Google I/O 2026 - The Good Parts

Today’s issue: Getting “AI mogged” by the Pope, a round of code golf, and the biggest minor release you’ve ever seen.

Welcome to #490.

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The Google I/O recap you didn’t ask for but definitely need:

Google made over 100 new product announcements at I/O last week. However, since the summary article is longer than a Cheesecake Factory menu and most of you have CTE from watching too many short-form videos, you probably missed the good stuff.

Fortunately for you, we’re back with our annual I/O recap. So without further ado, here are the 5 most interesting things they announced in no particular order.

1. Gemini 3.5: The latest frontier model from big G was announced (coming later this month), and 3.5 Flash was released to the public. It’s supposedly fast, cheap and pretty good at agent stuff. That being said, it got some rough early reviews from the peanut gallery.

2. WebMCP: Also announced was a new browser standard built on top of MCP that enables you to make your web pages easier for agents to use.

3. Managed Agents: With their API, you can now deploy custom agents that can browse the web, execute code in a secure sandbox, and do long-running tasks without needing to orchestrate any of the infrastructure.

4. Antigravity: Google released all the acronyms (IDE, SDK, and CLI) for Antigravity, their agent development platform.

5. Stitch: Even though the vibe-design tool is already a few months old, the Stitch team did some I/O-driven development and shipped support for streaming, in-place edits, and the ability to start with an existing design.

Bottom Line: If you were looking for AI abstinence 2 years in a row from our I/O recap, welp… better luck next year.

Also pro-tip: order the brown bread and fried mac & cheese balls next time you’re at CCF. Thank me later.

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function factorial(n) {
  if (n === 0 || n === 1) return 1;

  for (const i = n - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    n *= i;
  }

  return n;
}

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1. Deno just dropped 2.8, their “biggest minor release” ever. The last time I dealt with a minor release this big, the plunger failed me and I had to fish it out with nothing but a plastic bag and my bare hands.

2. Aurora Scharff tries to answer once and for all how to architect your React Server Components.

3. Only idiots write manual tests – modern engineering teams like Notion, Dropbox and LaunchDarkly use Meticulous to maintain e2e UI tests that cover every edge case of your web app. [sponsored]

4. Brenley Dueck gets you up to speed on all the new concepts in Solid 2.0.

5. Xuan Huang and the Lynx team just released Lynx UI, a headless component library designed to deliver “native performance” for web applications. The Dep. of Commerce is considering a ban because allegedly it’s a threat to React’s market share.

6. Christoph Nakazawa released Cloudsail, a remote development environment for your GitHub projects that comes fully loaded with codex, opencode and pi.

7. Abstract Conf is a conference about principled design that Convex is hosting in September. And it’s not just about SaaS, it’s about passionate builders of physical products, games, education, and other disciplines. Check it out. [sponsored]

8. Our friend Dominik Dorfmeister created a guide on how to use TanStack Router and Query together.

9. GeoHot argues that agents will end up hurting large organizations. It’s not too dissimilar from hiring George as an intern to rewrite your search algorithm.

10. Yusuke Wada played a round of code golf and managed to create a tiny router for Cloudflare Workers and Deno that’s under 400 bytes.

11. Sergiy Dybskiy walked through how to set up observability for Next.js and Supabase apps, addressing things like N+1 queries, instrumentation for edge functions, auto fixing errors with Sentry Seer, and setting up workflows for agentic self-healing using Sentry and Supabase MCP Servers. [sponsored]

12. The Pope (yes, his holiness) wrote a manifesto encyclical letter about AI. I haven’t read it yet but I heard he “AI mogs” JD Vance.

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function factorial(n) {
  if (n === 0 || n === 1) return 1;

  for (const i = n - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    n *= i;
  }

  return n;
}

For loops work by assigning a value to the variable for each iteration, but variables defined with const can’t be reassigned. Instead, we should use let to define our variable.

function factorial(n) {
  if (n === 0 || n === 1) return 1;

  for (let i = n - 1; i >= 1; i--) {
    n *= i;
  }

  return n;
}