Richard MacManus

Tailwind has been in the news lately, as it struggles to keep its doors open in the AI era. But it’s not the only “CSS-in-JS” solution to compete for developers’ attention. Recently Meta has been promoting its open source, React-based styling project, StyleX. Unlike Tailwind, it’s not a framework — Meta calls it both a … Read more

One of the big AI development trends of last year was the shift to on-device inference, in many cases using so-called small language models (SLMs). Google is leading the charge on this, with its “Web AI” initiative and technology such as LiteRT.js, its Web AI runtime. But this trend toward processing inference on the user’s … Read more

When I went to the first AI Engineer Summit in October 2023, AI agents were a joke. At that point, agents hadn’t proven they could consistently do even basic tasks. But fast forward just two years, and agentic technology has made big strides — albeit it’s still relatively unproven as completely autonomous software. Regardless, agents … Read more

There was a further shift away from complexity in web development this year, with frontend frameworks like Astro and Svelte gaining popularity as more developers looked for solutions beyond the React ecosystem. Meanwhile, native web platform features proved they’re up to the job of building sophisticated web applications — with CSS in particular improving over … Read more

OpenAI’s Apps SDK launched in early October, enabling developers to build mini web apps for ChatGPT. While we haven’t yet seen the promised ChatGPT app store, third-party developers have already begun to experiment with the SDK. For instance, TELUS Digital has built a proof-of-concept ChatGPT app, “a stock and news tracker with market data, interactive … Read more

Last week Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, published an article explaining why Mozilla is “doing for AI what we did for the web.” He also pointed to a new strategy document that is “focused just as much on AI as it is on the web.” Part of Mozilla’s new AI-centric strategy is an … Read more

Microsoft Research has just launched an open source environment for studying agentic markets, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Kamar’s research group had previously developed AutoGen, an agentic development framework that has become popular with Python developers — … Read more

For Vercel’s Andrew Qu, OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Apps platform presented a challenge. “ChatGPT initially designed their apps to be static HTML pages, cached, so they can deliver a consistent but static experience to everyone,” he told The New Stack. “But the web has progressed all this time to make things more dynamic… so to sort … Read more

2025 has been the year of AI agents, and most of the developer attention so far has been on the frameworks and tools to build these agents. We’ve seen a flurry of launches in this space recently: OpenAI’s AgentKit and Agents SDK, Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Vertex AI Agent … Read more

This week VoidZero announced Vite+, which it calls “a unified toolchain for JavaScript.” The company’s founding CEO Evan You, who created Vite and also the web framework Vue, wrote that “Vite+ is a command-line developer tool you can install from npm, just like Vite itself.” You had talked about Vite+ during my recent interview with … Read more

It’s now almost three years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Since then the fediverse — a collection of decentralized web products powered by the W3C standard, ActivityPub — has continued to grow. Bluesky’s AT Protocol also has some intriguing new apps. But overall, app development on these protocols is still in a nascent phase. Let’s … Read more