What's next for Nx

Today’s issue: Getting invited to a polycule, wrestling with Jevons paradox, and trying to fill the Nikola Jokic sized hole in your heart.

Welcome to #498.

---

What’s next for Nx

If a guy comes up to you at a conference and asks you if you want to see pictures of his pigs, you say yes. Before you get creeped out that someone is slanging swine pics, it’s because this person is Jeff Cross, and you’re probably also about to hear the gospel of monorepos.

In our case, we’ve known Jeff and Victor since back in the Angular days (an admission that we’re all old af), but them boys still got it. This week their team at Nx launched a brand-new product called Polygraph, and we’re here to break it down.

What is Polygraph:

If you are building an AI-native product, you are probably going to use a monorepo so your agent has context for the entire codebase. But most organizations and companies that have been around for a while have their code split up across repositories with different teams that own various services, and in the age of AI, this creates challenges. As a developer, the goal for your agents is that they can work autonomously, but if they can’t access all of the relevant code or lose session context, you’re back in the driver’s seat. Enter Polygraph.

Polygraph is a meta-harness — working with the agents your team is already using, but adding the components they need to actually be effective. It uses a dependency graph to connect all of your organization’s repos into a sort of synthetic monorepo where agents can read, write, and grep as if they were all in the same file system. This environment allows agents to work without interruption and complete more ambitious tasks.

Here’s how it works:

• Dependency Graph: After connecting all of your private and public repos, Polygraph creates a graph of all your dependencies and how your codebase fits together (poly + graph).
• Agent Harness: Then the platform provides this context to your agent, along with everything you’d expect from an agent harness. This enables your agent to read and write to many different repos as if they were all in a monorepo.
• Session Memory: Polygraph records every session by every developer in your org, building a detailed picture of how all the work fits together. Any task can be resumed or referenced by any developer, on any machine, with no context lost.

Bottom Line: Nx seems to have solved the repo boundary and agent amnesia issues many teams are facing. And if we weren’t open-minded about pigs, you probably never would have known.

---

Put your end-to-end tests on autopilot with QA Wolf

As an engineer, the only thing worse than not having good end-to-end tests is having tests that are out of date. When this happens, your team can lose confidence and everything slows down.

Fortunately, with QA Wolf, as your team ships new features, the mapping agent scans your app, identifies all the workflows, and adds or refines your end-to-end tests to catch bugs and prevent regressions.

Here’s how it works:

1. Prompt the agent to map your app.
2. A detailed map of your workflows and roles is generated.
3. As you add features, QA Wolf identifies where to add or refine tests.
4. With your tests always up to date, you can ship with confidence.

Try it out for free.

---

1. Astro just released version 7.0.0 which features an upgrade to Vite 8, a shiny new Rust compiler, and full access to the request pipeline. It’s basically everything I wanted for my 7th birthday.

2. Speaking of Vite 8, the team just released version 8.1 which has “full bundle mode” (now called “experimental bundled dev mode”). If watching Tropic Thunder taught me anything, you never go full bundle mode.

3. Learn how Datadog’s Digital Experience Monitoring suite can help teams troubleshoot frontend issues, collaborate more efficiently, and deliver a strong user experience. [sponsored]

4. Our resident Defense Against the Dark Arts professor, Una Kravets, wrote about how to do modern CSS theming with light-dark(), contrast-color(), and style-queries.

5. Armin Ronacher wrote about his mixed results using /loop and how it’s probably the future whether we like it or not. As someone who watched a rogue useEffect take down Cloudflare’s API, all I can say is “good luck with that”.

6. The ast-grep team added support for outlining, which lets agents inspect the contents of a file without having to read the whole thing. This will probably save you a bunch of tokens, but also… Jevons paradox.

7. Trigger.dev unifies your queues, crons, and scheduled tasks into a single managed TypeScript platform, complete with built-in observability and real-time streaming straight to your UI. Deploy your first task today. [sponsored]

8. Victor Savkin wrote a post reflecting on why React won the front-end framework wars and what they can teach us about building agent harnesses.

9. Aiden Bai just shipped cnfast, an alternative to tailwind-merge, clsx, and classnames that’s up to 7x faster.

10. David East shipped a “side project” called inbrowser-agent that lets you run a full AI stack (including inference) in the browser. It seems like he might be trying to fill a Nikola Jokic sized hole in his heart.

11. Kevin Van Cott wrote about how they reduced TanStack Table’s memory footprint by 90% for large tables in version 9.

12. After years of monorepomy, the team at Nx is embracing the polyrepo lifestyle. All repos are now invited to join the polycule Polygraph.