SXSW 2026: Where Health, AI, and the Systems That Shape Us Converge cloos Tue, 03/24/2026 - 17:42

SXSW has always been a place for trendspotters. The content and experience is known for being everything, everywhere, all at once. Only when backing away and reflecting, can one see above the waves.  

This year, my realization hit close to home. Health is no longer siloed and treated separately from other industries. It is becoming part of something bigger: an interconnected system that spans technology, biology, environment, and the basic human behaviors and desires we often set aside for industry specialization.

One session that really stayed with me was led by Dr. Samantha Tucker-Samaras, who shared new research on the skin microbiome. For the first time, scientists are drawing a direct connection between the presence of specific bacteria, particularly Cutibacterium, and lower stress levels and improved mood. The mechanism is the skin:brain axis. It challenges how we have traditionally thought about both mental health and skincare. 

While these kinds of biology and science talks were the most interesting to me, no one can deny how we’re getting to these breakthroughs; it’s the underlying presence in every conversation-- the role of AI. The patterns connecting microbiome data to emotional wellbeing were uncovered through advanced models that can see and synthesize what humans cannot (in any reasonable amount of time, anyway). These recognizable patterns build on something I have been exploring over the last couple of years: how can AI unlock insights about our health that were previously invisible? In my own experience, data paired with the right tools can become a real game changer as we start to take more responsibility for our own health and wellbeing. 

Each session in the SXSW Health Track pushed the idea further. Conversations about optimizing metrics like sleep or fitness were almost non-existent. Through the emergence of insights and learnings derived by AI,  we are starting to understand that our bodies function as a complex ecosystem that responds to a wide range of inputs, not just 3 or 4 KPIs. What we eat, what we put on our skin, and the environments we spend time in all play a role and can impact/disrupt our ecosystem.

Of course, in having the privilege of Phase2 sending me to this event, they asked:  what does all of this learning mean for our business? How can we be better at pushing forward AI in Health, practically and accurately. 

At Phase2, over the last couple of years, we’ve been focused on helping organizations move beyond experimentation and into real application of AI. We’ve been  building digital products that work in complex environments like healthcare. The challenge is not just generating insight and crunching large data sets, but actually implementing it in a way that is scalable, connected, and centered around real human needs. It feels like the healthcare industry is a mirror image of our biological bodies: detailed, dependent on myriad functions, and… balance and symbiosis is everything.

Connecting those dots and having these conversations with new and old friends made SXSW especially meaningful this year. A common mindset and inspired innovation can sometimes be hard to find, but at this conference, it was in abundance.  For example, I spent some time with Caitlyn Craft from Genentech, whose work sits at the intersection of learning, technology, and innovation. There was a shared focus on how to apply emerging technology thoughtfully, not just for efficiency, but for real impact.

It is easy to talk about the future of health in abstract terms. It is different to be surrounded by women who are actively shaping it. There is a level of clarity, practicality, and systems thinking that makes the conversation feel grounded and real.

Walking away from SXSW, the takeaway for me is that the future of health is holistic. It is not about isolated solutions. It is about understanding and working with the systems that shape us.

That is true in our bodies and it is true in the products and experiences we are building. And it is where some of the most meaningful innovation is starting to happen.
 

Publication Date Wed, 03/25/2026 - 17:42 Nicole Lind Chief of Staff

In partnership with our CEO, Nicole’s mission as Chief of Staff is to ensure alignment across all organizational areas of Phase2.  By empowering our leadership team and focusing on integration across departments, she oversees growth across our capabilities and offices. Nicole is also a driving force behind Phase2’s Tech Unites Us social impact program and our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative.

Featured Blog Post? Yes Has this blog post been deprecated? No Summary SXSW has always been a place for trendspotters. The content and experience is known for being everything, everywhere, all at once. Only when backing away and reflecting, can one see above the waves. This year, my realization hit close to home. Health is no longer siloed and treated separately from other industries. It is becoming part of something bigger: an interconnected system that spans technology, biology, environment, and the basic human behaviors and desires we often set aside for industry specialization. Topic Artificial Intelligence SXSW Banner Plum.png Promo Image

Missed the Driesnote? You can watch it here.

Drupal, the open source content management platform that runs some of the most demanding websites on the planet, turned 25 in January. But while the community is celebrating what is a remarkable milestone for any open source project, it is actively strengthening its foundations to lead in the AI era and looking ahead to a future it intends to shape.

This week at DrupalCon Chicago, Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert delivered his annual keynote, the DriesNote, and it was one of the more honest talks you'll hear at a tech conference. A clear-eyed look at what's working, what's under pressure, and what the plan actually is.

AI is Disrupting Everything, But Deep Expertise is Irreplaceable

For more than two decades, the Drupal ecosystem has rested on three things: the platform itself, the agencies that build with it, and the community that maintains it. That triangle has survived waves of new technology and constant change. It's been remarkably resilient.

But what happens when AI disrupts all three sides at once? When anyone can spin up a decent-looking site in fifteen minutes, what does that do to the people who've spent years building something better? That’s what is happening at the moment, as the world is being flooded with AI-generated “average”. Average content, average code, average websites - average is easier to attain than ever.

What it means is that the only thing that will actually matter, to customers, to organisations, to the people trying to build something lasting on the open web, is genuine, hard-won, deep expertise.

What AI Actually Can't Do

Here's something worth understanding, because it gets lost in the noise.

AI can generate a beautiful website in about fifteen minutes. Tools like Lovable and Replit are genuinely impressive. You give them a prompt, they give you something that looks polished and professional. It feels like magic.

But a prototype is not a production system.

The moment you need structured content that editors can actually update, workflows that a real team can follow, permissions, governance, security, accessibility, multilingual support, compliance... you're not building a website anymore. You're building a system. And building systems is exactly what Drupal has excelled at for 25 years.

The demo at DrupalCon made this tangible. A beautiful event site built in Lovable in minutes, then migrated into Drupal CMS using AI coding tools, where the hard-coded layout became structured, reusable, editable content. Same visual ambition. Completely different foundation.

The pitch is simple: AI gets you to visual ambition fast. Drupal makes that ambition durable.

What's Actually Shipping

This isn't a vision talk. Things are being built and released.

DrupalCMS 2.1 landed at DrupalCon, built on top of Drupal Core 11.3. Over the last 18 months, core database and cache utilization have roughly halved, meaning every Drupal site in the world gets faster when it upgrades. That's not a minor thing. That's the compounding benefit of a serious engineering community.

Site templates and a marketplace are now live at marketplace.drupal.org, with more than ten purpose-built templates covering nonprofits, education, healthcare, events, government, and SaaS, built by agencies that understand those sectors. Free and premium options, with direct access to the people who made them if you need help.

Canvas, Drupal's new page-building layer, lets teams create and customise pages at speed without sacrificing the structured content underneath.

The Context Control Centre is a system for storing and managing your organisation's institutional knowledge (brand guidelines, content strategy, audience personas, live analytics) and it's moving from prototype to production. The idea is that AI tools are only as good as the context they're given. Without it, you get the average of the internet. With it, you get something that actually knows your brand.

And in the AI layer itself, a demo showed what it looks like when a marketer can drop a raw content brief into Drupal, have the system read it, load the right brand and strategy context, ask clarifying questions, and generate a production-ready page, with proper cross-linking, structured data for AI search engines, and an accessibility check built in.

That's not a concept. That's a demo running on real code.

One Developer, Six Weeks, 90,000 Lines of Code

The most striking moment of the keynote was a contribution from Jurgen Haas, one of the Drupal community's most experienced developers. He builds ECA, Drupal's automation engine, running on thousands of production sites.

Three years ago, he knew what ECA needed. He knew how to build it. He never had the time.

Six weeks ago, he started. With AI as a collaborator, handling scaffolding, generating tests, refactoring code, he shipped a completely rebuilt workflow editor: a new visual interface, built-in debugging and replay, in-context automation for non-technical users. 90,000 lines of code. Full test coverage. One person.

"This is what one Drupal developer can build in six weeks," he said. "Imagine what all of us can build next."

The key detail: Jurgen could explain every line. He could defend the architecture. He owned what he built. AI removed friction. It didn't replace expertise.

The Harder Conversation

Not everything in the keynote was product news.

Dries was honest about the pressure on Drupal agencies. When AI commoditises production, and it is, the business models that agencies have built over years start to look shaky. An agency leader named Aidan Foster, seventeen years into running a Drupal shop, described the feeling plainly: "AI had converted making things into a commodity. That shook the foundations I had spent 17 years building."

But Aidan's conclusion was interesting. The bottleneck isn't production anymore. It's creativity, strategy, and judgement. If you use AI without asking the hard questions, who are we, who are our audience, what makes us different, you get the boring average. The agencies that will win are the ones that get good at encoding expertise, not just delivering outputs.

There's also a challenge for the community itself. AI lowers the barrier to contribute code, which sounds good, until you realise the burden of reviewing that code falls on the same small group of maintainers. And when people use AI to skip the deep learning that used to come from contributing, the community gets shallower. A shallow community can't maintain what's been built.

Dries' response was a new mantra:never submit code you don't understand. It doesn't matter what tools you used to write it. If you submit it, you own it.

The Bet Worth Making

Twenty years ago, Dries was a bedroom inventor who collapsed from stress on a street in Belgium. He had a choice: take a safe job, walk away from the thing he'd built, or ask for help and become a deliberate leader.

He made the harder choice. The community that grew up around that choice is why Drupal is still here, still relevant, still running critical infrastructure for organisations around the world.

Now there's another crossroads. AI is both the flood and the drainage system. It destabilises the foundations and it can help rebuild them stronger.

Twenty-five years of Drupal is twenty-five years of expertise built patch by patch, merge request by merge request. A community that showed up not because it had to, but because it cared. That's not a liability in the age of AI. That's exactly what this moment needs.

DrupalCon Chicago runs through this week. The marketplace is live at marketplace.drupal.org. The Context Control Centre is approaching production. The Drupal AI initiative is moving fast.

File attachments:  DriesNote1.png DSC_8250.JPG DSC_8272.jpg

Great digital experiences don't happen by accident, they're built with intention, inclusion, and users at the heart of every decision. At DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026, the UX, Accessibility and Usability track is bringing together designers, developers, content strategists, and decision-makers to explore how Drupal powers truly user-centred digital products.

We're looking for speakers with real stories to tell. Whether you've transformed an accessibility audit into lasting organisational change, built a design system that scaled beautifully across channels, or used user research to completely reshape a development roadmap — we want to hear from you.

Image

          Foto by Matthew Saunders

We're particularly interested in sessions covering:

·    Accessibility beyond compliance - embedding WCAG and ATAG into everyday workflows

·    User research that drives real development decisions

·    Design systems and collaborative design-development workflows

·    Usability improvements backed by evidence and data

·    Content design and strategy, including practical uses of AI

·    Digital sustainability - designing for efficiency and longevity

 

This track is for anyone who believes that inclusion, usability, and good design aren't nice-to-haves — they're essential. Whether you're sharing a case study, a practical toolkit, or a freshperspective, your session could help Drupal practitioners everywhere build better, more inclusive digital experiences. 

 

Submissions close 13 April. 

Submmit your session: https://events.drupal.org/rotterdam2026/program-glance 

Don't wait! Share your expertise and help shape the conversation at DrupalCon Rotterdam 2026.

 

 

When making code changes or fixing issues, it's easy to leave @todo comments behind. Sometimes they mark areas waiting on an upstream fix, sometimes they're reminders that never got revisited. Either way, they accumulate — and the ones tied to the specific issue you're working on should be resolved before the MR merges.

phpstan-drupal 2.0.12 adds TodoCommentWithIssueUrlRule to catch this in the GitLab CI jobs on Drupal.org.

This rule is inspired by staabm/phpstan-todo-by, which handles expiring todos by date, version constraint, and issue tracker status. It doesn't currently support custom issue fetchers or alternative detection mechanisms, such as matching ticket IDs to branch names — but that flexibility could make its way there someday.

Simply ranking high in Google is not enough today. Learn how to get your content chosen by AI in this brief guide to AI Search Optimization.

As autonomous agents increasingly interact with technical documentation, traditional HTML can introduce challenges by filling limited context windows with layout elements, navigation, and scripts. This structural cluttering not only drains computing resources but directly causes context pollution and AI hallucinations.

Discover how you can reduce this “token tax” and create cleaner, more AI-friendly documentation experiences.

Drupal’s 25th anniversary keynote in Chicago moves beyond retrospective framing to address a structural shift affecting the CMS ecosystem. Dries Buytaert outlines how artificial intelligence is changing how websites are built, where value is created, and how Drupal must respond through product changes, new workflows, and a renewed emphasis on structured content and governance.

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

• What Is DKAN
• Who Uses Open Data
• 20:08 DKAN Origin Story
• Why Drupal Fits DKAN
• From Distribution to Module
• DKAN 2 Rebuild and JSON Shift
• Async Jobs and API First
• How Teams Publish Data
• What a Dataset Really Is
• Metadata vs Data Access
• Why DKAN Left Drupal Org
• Migration Path to DKAN Four
• Harvesting and Data Store ETL
• APIs Visualizations and Bots
• Roadmap Data Store and AI
• Contributing and Where to File Issues

Resources

• DKAN
• DKAN Drupal Module
• DKAN on GitHub
• Public sites using DKAN 2
• DKAN channel on Drupal Slack
• JSON Form Widget

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have your Drupal site admins start with a fast, widget-based interface that surfaces key site metrics, system health, and operational insights? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Modern Drupal Dashboard
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Gaurav Kapoor (gaurav.kapoor) of werk21 in Berlin
  • Versions available: 1.0.5, which works with Drupal core 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: no open issues
• Usage stats:
  • 4 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, site visitors with the new "Access modern dashboard" permission can access a React-based dashboard with widgets to provide insights on topics like:
  • Content overview: total content count, published vs unpublished, and per content type breakdown.
  • Users overview: user count per role (users with multiple roles are counted in each role), plus pie chart visualization.
  • Additional Content (Entity overview): lists all entity types (content + configuration), shows counts, and provides direct "Manage" links.
  • Modules overview: installed modules summary, including enabled/disabled and core/contrib breakdown.
  • System & status: key environment details such as Drupal core version, PHP version, and database information.
  • Health checks: displays Drupal requirement checks grouped by status (pass/warning/error) with a dedicated detail view.
  • Each widget can be clicked to open a detail view of the extended data, making it easy for admins to dig into any area
  • The widget-based architecture should also help to pull in data from other sources, potentially including things like analytics

The latest update to the CKEditor contributed modules brings AI writing and editing directly into Drupal. Premium Features module 1.8.0 introduces CKEditor AI, adding AI Chat, AI Review, AI Translate, and AI Quick Actions inside the rich text editor. Authors can write, review, and translate content without the back and forth of third-party tools.

Recap of Drupal 12 release windows

Our release schedule includes three potential release dates for Drupal 12.0.0, depending on when critical requirements are completed:

1. Week of June 15, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by March 27
2. Week of August 10, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by May 15
3. Week of December 07, 2026, if beta requirements are completed by September 11

Our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is the week of August 10, 2026

Many great improvements landed recently. The main branch is on Symfony 8 and most deprecated modules are removed already. With only a few days remaining until the March deadline of the first release option though, we are confident that not all critical requirements will be completed by March 27. Therefore, we are officially announcing that our new target release date for Drupal 12.0.0 is August 10, 2026, and the beta deadline for critical requirements is May 15, 2026.

We need your help to complete requirements by May 15!

While there are other pending improvements that are not hard requirements for Drupal 12's release, these are the most urgent needs:

1. PHPUnit 12 support

   While our ultimate goal is to support PHPUnit 13 in Drupal 12, there are significant API changes in PHPUnit 12 that we first need to adopt. See #3527936: Introduce support for PHPUnit 12

2. Import maps API

   CKEditor 5 is changing their installation method in the near future. See #3527914: [PP-1] Use New installation methods for CKEditor5

   To support this, we need a JavaScript import maps API in core. See #3398525: Add an API for importmaps

3. Update path related changes

   To test update paths from Drupal 11.3.0, we need to generate new database dumps. See #3569127: Add new 11.3.x database dump fixtures, without modules deprecated for removal in 12.x

   Remove older upgrade paths. See #3580877: [PP-1] Remove updates added prior to 11.3.0 from 12.x

4. Remove tests from release packages

   To reduce the size of core, we are excluding tests from core release packages, and offering them via a different namespace. This is a disruptive change and should only be done in a major release.
   See #3067979: Exclude test files from release packages.

5. Deprecate and remove libraries, modules, themes and dependencies

   The Toolbar Module needs to be removed from core now that the Navigation module is stable and in the standard profile. See #3484850: [PP-1] [meta] Deprecate Toolbar module

   There are more dependencies, modules and themes that are still possible to remove. See #3466088: [meta] Deprecate dependencies, libraries, modules, and themes that will be removed from Drupal 12 core

6. Move from Claro to Gin as admin theme

   Gin is in core as an alpha experimental extension. Help make it stable and so it can replace Claro.
   See #3576488: [meta] Admin theme: path to stable.

7. Update to ESLint 9

   The coding standard checks are using the unsupported ESLint 8. We need to update to version 9. See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.
   See #3440225: Update to ESLint v9 with standard rules.

The above list are the current highest priorities. We'll keep identifying and tagging Drupal 12 release priority issues. The up to date list can be found using the Drupal 12.0.0 release priority tag.

DrupalCon Chicago 2026 has begun, bringing together the global Drupal community from March 23 to 26 at the Hilton Chicago. As the event kicks off, attention is turning to the sessions scheduled over the coming days, many of which focus on accessibility, inclusion, and how Drupal teams are responding to evolving real-world requirements.

In the lead-up to the event, The DropTimes published a series of articles previewing selected sessions from the program. These included Palak Agarwal’s coverage of accessibility audits on Drupal websites, highlighting recurring issues such as missing alt text, poor contrast, and structural inconsistencies that continue to affect many Drupal projects.

Among the upcoming sessions is “Future-Proofing Accessibility: Strategies for Government & University Platforms,” featuring M. Nikki Flores, Javier Reartes, and Kat Shaw, scheduled for March 24. The session will focus on moving accessibility earlier into the workflow, drawing from large-scale public sector and university implementations.

Another session featured in our coverage, “Designing for Difference: Practical Strategies for Building a Neuroinclusive Organization” by J. Matthew Saunders, will explore how workplace systems can be redesigned to reduce friction and support neurodivergent teams.

As DrupalCon Chicago gets underway, these sessions point to the conversations that will shape the week ahead. The focus is not only on what Drupal can do, but how it can be built and used in ways that are more accessible, inclusive, and effective in practice.

DISCOVER DRUPAL

• Mike Gifford Introduces pdf-crawler for Automated PDF Accessibility Audits
• New Drupal Module Makes Configuration UUIDs Deterministic Across Environments
• Drupal Commerce 3.x Focuses on Stability and What Comes Next
• Survey Launched to Study How Universities Use Drupal
• Gemini Provider 1.0.1-rc1 Brings Multimodal Gemini Features to Drupal AI Ecosystem

EVENTS

• DrupalCamp Finland 2026 Opens Call for Papers Ahead of March Deadline
• Miffy Mascot Campaign Extends to DrupalCon Chicago with Ticket Giveaway for Rotterdam 2026
• Accessibility Beyond Compliance for Government and University Platforms
• Designing for Difference: Practical Strategies for Building a Neuroinclusive Organization
• Future-Proofing Accessibility for Government and University Drupal Platforms
• Drupal Mountain Camp 2027 Scheduled for March 2 to 4 in Davos
• What Accessibility Audits Reveal About Drupal Websites

ORGANIZATION NEWS

• Tag1 Joins Drupal AI Initiative as Gold Partner to Develop Governance Layer
• Drupal Association Confirmed as Mentoring Organization for Google Summer of Code 2026

FREE SOFTWARE

• OpenUK Publishes Proposal for National Foundation to Support UK Open Source Ecosystem

Additional developments from across the Drupal ecosystem were published during the week. Readers may follow The DropTimes on LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook for continuing updates. The publication also maintains a presence on Drupal Slack in the #thedroptimes channel.

Thank you.

Alka Elizabeth
Sub-editor
The DropTimes

A DrupalCon Chicago session will outline the next phase of the ECA module, focusing on making workflow automation accessible to a wider range of users. Despite adoption across more than 16,000 sites, ECA is estimated to be used by only a small portion of the Drupal ecosystem. The presentation will explore how usability, onboarding, and guided workflows are being reworked based on community feedback.

Links help shape the experience of discovery: they are like little portals that transfer readers to a different place on the web with a single click. For search engines, they act more like pathways that reveal how your content connects to everything else. The practical importance of both internal and external links deserves special coverage, which we’ll explore in this post.

Come Monday, March 23rd, for a day devoted to Drupal in healthcare— a relaxed and friendly opening to DrupalCon with information-packed presentations plus two "table talk" sessions which will give everybody a chance to dive deeply into key topics, including privacy and overall takeaways. Whether you are in a state department of health, a non-profit hospital, a public health organization, or anyplace else in the broad healthcare space, there are unique needs in ensuring security, accessibility, compliance, and availability of important information and tools.

Online communication and emerging technologies promise improved access and capabilities for patients and professionals. Useful and inspiring digital experiences, however, must be built on a foundation of privacy, accessibility, and legal compliance. Come listen to healthcare technology practitioners share their experience solving these and more challenges in healthcare.

Get tickets to go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Ticket includes lunch, and we will be all wrapped up by 4pm.

Who Should Attend

Everybody interested in hearing and discussing how companies and the community are creating rich digital experiences in the healthcare space. All levels of colleagues in the pharma, medical, clinical, hospital, payers, caregivers, advocates, and healthcare professional space should go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!

Bring your needs to the table talks and we will embark on facilitated peer-to-peer problem solving with others who are affected and tech and healthcare industry experts.

COVID-19/DrupalFlu Safer Space

We will have a sensor in the room to monitor CO₂ levels and if they remain between at 800–1000 ppm.

Agaric will also have high-quality N95 masks available to anyone who wants them, and may bring our own MERV-13 Corsi-Rosenthal box fan filter, which provides appropriate filtration for reducing the spread COVID-19.

More about the Healthcare Industry Summit

The Healthcare Industry Summit brings together professionals and innovators to explore how Drupal can drive impact in healthcare. Through expert-led sessions, you’ll gain insights into topics such as the responsible use of AI, personalization, content marketing, and streamlining migrations.

In addition to presentations, roundtable discussions will provide opportunities to share experiences, exchange ideas, and build connections with peers tackling similar challenges. Join us to discover innovative approaches and collaborative strategies that are shaping the future of healthcare with Drupal.

The Healthcare Summit at the 2025 Chicago, Illinois, DrupalCon is organized by Jeanne Cost, Laura Chaparro, and myself.  I am glad to be playing a part in coordinating this summit, especially given Agaric's involvement in and commitment to health and science communities.

Read more and discuss at agaric.coop.

Creating some rules for my playground

I'm setting up my Drupal Playground to experiment with AI coding agents. My previous post was about using Claude Code to establish a Drupal environment, and it felt a bit like crawling, but now I am ready to pick up the pace.

I've experimented and found that, in addition to sending effective code-generation prompts to an AI, providing metadata about the targeted codebase is equally important. The standard way to give this context is AGENTS.md. My initial experiments with Amazee.io's AGENTS.md produced much better results with PHPStorm's Junie. I'm inclined to think that Drupal core should include an AGENTS.md file or template.

Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with Claude's Chat UI without any context beyond knowing I am a Drupal developer. Despite this, Claude, with no background information, shows an impressive understanding of Drupal's API and developer workflow. For example, Claude can plan and develop an entire module, including automated tests. I look forward to seeing Claude attempt to build a Telephone Filter module, based on the one I created with ChatGPT a year ago. For now, I plan to continue setting up my environment to give Claude Code the necessary context to produce the most reliable results.

Adding context via CLAUDE.md (aka AGENTS.md)

Currently, Claude Code uses CLAUDE.md files for context, but it will likely support AGENTS.md. In short, CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are the same. I haven't extensively experimented with other AIs yet, but the fact that Claude Code has an...Read More

A recap shared by DevBranch outlines the 30th Drupal Cafe Lutsk meetup, marking an anniversary gathering with three talks and community participation. The event combined technical discussion, personal narratives, and organiser insights, while retaining its informal structure with food, certificates, and an afterparty. The summary reflects the continuing role of local meetups in sustaining Drupal community engagement.

By Mari Núñez and Andrés Díaz Soto

If you study computer science or web development, you’ll take an introductory JavaScript course. Everyone starts in a similar place: variables, let and const (or var if you’re old enough), maybe even a conversation about the difference. You write a few functions, do some math, and concatenate some strings. It feels like learning a language in the abstract — technically correct, but removed from real work.

Before long, you are manipulating a web page. You grab an element, change its content, add a class, and attach a click handler. The browser responds. The page changes. It finally feels tangible.

But even then, JavaScript can feel like a layer you add on top rather than the foundation of the experience itself. And almost inevitably, you move to a library or framework. For many of us, that once meant jQuery.

Abstraction solved real problems

jQuery did not become dominant because developers were lazy. It solved real problems. Browsers were fragmented. There was no consistent way to select elements from the DOM. Event handling varied. AJAX required wrestling with verbose XMLHttpRequest code and awkward callback patterns. jQuery unified those concerns behind a clean, approachable interface: the dollar sign selector, the on method, simple get and post helpers, animations like fadeIn and slideUp.

It was a necessary abstraction at the time.

Over the years, though, the platform evolved. Browsers standardized. APIs matured. ES6 modernized the language. CSS grew far more capable. Many of the problems jQuery once addressed were absorbed directly into the browser.
The platform changed.

When thoughtful choices become defaults

We may be living through a similar moment with modern frameworks. React and other tools solve meaningful problems. They help teams move quickly and provide structure, especially for developers early in their careers. In many cases, they are exactly the right choice.

But over time, thoughtful decisions can quietly become defaults. A subtle assumption can creep in: if something feels modern or interactive, it probably requires a framework.

The shift is not dramatic. It is behavioral. Instead of beginning with the problem, we sometimes begin with the stack. If an interaction feels dynamic or app-like, we assume it needs something larger.

Frameworks offer guardrails and shared patterns, and that consistency is valuable. But when the tool becomes the starting point for every conversation, it can narrow the range of options we consider. We stop asking what the browser already provides. We begin to treat complexity as the baseline for modern work.

This is not bad architecture.It is often just unexamined architecture.

It shows up in small ways: adding a dependency before exploring a native API, reaching for a heavy client-side solution when progressive enhancement might be enough, and introducing new tooling because that is what modern projects tend to do. Each decision is understandable on its own. Over time, though, they expand the surface area of a project: more dependencies, more upgrades, more maintenance. Fewer dependencies can mean fewer upgrades to manage, fewer compatibility conflicts, and a smaller maintenance surface over time.

The foundation is stronger than we remember

While we have been refining our build pipelines and debating frameworks, the browser has continued to evolve. Quietly and steadily. Modern JavaScript is not what it was 10 or even five years ago. Today’s browsers ship with stable, well-documented APIs that address many of the use cases we once handled with libraries.

Need to know when something enters the viewport? There is Intersection Observer.

Need to react to changes in the DOM without polling? Mutation Observer is built in.

Need to respond to screen size changes? MatchMedia handles that cleanly.

Need to persist data between sessions? Local storage is there.

Need to integrate with a device’s native share dialog? There is an API for that.

CSS has evolved as well. Layout systems, transitions, scroll behaviors, and positioning features eliminate entire categories of JavaScript we once considered unavoidable.

And the language itself has matured. Modules, promises, async and await, richer array methods, cleaner syntax. These are no longer experimental features. They are part of the platform.

None of this is particularly flashy. It is simply what the browser now provides.

The hard part is not writing JavaScript. It is knowing what exists.

The important point is not that every project should avoid frameworks. It is that many of the problems we once solved with external libraries now have first-class support in the browser itself. So, what does that mean in practice?

Add one small pause to your workflow. Before installing a dependency, check the platform. Search MDN. Look up “browser API for…” and see what comes back. You might discover that Intersection Observer replaces the scroll library you were about to add. Or that CSS handles the animation without JavaScript at all.

It means reframing how you evaluate tradeoffs. When a feature request comes in, write down the requirement in plain language before you write down the stack. What actually needs to happen? A modal opens. Content animates on scroll. State persists between visits. Once the behavior is clear, ask whether the browser can already do it.

It means keeping a short list of native capabilities in your mental toolkit: MatchMedia. Local storage. Native form validation. ResizeObserver. The goal is not to memorize every API. It is important to remember that vanilla JavaScript is an option.

It also means normalizing this conversation on your team. When someone suggests a new library, ask a simple question: is there a native way to do this? Not as a challenge. As due diligence.

None of this requires abandoning modern tooling. It simply widens your decision tree. And it costs almost nothing but attention.

Join us at DrupalCon Chicago

In our session, “Elevating Drupal Experiences with Vanilla JavaScript,” we’ll share how we’ve used modern browser capabilities to build rich, interactive experiences within Drupal — not by rejecting frameworks, but by pairing Drupal’s strengths with what the browser already does well.
We’ll walk through:

• Where native APIs replaced heavier dependencies
• Where progressive enhancement simplified complexity
• Where we had to rethink our own assumptions

More than anything, we hope it sparks a conversation.

If you go

If you’re going to DrupalCon Chicago 2026, please make sure to attend the session with Mari and Andrés.

Where: Hilton Chicago, 720 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605, Salon A-2 (LL)

When: Tuesday, March 24, 2026, 4:10–5:00pm

For session details and tickets, click here.

The post The browser has grown up. Have we? appeared first on Four Kitchens.

Three complete rewrites with three AI coding tools over 14 months. Each rewrite passed the same test suite. The spec and the tests are not interchangeable. The AI tool is.

New Module Builder documentation site

Module Builder now has its own documentation site.

This covers the many options it offers developers for fine-tuning their module code, from dependency injection to plugin inheritance, entity base fields, form elements, permissions, library asset files, and more.

Meanwhile, the latest release of Module Builder adds a feature I've wanted to implement for a very long time: when a new form section is added to add a new component (such as a plugin, hook class, or entity type), the form scrolls up to the new section that's just been added with AJAX. This makes it much clearer to understand what's just been changed, and helps with navigating around Module Builder's forms.

joachim Thu, 19/03/2026 - 12:45 Tags

• module builder