Hello friends!
Welcome to this week’s Sloth Bytes. I hope you had a great week.
Benchmark Your Voice AI
Deepgram surveyed 400 senior leaders on voice AI to map adoption, budgets, and use cases. Compare your voice AI roadmap to $100M+ enterprises and learn where to invest next - human-like agents for customer service, task automation, and order capture - plus benchmarks to guide your 2026 plan.
Homebrew 5.0 - Parallel downloads and will drop Intel Mac support in 2026
Homebrew is a package Manager for macOS (or Linux) and version 5.0 has been released with new features and announcements:
Enables concurrent downloads by default (faster installs yippee!)
Adds official Linux ARM64 support
Sets timelines old macOS versions
Intel Macs move to Tier 3 (no longer supported) in September 2026
Homebrew won't run on Big Sur Intel at all by 2027
A bunch of quality-of-life improvements like
brew bundlefor Go packages andbrew info --sizes.
Why it matters: If you're still on an Intel Mac, the clock is ticking… In less than two years, you'll stop getting new Homebrew packages.
The move to parallel downloads is of course a nice speed boost for everyone, and promoting Linux ARM to Tier 1 shows Homebrew is finally treating ARM as a first-class platform.
React Email 5 - Major upgrades for emails
Wow another 5.0 update…
React email is an open source tool for writing emails in React, TypeScript and Tailwind with 932k weekly downloads.
Proper dark mode support (tested across major email clients),
Upgrades to Tailwind 4 for simpler styling
Upload templates to Resend so non-technical teammates can edit emails in a visual editor
8 new email components that you can copy and paste to build beautiful emails.
Now supports React 19.2 and Next.js 16
Hopefully beehiiv upgrades to this, so we can finally have a dark mode version of the newsletter…
Why it matters: Styling an email is way different compared to websites. This update is a gift to everyone who has to code emails.
OpenAI releases GPT-5.1 — a "warmer" model that's basically the same thing.
The main upgrades? It can follow instructions even better (wow…)
Seriously though, this model is
Supposedly “warmer by default and more conversational”
Can adjust its thinking time based on question difficulty
Letting you pick from preset personality modes like "Quirky" or "Candid."
Rolling out to paid users first, then free users later.
Why it matters: Honestly, this feels like a minor tune-up dressed up as a major release. The real story is OpenAI seems more focused on making ChatGPT feel friendlier than actually shipping breakthrough capabilities.
Probably because they're stuck waiting for the next big model leap…
Dead Framework Theory — why new frameworks are "dead on arrival" in the age of AI coding
React Usage Over Time
Paul Kinlan is the lead Chrome DevRel at Google and is noticing that React is becoming the default for web development because of AI tools.
A lot of AI coding assistants hardcode React into their prompts because it's what developers already know how to maintain.
The issue is these tools aren't giving other frameworks a fair shot, and since AI coding tools are so popular, it's having massive ripple effects across the web.
Here’s a comparison for each popular frameworks from last year:
React is ahead by 10M+ against other popular frameworks.
So how is a new framework/library suppose to compete?
They would need 12-18 months just to show up in training data, but by then, React grows by millions of sites and dominates even further.
Why this matters: AI is determining how we write code now.
React is the big example:
React dominates the web → LLMs learn from React code → AI tools output React → more React sites get built → React dominates even more → repeat.
Whatever gets popular or recommended by AI tools becomes the dominant tool for all future projects. AI is determining software infrastructure whether we like it or not.
Shipping code in 2025 looks nothing like it did 5 years ago
GitHub analyzed 986 million commits from 2025 and found developers are shipping code differently.
More frequent, smaller commits instead of big quarterly releases
Feature flags everywhere to toggle incomplete features
11.5 billion GitHub Actions minutes running automated tests
Pull requests are getting shorter and more focused
CI/CD pipelines are handling everything automatically.
Why it matters: The "ship when it's done" mindset is dead. Developers are pushing code constantly in small chunks because it's easier to debug, easier to review, and way less risky than massive releases. These trend will most likely stay because of you guessed it… AI tools
How Copilot Builds GitHub - GitHub shows how engineers use copilot for real issues at the company. I’ll give you a hint: annoying tasks.
What is “bad code?” - JetBrains breaks down what developers actually mean when they say "bad code." You probably need it.
Working At Cursor - Get an in depth look of what it’s like to work at Cursor. Personally I would love working there.
ElevenLab’s Scribe v2 Realtime - A low-latency Speech to Text model, delivering live transcription in under 150 ms.
lazygit - A simple terminal UI for Git that makes working with it not painful. It also has lazy in the name and I’m lazy.
deepnote - Deepnote is a drop-in replacement for Jupyter with an AI-first design, sleek UI, new blocks, and native data integrations.
Valdi - Snapchat released a beta version of the cross-platform UI framework they've used in production apps for the last 8 years. Not based on React btw.
Imposter Syndrome as a Service
Create an API that returns randomly discouraging developer facts: "Someone just built your entire project idea in 4 hours," "A 12-year-old just got hired at Google” and connect it to some type of front end (web, mobile, chrome extension, etc.)
That’s all from me!
Have a great week, be safe, make good choices, and have fun coding.
If I made a mistake or you have any questions, feel free to comment below or reply to the email!
See you all next week.
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