Cloudflare Buys Astro

The Payload team released versions 3.71 and 3.71.1. 3.71.0 is a meaty update with a lot of new features built-in. I'll cover these in a live stream, but here are the quick hits:

That doesn't even include the bug fixes. That's ONLY new features. Again, I'll hit this one in an upcoming live stream next week.

I've heard so many good things about Astro, so I thought I'd get a simple monorepo spun up to show you how to use Payload CMS with Astro. Hope this helps!

I'm still waiting for full Next.js 16 support for Payload. I know some are excited for it, but I'm not planning on switching to Next.js 16 anytime soon. Not because it's bad, but because I don't really need anything in it. PPR would be nice, but not a necessity, and I don't mind using unstable_cache for my caching needs.

All that to say, work is being done by both Payload and Next to create that support. Even so, the team has not prioritized enabling cacheComponents when support is rolled out.

Regardless, the Next team released version 16.1.2. This backported bug fixes for Turbopack.

Cloudflare acquired Human Native. Human Native is a UK-based company that turns videos and images into high-quality data for AI training. The idea here is to build a system where creators get paid or at least credited when aI models use their content. In an ideal state, this would lead to a more structured and profitable AI-native internet.

This is the first time that I don't have any news from OpenAI. Sure, things have happened. But nothing interesting has happened. They signed a few big deals with Cerebras and Merge Labs, but that's not really news. Let's be honest, $10B deals have lost their luster when talking about AI.

A lot is happening in Anthropic's world. Let's start with Elon Musk and xAI.

I wanted a more reliable source than X and this, but I've not seem many major publications reporting on this yet. Anthropic blocked xAI from using Claude Code through Cursor to ensure they weren't using Claude to create a competing product. This is strictly against Anthropic's terms of service, so this is reasonable. What's really wild is that xAI doesn't trust their own AI, Grok, to build with.

Nearly immediately after OpenAI announced their health tools, Anthropic announced their own tools to help doctors and scientists to manage complex data. These tools are not built to diagnose issues like OpenAI's health tool, but rather, they're built to help medical professionals speed up insurance approvals, clinical trials, and more. This is a much better approach to AI in healthcare, in my opinion.

Anthropic released two pieces for their Economic Index. The first is the actual report followed by a deep dive into what they call "Economic Primitives." The true value in this report is Anthropic's discussion about which parts of what jobs AI is automating and what skills will remain valuable as AI takes over more routing tasks. Definitely worth the read.

Now for the big AI news.

Google and Apple issued a joint statement announcing a new partnership. Gemini will power Apple's Siri and Apple Intelligence (hopefully making them one and the same). With Gemini already on Android phones, this means that Gemini will be on virtually every smart phone.

With Apple's focus on privacy and security, I'm feeling okay with this partnership...for now.

Other big partnership announcements for Gemini this week: grocery store chain Kroger and general stores Target and Walmart. It's a good week to be Google.

Railway released a new agent skill and Claude plugin. This makes Railway more coding-agent-friendly, allowing you to spin up projects, manage services, and more. Visit the link above to learn how to enable these new options.

The team introduced new commands, new flags, and better error messages to their CLI tools. You can now restart deployments, delete projects, and upgrade the CLI using the new railway commands.

As for errors, the team added better feedback when a deployment can't redeploy and better SSH error messages for serverless services.

There are too many new flags to call out specifically, so be sure to check those out if you use the Railway CLI tools in your development.

Now in beta: Editable Canvas Arrows. This is a small change, but you now have better control of how the arrows in your Railway canvas appear. Enable this in the feature flags portion of your account.

The last update I'll call out is in Railway's buckets. First, bucket sizes now display KB and bytes, so you can see the exact size of the bucket. Before, these sizes were displayed only in MB. Second, environment syncing includes buckets now. Before, when you deleted environment, buckets were left for you to clean up manually, but not anymore.

Use my affiliate code to sign up for Railway if you want.

Cloudflare acquired Astro. This is a move we've seen time and again. Payload by Figma, Bun by Anthropic, now Astro by Cloudflare. Someone should pick up Tailwind.

All Astro employees are now Cloudflare employees, and Astro will remain an independent, open-source project that supports all hosting platforms. Cloudflare gets to join the war of JavaScript frameworks, and Astro can stop worrying about raising money. It's a win-win. I'm confident Astro will remain open source.

In other news, Astro introduced Astro 6 Beta. The major changes here include an overhaul of the dev server, using Vite's Environment API, first-class support for Cloudflare's workerd runtime (not surprising), and Live Collections for real-time data without rebuilds.