Off-by-none: Issue #338

September 30, 2025

Limitless with Claude 💊

In our previous issue, Amazon Nova Act brought AI agents to your IDE, Cloudflare backed Ladybird to push the open web forward, and PlanetScale for Postgres went GA. This week, Anthropic drops Claude Sonnet 4.5, AWS gives us S3 Tables and ECS Managed Instances, and Cloudflare celebrates its birthday with a flood of new launches. Plus, plenty of amazing serverless and cloud content from the community!

News & Announcements

Anthropic just dropped Claude Sonnet 4.5 and it's really, really good. Of course they are saying that it's their most intelligent model yet and better at coding, better at reasoning, and best suited for complex agent workflows. I;ve been using it for about 24 hours and you can color me impressed. They also rolled out new autonomy features for Claude Code, which has already supercharged my own workflow. Coupled with their new VS Code extension, I feel like Bradley Cooper in Limitless.

On the AWS side, Claude Sonnet 4.5 is also now in Bedrock (blog post here), giving you an easy way to integrate it into your existing stacks. You can also preview S3 Tables in the console now (finally), and ECS launched Managed Instances to simplify running containerized workloads.

Then came Cloudflare’s Birthday Week, and they didn’t hold back. They launched a Data Platform to ingest, store, and query your data directly on their edge and a new Email Service (private beta). They announced Observatory + Smart Shield for performance insights in one click, an AI Index for all customers and a way to deploy Payload CMS on Workers.

But they weren't done. How about eliminating cold starts with shard-and-conquer, R2 SQL for distributed queries, a 20% speed boost to the Internet powered by Rust, and a newly minted partnership with PlanetScale to deploy databases straight from Workers. And sprinkled in are Code Mode for MCP and a nice summary of everything that's new in their constantly evolving developer platform. They wrapped the whole thing with a retrospective on their 15 years of helping build a better Internet. Not a bad quinceañera. 🎂

In other news, Modal Labs raised $80M to simplify cloud AI infrastructure with programmable building blocks. I've been watching them since the beginning, and I can see them becoming the go-to dev platform for lots of AI/ML workloads. And of course, David Boyne is at it again, adding GraphQL support to EventCatalog. I think he sleeps less than me.

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Trusted by 600,000+ developers and 56% of the Fortune 500, Warp is where the IDE and terminal merge: so you can prompt, review, and ship code with agents. Ranked #1 on Terminal-Bench, top-5 on SWE-Bench, and saving devs 5 hours weekly. Try Warp free; Pro is $5 with code OFFBYONE. Sponsored

Tutorials

• Two Easy Ways to Cut Costs in AppSync Merged APIs by Seth Orell
• Build resilient generative AI agents by Yiwen Zhang
• From First Principles to FinOps: How to Build Your Own Proactive AWS Cost Assistant by Menelik
• AWS Deep Dives - SQS (Simple Queue Service) by Brian Rinaldi
• Detect EventBridge target failure: Part 1 - with dead letter queue by Pubudu Jayawardana
• Building a Serverless Dungeon Master Agent on AWS by Joanne Skiles
• Building an MCP Server with Strands Agents SDK: From Agent to Protocol by Akshatha Laxmi
• Serverless applications with Java and Aurora DSQL - Part 2 Using Aurora DSQL JDBC Connector by Vadym Kazulkin
• Building Serverless RAG Applications with Couchbase and Amazon Bedrock by Amir Tarek, Mohamed Salah, and Yves Laurent

Reads

• Is Serverless expensive at scale? Only if you are using it wrong by Evandro Pires
• How a Silent Redshift Serverless Pricing Change Spiked Our Costs — and What We Did About It by Ryan Wood
• Seven Years of Firecracker by Marc Brooker
• Taming Large Codebases with Kiro: Lessons from a 58K-LoC Rust Migration by Vivek V.

Podcasts, Videos, and more

• Building Intelligent Agents | Serverless Office Hours with Julian Wood and Eric Johson
• Serverless Craic Ep73 Liberty Mutual’s Cloud Journey to Serverless by the Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge

New from AWS

• AWS X-Ray introduces Adaptive Sampling for automatic optimized error detection
• Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Runtime, Browser, and Code Interpreter add support for VPC, AWS PrivateLink, CloudFormation, and tagging
• Amazon CloudWatch now supports resource tags when monitoring vended metrics
• Billing View now supports cost management data from multiple organizations
• AWS Transform now enables Terraform for VMware network automation
• Amazon Connect dashboards now support filtering and comparing metrics by any time range
• AWS Compute Optimizer now supports 99 new Amazon EC2 instance types
• AWS announces EC2 instance attestation

Upcoming Events 🗓

October 16, 2025 - AWS North Community Conference

October 21, 2025 - Serverless Days Milan 2025

December 1-5, 2025 - AWS re:Invent 2025

Please send me your serverless events!

Final Thoughts 🤔

It's already super late because I've been nonstop coding with the new Claude Code using Sonnet 4.5 for at least the last 15 hours. If you haven't tried it, you really should. If you don't, other (experienced) developers that master tools like Claude Code and Warp are going to run circles around you. #justsaying

See you next week,
Jeremy

I hope you enjoyed this newsletter. We're always looking for ideas and feedback to make it better and more inclusive, so please feel free to reach out to me via Bluesky, LinkedIn, X, or email.