Richard MacManus

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

AI coding tools are now an established part of software development, but generative AI is also spreading out to other parts of a developer’s workflow. Userdoc is a startup that has created an AI-assisted service for creating software requirements. At the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco last week, I sat down with its co-founder … Read more

This week the inaugural AI Engineer Summit was held in San Francisco. It was a heady week of startup excitement and networking around an emerging job role: the AI Engineer. After the event, I met co-founder Shawn “Swyx” Wang at a new AI hackerspace in San Francisco, called Newton, to discuss the current status of … Read more

DataStax has just released a new open source project called LangStream, bringing together “data streaming and generative AI.” I spoke with streaming engineer Chris Bartholomew, the lead on the project, about what LangStream contributes to the emerging AI app ecosystem, and what (if any) similarities it has to the popular LangChain project. DataStax is over … Read more

CDE, which stands for “Cloud Development Environment”, is a hot product category for developers currently. Up till now, the consensus was there were two main types of CDEs: the SaaS model (software as a service) and the so-called “self-hosted” model, where the CDE is hosted inside a customer’s cloud environment. Well, according to the company … Read more

Will Falcon has quite a resume. He’s the creator of PyTorch Lightning, a wrapper for PyTorch (the popular machine learning framework), and the CEO of a VC-funded “OS for AI” company called Lightning AI. And, as I learned today in an interview with Falcon, he’s an ex-Navy Seal trainee who only learned how to code … Read more

This week at Anyscale’s Ray Summit, a conference focused on LLMs and generative AI for developers, attention was turned to the business of scaling. Robert Nishihara, the co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, opened the Ray Summit by warning that the LLM era was about to get even more complex and data-intensive than it already is. … Read more

Meta’s recent release of Code Llama, a large language model (LLM) for code generation, prompted the data cloud company Snowflake to evaluate Code Llama’s performance on SQL code generation. It found that “Code Llama models outperform Llama2 models by 11-30 percent accuracy points on text-to-SQL tasks and come very close to GPT4 performance.” Snowflake also … Read more

Codeanywhere was one of the first web-based code editors when it was released in 2009 (as PHPanywhere). Since that time, entire developer environments have migrated to the cloud and Codeanywhere has found itself slipping behind in the ultra-competitive Cloud IDE market, where newer products like GitHub Codespaces and Replit have taken center stage. To rectify … Read more

In the evolving LLM app stack, a British company called Humanloop has — perhaps accidentally — defined a new category of product: an LLM “playground.” It’s a platform where developers can test various LLM prompts, and then deploy the best ones into an application with full DevOps-style measurement and monitoring. To understand exactly what Humanloop … Read more