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Welcome to Next in Dev
What's up, everyone? Welcome to Next in Dev, your weekly rundown of modern web dev news. This week, Vercel opts free users into AI training, OpenAI is on an acquisition spree while Microsoft threatens to sue, and Vite 8 ships Rolldown as its sole bundler.
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Vercel updated its Terms of Service, and the big detail is in the defaults: free-tier users are now opted in to let Vercel use their code and agent chats to train AI models and share that data with third-party providers. Paid Pro users are opted out by default; Enterprise is excluded. The opt-out deadline is March 31. After that, opting out only prevents future use. If you're on the free tier, check Team Settings > Data Preferences now. Source
OpenAI signed an AWS deal to sell AI products to U.S. government agencies (source). They’re stepping onto Anthropic's home turf weeks after Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk for refusing to drop ethical restrictions. Microsoft is reportedly considering suing, arguing the deal violates its exclusive cloud agreement with OpenAI (source).
OpenAI is also acquiring Astral, the company behind uv, Ruff, and ty, which are three of the most widely used open-source Python tools. The Astral team will join Codex, and OpenAI says it'll keep the tools open source. That's the same promise they made about Promptfoo last week. Acquiring two open-source projects in the same month is a platform strategy. If you rely on uv or Ruff outside the OpenAI ecosystem, watch this closely. Source
Google SVP Nick Fox told Wired the company is "not ruling out" ads in Gemini. This is a shift from the "no plans" messaging at Davos in January. Fox called personalization the "holy grail" of Search and said Google's Personal Intelligence feature, which connects Gemini to your Gmail, Photos, and Calendar, could expand into broader Search. When asked about ad targeting with that data, he said, "TBD." Source
Payload CMS v3.79.1 is here. It delivered a 3-15x reduction in main thread blocking for the Lexical rich text editor via centralized toolbar state. Drizzle ORM fixes address circular references in schema generation, contains on hasMany fields, and polymorphic join query limits. Block paste no longer duplicates array items, and auth is tighter with Sec-Fetch-Site header validation. Source
Next.js 16.2.0 landed with experimental strict route types, redesigned error pages, server action logging, browser error forwarding to the terminal, and massive Turbopack infrastructure work. Payload is expected to support most of 16.2, but still not cache components. Source
Also this week:
Cursor Composer 2 is producing frontier-level benchmarks at a lower cost than GPT-5.4 mini. (Source).
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano. These are faster and cheaper models for multi-agent workflows. (Source).
Claude Code upgraded from 2.1.75–2.1.78, 1M context window for Opus 4.6 by default, MCP elicitation support, and massive stability fixes.
Railway released an experimental one-click HA Postgres with automatic failover, plus full bucket management in the CLI. (Source).
Gemini API now combines built-in tools like Search and Maps with custom functions in a single request. (Source).
CloudCannon becomes an official CMS partner of Astro. (Source).
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What did I miss? There’s so much happening in modern web dev that I know I missed something. Please share your thoughts in the comments or reply to this email. I want to address your suggestions and may include them in future newsletters.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.
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