Richard MacManus

In an article introducing GPT‑5 to developers, OpenAI claimed that the new model “excels at front-end coding, beating OpenAI o3 at frontend web development 70% of the time in internal testing.” Romain Huet, OpenAI’s head of developer experience, added on X that GPT-5 is “astonishingly good at frontend development.” There was also support from well-known … Read more

If APIs were the connective tissue between different websites and apps during the Web 2.0 era, then AI agents are shaping up to be the same thing in the AI era. In other words, AI agents will increasingly be how you access and use data from various sources around the internet. APIs aren’t going away, … Read more

Webpages and websites are increasingly seen as “old world UIs” to proponents of AI agents and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). This week, in a presentation at Microsoft’s MCP Dev Days entitled “The Future of User Interaction,” Kent C. Dodd even went as far as to say that “we’re entering a new phase where, instead … Read more

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced its second-quarter financial results today. In both the press release and in CEO Sundar Pichai’s remarks, AI was mentioned every couple of lines. What wasn’t mentioned? The word “web.” Not even when it came to talking about search, the core product of Google that was built on — … Read more

If you want to create a user interface for your web application, these days, chances are you’ll use React — or at least, that’s what your frontend developers will likely suggest. Turns out, that’s the primary reason why Gent Hito, CEO of /n software, decided to target React with his company’s new UI builder product, … Read more

This week, a web framework called Hono announced on X that it had “finally” reached 25,000 GitHub stars. While 25,000 fans is not exactly under the radar, Hono hasn’t had the attention it deserves either. Given it is built on web standards, rather than (for example) React, Hono seems like an indicator of where frameworks … Read more

Thirty years ago, Netscape engineer Brendan Eich famously created a new client-side scripting language in just ten days. It was initially called Mocha, but by the end of the year it would be renamed JavaScript. In 1995, nobody could’ve predicted that JavaScript would become the world’s most popular programming language. But that’s exactly what happened. … Read more

Half an hour before I attended Google’s press briefing announcing Gemini CLI — an “open source AI agent that brings the power of Gemini directly into your terminal” — I tuned into the live YouTube stream of Warp announcing its version 2.0 product. Warp, one of the original AI-focused terminal apps, was launching what it … Read more

“Every AI agent needs a web browser,” said Paul Klein IV, CEO of headless browser vendor Browserbase, at this month’s AI Engineer World’s Fair. What is a headless browser? Simply put, it’s a web browser without a graphical user interface. Until very recently, they’ve been used primarily for running automated web app tests and for … Read more

The web browser has been the core app of the web for more than thirty years. Fundamentally, it hasn’t changed much over that time, but now it’s starting to be reimagined as an AI tool. Dia, a new web browser that invites you to “chat with your tabs,” has just been launched as an invite-only … Read more

This month marks the 30th anniversary of PHP being released to the world. To find out how PHP has evolved over the years, its technical improvements over the past decade, and the importance of PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, I spoke to PHP core developer Derick Rethans. Rethans has been a PHP developer for … Read more

Believe it or not, it’s been over three years since Twitter announced it was being sold to Elon Musk. When that news broke, some Twitter users (myself included) began to move to the fediverse — a collection of decentralized web products powered by the W3C standard, ActivityPub. Many people thought this might be the beginning … Read more

When the web was first scaling up, content delivery networks (CDNs) became a way of dealing with the ever-increasing load. Akamai is widely considered the pioneer of CDN technology in the late-1990s, but arguably it’s been overtaken now by younger, more agile CDN competitors. At least that’s the view of Artur Bergman, co-founder and chief … Read more

Is RAG dead yet? That was the tongue-in-cheek question posed recently by Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI. And Kiela knows a thing or two about RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — he led the team at Meta that introduced the technique in a May 2020 research paper. Of course, Kiela’s post was a reaction to the … Read more

At today’s Google I/O, the general availability of Gemini Code Assist for individuals was announced. In the lead-up to the event, I spoke to Ryan J. Salva, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, about this latest iteration of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s AI coding tool. In particular, we focused on the product’s … Read more