What's New - August 2025

Inspired by my favorite newsletter, "3-2-1" by James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. This month, I'm giving you my top 3 product updates, 2 insights from developers, and 1 community contribution.

3 Product updates

I.

When alerts go quiet (and that's actually good news)

It was, in fact, a success.

Introducing a major platform shift like Dashboard—unifying all your Studios and Apps under one roof—will inevitably bring unknowns around performance and stability. For the last quarter, tackling this became the team's top priority, using Sentry, Vercel, and custom analytics in Amplitude.

Their approach and key takeaways:

• Research and prioritize ruthlessly—fix what impacts the most users first.
• Performance improvements cascade beyond UX—faster SSR uses less processing time on Vercel, and calling our own APIs less frequently reduces load on our infrastructure.
• Strategic data loading makes the biggest impact—defer everything that's not required for first render.

Result: Faster loading times, smoother app switching across Dashboard, and a quiet alert channel = happy developers.

II.

Functions now support full GROQ syntax

Not only do we now have pre-built functions, so called "recipes" for you to copy & paste. But as of July 29th, we also have Full GROQ Support in Functions.

Want to trigger a function only if a specific field changed? Or give the function access to the document’s data before and after the change? Watch John demonstrate this in our newly dropped release video on YouTube.

And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel - the easiest way to stay up to date with releases throughout the month!

III.

A major that wasn't so major

On July 15th, we updated Sanity Studio from v3 to v4.

The only breaking change? Node 20 is now required instead of Node 18.

Determined to learn from previous major bumps, Rita Dias and the team made developer experience priority one: early communication through docs, blog posts, CLI notices, an "Are we v4 yet?" tracking tool (thanks Cody!) that they can now reuse for future version bumps, and systematically tackled both first- and second-party dependencies before launch.

Watch my conversation with Rita to understand the three main engineering challenges faced when performing a major upgrade like this.

2 insights from developers

I.

Matt Pocock on shipping faster in our latest Code && Content episode.

"Cutting down on review cycles actually means I can ship more code. And if I ship something bad, I either just delete it or update it."

Think big, deliver incrementally. Few things are irreversible, but there's always more to learn once you get it in front of users.

Watch the full conversation below to learn more about embracing improvisation to create more effective developer content, cohort-based learnings, AI tooling, and how to stay trusted in a fast-moving industry.

II.

Anthony Rivera, Director of Engineering at Complex, on staying ahead:

"Right now, we're figuring out what's next. We have a marketplace and partner with a lot of brands—commerce is definitely the next big initiative for us. It's about marrying content and commerce, and building on our experiential platforms like ComplexCon, our yearly event. We're essentially becoming multiple companies at once."

Anthony joins us August 6th (sign up here!) to share how Complex shifted their engineering focus from infrastructure maintenance to business value.

Watch the full conversation between Simen (CTO of Sanity) and Anthony below, plus see how Complex, Morning Brew, and Semafor scale media operations with small teams in this Behind the Experience series.

1 Community contribution 🌟

I.

Lucidity Next.js Sanity Starter by Hex Digital

The Enterprise-Ready Next.js 15 + Sanity Starter with a focus on performance, security, and maintainability.

Recent example: Jamie Warburton (Head of Engineering at Hex Digital) used Lucidity to build BirdLife International's DataZone—a global conservation platform that connects Sanity documents with species databases, powering data-driven fact sheets that inform worldwide policy decisions.

Want to use this starter? Jamie would appreciate a star on the repo, sponsorship or a coffee if you're using it in your company, it helps him maintain and improve the project.

Questions? The team is here to help!

Want more behind-the-scenes details on Dashboard improvements? Join our #dashboard channel on the Sanity Community Discord. Run into dependency troubles with the v4 upgrade? Let us know!