Richard MacManus

The JavaScript frameworks Remix and Astro are currently getting a lot of buzz as simpler alternatives to Next.js, the dominant framework of the React era. Of the two upstart frameworks, Remix is more of a direct competitor to Next.js, since they are both based on the React library (Astro is framework-agnostic, so you can use … Read more

The last time I spoke to Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, in October 2022, our focus was headless content management systems — at the time a trending topic in web development. But much has changed since then: JavaScript frameworks have gotten even more complex, Jamstack is no longer a hot buzzword, and (of course) generative AI … Read more

Today and tomorrow, an event for web developers called TheJam.dev is being held virtually by CFE.dev, a community for developers founded by Brian Rinaldi. Rinaldi opened the event by noting that web development has changed dramatically over the past four years — he cited generative AI tools, but also the changes in Next.js and the … Read more

Locofy is a tool for frontend developers that converts designs to code, primarily via a Figma plugin. The company, based out of Singapore, has just announced a new product called Locofy Lightning, which is built on a stack that includes a custom technology called a “Large Design Model” (LDM). According to the company, the LDM … Read more

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

There is no sign of the React juggernaut slowing down as we near the end of 2023, but there has been a bit of a shakeup in the web frameworks that use React. Other web development trends this year include the rise of Cloud Development Environments (CDEs), generative AI and LLM features being integrated into … 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