new Chrome features based on how useful I think they’ll actually be in the wild:

1. A persistent Gemini side panel: The biggest change is that Gemini now lives in a Chrome sidebar that’s context-aware and can see/reason across your open tabs (all 112 of them). This seems pretty helpful for being able to ask Gemini questions about specific documentation pages, papers, or competing products without needing to copy-paste a bunch of stuff into a separate AI chat app.

Actual Usefulness Score: 7/10. Less context-switching is nice, and it’s not an invasion of privacy if you never had privacy in the first place.

2. Agentic auto-browsing: Chrome’s attempt to let the browser+AI perform multi-step tasks on your behalf, like filling out forms, navigating logins, buying stuff with your permission, and pulling research from multiple sites for a project. This is probably still a lot more sizzle than steak right now, but integrating Gemini directly into the browser (along with deep integrations for the most popular Google apps) gives this a much better chance of fulfilling this vision than the other vaporware demos we’ve seen in this space.

Actual Usefulness Score: 3/10. At least today, but there’s potential here.

3. Built-in Nano Banana: This lets you transform and alter images without needing to download/upload or open other tabs. You can just prompt the Gemini side panel to make any changes you want to any image. Helpful for violating basic human rights I mean destabilizing democracies by undermining public trust I mean, testing out fun design elements for your site.

Actual Usefulness Score: 5/10. For better or for worse.

Bottom Line: There’s no putting the great Chromini back in the bottle, but with any luck, some of this stuff might actually be useful. At least that’s what the “trying to be more optimistic in the new year” version of me wants to believe.

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Augment Code wants to fix your code reviews

Most AI code review tools follow the same flawed pattern: extract the diff → send it to an LLM → generate dozens of shallow, noisy comments.

That’s why Augment just launched a new code review tool with a different approach that:

• Prioritizes actual bugs and vulnerabilities, not style nits

• Lets teams define custom rules once, then enforces them everywhere

• Adapts over time, based on which comments your developers address vs. ignore

Their philosophy is, “if a comment won’t likely change a merge decision, we don’t post it.”

Read their announcement post for a deep dive on what that looks like.

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What gets logged to the console?

const res = ["👨", "‍", "👩", "‍", "👧", "‍", "👦"].join('')

console.log(res)

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1. I didn’t have it in me to write a 1,200-word think piece on Moltbook today, but luckily Simon Willison did.

2. Tamagui v2 RC just dropped with more color themes, new components, and performance + stability gains.

3. GitLab Transcend is a free virtual event on Feb 10th where GitLab engineers will give you a sneak peek at everything they’ve been working on in the world of DevOps, security, and AI. RSVP so you don’t miss out. [sponsored]

4. Andrew Nesbitt wrote about how package management is a wicked problem, which I think is a symbolic way of saying that it starts off strong, then goes completely off the rails with all the CGI animal scenes in Part 2.

5. Astro 5.17 comes with configurable dev toolbar placement, async parsing in the file() loader, and new ways to optimize your images.

6. The Clerk team just launched their Clerk MCP Server, which lets you ask Claude, Cursor, or Copilot to do stuff like, “create a waitlist flow for my Next.js app” and have it respond with accurate Clerk SDK snippets and best practices. [sponsored]

7. Bogdan Mihai wrote a long diatribe why he switched to Linux from Microslop. Just in time for the Chinese New Year …of the Linux desktop.

8. Mattheus Lima shared why he still writes code as an engineering manager. “Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?”

9. Convex lets you express every part of your backend in pure TypeScript. Your backend code lives next to your app code, is typechecked, autocompleted and is generated by AI with exceptional accuracy. It’s worth trying out. [sponsored]

10. Rspress released v2.0 of their Rspack-based static site generator. It’s now “AI-native” and comes with a new readability-first theme.

11. Brayden Wilmoth wrote on the Cloudflare blog about building vertical microfrontends on Cloudflare’s platform.

12. MIDI survivor is a game where you play a MIDI keyboard IRL to survive against a wave of monsters (see demo). Not to be confused with surviving the ritual of sitting in your friend’s guest room for 2 hours while they say, “ok, but can you hear how this synth patch is definitely totally different from the other 12 I already showed you?”

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What gets logged to the console?

const res = ["👨", "‍", "👩", "‍", "👧", "‍", "👦"].join('')

console.log(res) // 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

It’s the ”👨‍👩‍👧‍👦” emoji.

This works because the Unicode standard supports mapping individual emojis with zero-width joiners to create new emojis. In our case, taking individual emojis and joining them to get a family emoji. Wow, programming.