Richard MacManus

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

Earlier this week, Matt Rickard wrote a post entitled “Why Tailwind CSS Won,” which got to the front page of Hacker News. Inevitably, it kicked off the latest round of polarized opinions on social media about a popular web development tool. Surprise, surprise: some people love Tailwind, and others hate it. The reasonings for each … Read more

The developer ecosystem for AI-enabled applications is beginning to mature, after the emergence over the past year of tools like LangChain and LlamaIndex. There’s even now a term for AI-focused developers: AI engineer, which is the next step up from “prompt engineer,” according to its proselytizer Shawn @swyx Wang. He’s created a nifty diagram showing … Read more

When Netlify acquired one of its former competitors, Gatsby, in February, I noted that its use of the term “Jamstack” (which it coined in 2016) wasn’t so prominent in its marketing anymore. “Composable architectures” appeared to be the new catchphrase. Fast-forward six more months, and Netlify has just closed The Jamstack Community Discord, according to … Read more

From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta’s Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn’t the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone. More intriguing is Meta’s promise to make Threads a part of the fediverse, by adding support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ActivityPub specification. The … Read more