🚨 When US-EAST-1 sneezes...

Hey everybody,

Two things dominated dev-world this week: a massive AWS outage that rippled across the internet, and a fresh Node.js major with real quality-of-life wins. We also saw Apple’s M5 silicon push AI-on-device forward, Anthropic ship a cheaper model tier, and Git celebrate 20 years with new talks to binge.

🚨 Infra & Incidents

AWS US-EAST-1 outage
AWS US-EAST-1 stumbled early yesterday, taking down or degrading a long list of apps (Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, Ring/Alexa, Coinbase, and more). Amazon attributed the core of the incident to internal EC2 networking components; services recovered through the morning/early afternoon ET. If you’re multi-region-light, this was your reminder.

Why it mattered: Another reminder that many apps still hinge on US-EAST-1. Good analysis on dependency concentration and resilience tradeoffs.

🎬 Video of the Week

Devs…stop hiding your LLM use
In this video, I share my daily AI tools and workflows, from Claude Code to IDEs to Terminals. I also discuss why being open about using AI tools, instead of hiding them, is becoming essential for developers and tech professionals.

Let your work, your AI-assisted work, speak for you…👇

🚀 Big Releases

Node.js 25
Node 25 landed Oct 15 with V8 14.1, faster JSON.stringify, built-in Uint8Array base64/hex helpers, and a sturdier permissions model (now with --allow-net). It also flips on more web-standard APIs by default (e.g., Web Storage). Worth a test run if you’re targeting Current in CI or building CLI tools. Also: odd-numbered majors ship in October; even numbers roll to LTS afterward.

Apple M5
Apple’s newsroom details CPU/GPU bumps and bigger on-device AI headroom via a faster Neural Engine, aimed squarely at pro workflows (including dev toolchains and ML builds). If you live in local inference land, keep an eye on early benchmarks.

📚 Book Club Kickoff (join us!)

🤖 AI: Models, Agents, Reality Check

Anthropic ships Claude Haiku 4.5
A smaller, faster, much cheaper model that (per Anthropic) hits near-Sonnet-4 coding performance at ~1/3 the cost and >2× the speed. They also introduced Agent Skills (task-specific bundles Claude can load on demand) and posted new enterprise tie-ups. Good option if you’re cost-optimizing agentic flows.

Karpathy on agents
“Year of the agent” hype meets a sober take. Andrej argues truly robust agents are still a decade away given today’s limits (tool use, multimodality, continual learning). Useful framing when setting stakeholder expectations. Also states in another podcast that “AGI is still a decade away.”

DeepSeek’s new AI model - DeepSeek-OCR
Vision-text compression lets a single A100 generate 200k+ pages/day of training data; claims 7–20× token reduction with ~97% info retained, open weights on HF/GitHub—promising for cheap long-context pipelines.

🧠 Community & Trends

Git turns 20, Git Merge 2025 highlights
GitHub’s recap and recordings are up; good talks on scaling VCS in the AI era and developer experience.

Developer ecosystem reports
JetBrains’ 2025 survey dropped with fresh numbers on AI usage, languages, and workflows; Stack Overflow’s coverage this week resurfaced “adopt but verify” sentiments. Great slide fodder.

Zed editor updates
Zed for Windows is now out, and their “Agentic Engineering” series (incl. a convo with Steve Klabnik on productive AI discourse) kept rolling—useful, pragmatic reads if you’re adopting AI in the editor.

⏱️ Try This in 5 Minutes

Kick the tires on Node 25 permissions + Web Storage:

nvm install 25 && nvm use 25
node --allow-net=example.com -e 'localStorage.setItem("x","y");console.log(localStorage.getItem("x"))'

What is this? Just a quick smoke test. Install/switch to Node 25, then run a one-liner that uses browser-style localStorage while showcasing Node’s newer permission model (--allow-net=...). In seconds, you can feel the DX changes, without touching your project.

More Reading

• Complete guide to buying your first Raspberry Pi 5

• Big Tech paying millions to train teachers on AI

• Claude Code on the web - delegate tasks from your browser

• Google launches “Google Skills”

• Armada × OpenAI partnership to bring smaller AI models to the edge

• Best Udemy AI courses for 2025.

🗳️ Quick Poll (1-Click)

Until next week,

Travis.