Richard MacManus

PostgreSQL (typically called Postgres) is a popular free and open source relational database. It’s attracted a lot of extensions and third-party tools over the years, which has inspired a company called Tembo to build a “Postgres as a Platform” service — a kind of marketplace for Postgres extensions and other tools. The goal is to … Read more

The AI search engine Perplexity has been getting a lot of buzz recently as an alternative to ChatGPT. Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity provides citations by default for the information it delivers. That single feature has become crucial in generative AI, given the ongoing hallucination issue with this technology. Accordingly, Perplexity has become a surprisingly strong player … Read more

If web development in 2023 was dominated by JavaScript, with a splash of AI engineering, then what can we expect for the coming year? The Fediverse Scales Up — RSS Readers 2.0? It was a wild end of the year for the fediverse, which up till recently had been a loose collection of relatively small … Read more

Using large language models (LLMs) in application development has been one of the biggest trends in technology this year. It began with companies using OpenAI’s proprietary models via its API, but by the end of 2023 there were a plethora of different LLMs to choose from — including open source LLMs that developers can directly … Read more

In many ways, the open web is the healthiest its been in years: the fediverse now has solid momentum, thanks to continued improvements in Mastodon and (crucially) the promised support of Meta’s Threads; web standards continue to improve (see WebAssembly and Web Components, as just two examples); and non-profit collectives like the Open Web Advocacy … Read more

Regardless of the outcome of the drama around OpenAI over the past several days, one thing is clear: startups that had built on top of OpenAI’s API are now rethinking their strategy. As Shawn “swyx” Wang noted soon after the drama spilled into the news, “99% of AI Engineer work begins and probably ends with … Read more

Freeplay is a new LLM development platform (a sentence I have repeated multiple times this year). It’s also been given the “Figma of…” label by one of its investors, who called it “the Figma of LLM development.” So we’re two for two so far on the dev tools hype index. But let’s step back: what … Read more

Project IDX is an “experimental” Google product for developers, currently in public preview (but there is a waitlist to get into it). The product is somewhat ambiguously described as an “integrated developer experience that features AI features/assistance.” So is it a Cloud IDE? Is it a copilot? Is it something else entirely? To find out, … Read more

Gradient is the latest large language model (LLM) application development platform to launch this year. This one caught my attention for a couple of reasons: firstly, it’s founded by people who used to run AI teams at Netflix, Google and Splunk; and secondly, Gradient promises to help developers build custom AI systems based on open … Read more

The phrase “Figma for developers” has been used by a number of dev tool startups in recent years, but a company called MightyMeld believes its product — targeted at React developers — actually lives up to it. MightyMeld, which is launching out of private beta today, has created what it calls a “visual way to … Read more

While I was in San Francisco for the AI Engineer Summit earlier this month, I took the opportunity to visit the Internet Archive — the actual physical archive in the California town of Richmond, about twenty minutes drive from San Francisco. I’d bought a ticket to “go behind–the-scenes at the physical archive” on Wednesday, Oct. … Read more

Last month, the low-code company Retool launched a new AI product called Retool AI. It’s one of the first low-code platforms to explicitly add AI, so I reached out to founder and CEO David Hsu to talk about the new tool. We discuss how Retool users are making use of AI, what types of products … Read more

At its Compose conference today, Netlify announced it is taking on the enterprise market with a new product suite: Netlify Composable Web Platform. Last week, I met CEO Matt Biilmann at Netlify’s new San Francisco office near South Park to discuss the launch. Netlify was the company that coined the term “Jamstack,” a web development … Read more