Richard MacManus

Earlier this week, Matt Rickard wrote a post entitled “Why Tailwind CSS Won,” which got to the front page of Hacker News. Inevitably, it kicked off the latest round of polarized opinions on social media about a popular web development tool. Surprise, surprise: some people love Tailwind, and others hate it. The reasonings for each … Read more

The developer ecosystem for AI-enabled applications is beginning to mature, after the emergence over the past year of tools like LangChain and LlamaIndex. There’s even now a term for AI-focused developers: AI engineer, which is the next step up from “prompt engineer,” according to its proselytizer Shawn @swyx Wang. He’s created a nifty diagram showing … Read more

When Netlify acquired one of its former competitors, Gatsby, in February, I noted that its use of the term “Jamstack” (which it coined in 2016) wasn’t so prominent in its marketing anymore. “Composable architectures” appeared to be the new catchphrase. Fast-forward six more months, and Netlify has just closed The Jamstack Community Discord, according to … Read more

From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta’s Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn’t the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone. More intriguing is Meta’s promise to make Threads a part of the fediverse, by adding support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ActivityPub specification. The … Read more

What if you could combine your own private data store with a large language model (LLM) like OpenAI’s GPT, and query it programmatically? That’s the promise of LlamaIndex, a new framework that helps developers avoid fine-tuning and overly long prompts. It’s part of an emerging category of LLM application tools that some are calling “orchestration … Read more

When Adobe announced that it would acquire the design tool Figma for $20 billion last September, an open source equivalent called Penpot immediately began seeing a spike in signups. Penpot, which is developed by a Spanish company called Kaleidos, continued to grow rapidly after it launched General Availability in February. Since then, Penpot sign-ups have … Read more

MosaicML is launching its second open source large language model (LLM), called MPT-30B, which follows on from the smaller MPT-7B model it debuted in May. To discuss the new model and what it means for developers, I spoke to MosaicML co-founder and CEO, Naveen Rao. His previous startup was Nervana, a deep learning company that … Read more

Forget the LAMP stack, it’s now all about the LLM stack. Tools such as LangChain and Anyscale’s Aviary have launched over the past year to help developers build apps based on — or connected to — large language models (LLMs). Although it’s still early days, Hugging Face has quickly become a key part of this … Read more

Today at Canva’s first-ever developer conference in San Francisco, the company announced a new developer platform, along with a $50 million “Innovation Fund.” Canva, a design platform that competes with the likes of Adobe and Figma, claims it has 135 million monthly active users. So this is potential of great interest to devs — including … Read more

The company behind Ray, an open source AI framework that helps power ChatGPT, has just released a new tool to help developers work with large language models (LLMs). Called Aviary, Anyscale describes it as the “first fully free, cloud-based infrastructure designed to help developers choose and deploy the right technologies and approach for their LLM-based … Read more

“Welcome to the era of spatial computing,” announced Apple as it unveiled its latest device, a pair of mixed-reality goggles called the Vision Pro. CEO Tim Cook described it as “a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world.” A new operating system powers the device, … Read more

AlphaSense has used artificial intelligence technologies for over ten years, as a way to compete against the likes of Bloomberg in the market intelligence industry. It recently launched its first generative AI application, Smart Summaries, which provides summaries of content such as earnings calls. We spoke to VP of Product Chris Ackerson, who previously worked … Read more

LangChain is a programming framework for using large language models (LLMs) in applications. Like everything in generative AI, things have moved incredibly fast for the project. It started out as a Python tool in October 2022, then in February added TypeScript support. By April, it supported multiple JavaScript environments, including Node.js, browsers, Cloudflare Workers, Vercel/Next.js, … Read more

We’re in a new golden age of decentralized versions of Twitter. Mastodon (an open source project built on the ActivityPub protocol), Bluesky (a company building the AT Protocol) and now Nostr (an open protocol project) are all attempting to fulfill the promise of Twitter in 2007, when it was erroneously called an open platform. Intriguingly, … Read more