[December 2025] Web Developer Monthly Newsletter 💻🚀

Welcome to the 90th issue of Web Developer Monthly!

If it’s your first time here, welcome, I like you already. If you want the full back story on the newsletter, head here.

The quick version: I curate and share the most important articles, news, resources, podcasts, and videos from the world of web and software development.

Think the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule) meeting the programming world. I give you the 20% that will get you 80% of the results.

If you're a long time reader, welcome back old friend.

Alright, let's not waste any valuable time and jump right into this month's updates.

Here's what you missed in December 2025 as a Web Developer…

Update to This Newsletter 🐣

This newsletter is getting an update! We will no longer just focus on Web Development news, but will instead focus on the overall tech market. We will cover all the important industry information around the tech world (like A.I.), to make sure you stay up to date not just with the Web Developer industry, but with the entire tech landscape.

Below you will see how the new newsletter will look like:

Google, Nvidia, and OpenAI 🤑

Here is a recap of everything you need to know about the big players in the A.I. industry. This article will catch you up on the latest news and the battle between Nvidia chips vs TPUs that are starting to make waves from Google.

Writing a good CLAUDE.md ✍️

LLMs are stateless functions. Their weights are frozen by the time they're used for inference, so they don't learn over time. The only thing that the model knows about your codebase is the tokens you put into it.

Similarly, coding agent harnesses such as Claude Code usually require you to manage agents' memory explicitly. CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md) is the only file that by default goes into every single conversation you have with the agent.

Here is how to make a good Claude.md file.

Better at Using AI for Programming? 💎

A great discussion thread from really smart engineers on hackernews talking about how they use AI to improve their programming. Some great advice in there.

The Thinking Game 🧠

You need to watch this documentary. Probably my favourite one of the year and it will give you great insight into the AI and Machine Learning world and its history.

It's a must watch even if you aren't really interested in AI

Top 10 of 2025 👑

As we wind down 2025 and get ready for the new year, I decided to collect my top 10 favourite articles from the year. As part of my job, I read articles 365 days a year, and consume a lot of industry news so I can stay up to date with the tech world. A lot turns out to be useless information, but every once in a while, you find some golden nuggets 🪙. Here are my top 10 golden nuggets for the year that I think everyone should read

Bet On Juniors Just Got Better 🧨

Junior developer: obsolete accessory or valuable investment? How does the genie (LLMs) change the analysis? Turns out, the answer is not what you expect.

Ps, this is what actually makes you a senior.

2025 LLM Year in Review 🪄

2025 has been a strong and eventful year of progress in LLMs. The following is a list of notable and mildly surprising "paradigm changes". Some of these might be a bit too technical, but it's worth the read to see what has happened in the industry.

News Around the World 🗺

• Let's Encrypt celebrated 10 years of certificates. They changes the internet with their system for giving you HTTPS.

• Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban. Seems like a good idea?

Big Tech News aka AI News 🏢

• Bun, a new JavaScript runtime was acquired by Anthropic for $20 billion. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.

• Amazon releases an impressive new AI chip: Trainium3 and teases an Nvidia-friendly roadmap... they are behind the big players though.

• OpenAI declares ‘code red’ as Google catches up in AI race. Interesting comment about this from a user:

I've seen a rumor going around that OpenAI hasn't had a successful pre-training run since mid 2024. This seemed insane to me but if you give ChatGPT 5.1 a query about current events and instruct it not to use the internet it will tell you its knowledge cutoff is June 2024. Not sure if maybe that's just the smaller model or what. But I don't think it's a good sign to get that from any frontier model today, that's 18 months ago.

• OpenAI also released their latest GPT 5.2 this month, and GPT image 1.5. More importantly they released GPT-5.2-Codex - probably the most advanced agentic coding model for professional software engineering and defensive cybersecurity.

• Google is making a big splash with Gemini 3. Now released Gemini 3 Pro is at the frontier of vision AI and document, spatial, screen and video understanding. It's now what I use over OpenAI.

• Someone built what news will look like on Hackernews in 10 years using Gemini 3 pro. This is funny.

• Google also release Gemini 3 flash, for super quick responses. Super impressive results at top speed makes it probably the best in the industry right now.

• Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI probably the best open-source agentic coding models and CLI agent currently.

• Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros. for a Total Enterprise Value of $82.7 Billion (Equity Value of $72.0 Billion). This is an ongoing story and the deal isn't final. Everything is being consolidated right now.

• IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion to expand its AI offering.

• The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI reach landmark agreement to bring beloved characters from across Disney’s brands to Sora. I have no idea how this makes sense, but I'll be curious to see what the implications of this are for future trademarks.

• AWS CEO Matt Garman pushes back on AI replacing junior developers and explains how AI should be used in the workplace. Duh.

• Worst idea of the month goes to.... Claude in Chrome. Security nightmare.

Completely useless to your career but still great 🙃

• A minimalist text editor that lives in URL. You read that right.

• A calendar you can print to add all your goals for 2026.

Best Resource of the Month ✅

As we end the year in 2025, you're probably looking at the new year with excitement and plans to make it better than the last. If you're like me, you are creating your big goals and plan for 2026. However, how much risk should you take? Should you be conservative with your plans?

I say you throw caution to the wind and take a risk in 2026. Here is why: All it takes is one to work out.

Trick of the Month 🌗

• You can play with historical LLM models now! Imagine talking to a model that has no knowledge of anything after 1918 (or any year of your choice)? You can do that with this new tool.

Thanks for reading!

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See you next month! ❤️

By the way, I teach people how to code and get hired in the most efficient way possible as an Instructor at the Zero To Mastery Academy. You can see a few of our most popular courses below or see all ZTM courses here.