It’s rare that a web product lasts 25 years, given how fast the industry cycles through technologies. But this month marks a quarter century of Drupal, the open source content management system (CMS). To mark the occasion, and also to discuss the launch of Drupal CMS 2.0 — which, confusingly, is not version 2 of … Read more

So, is RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) dead now? Last May I asked that question of Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI, based on the growing hype around MCP (Model Context Protocol). Both are data retrieval mechanisms for Large Language Models, but it’s MCP that has taken all the headlines over the past year. The truth is, … Read more

Late last week, the global cloud platform Cloudflare acquired the company behind Astro, one of the leading frontend frameworks. This follows a pattern of popular frameworks coming under the umbrella of platform companies — or at least becoming financially supported by them. This trend perhaps began in 2021, when Vercel hired Svelte creator Rich Harris. … Read more

Tailwind has been in the news lately, as it struggles to keep its doors open in the AI era. But it’s not the only “CSS-in-JS” solution to compete for developers’ attention. Recently Meta has been promoting its open source, React-based styling project, StyleX. Unlike Tailwind, it’s not a framework — Meta calls it both a … Read more

One of the big AI development trends of last year was the shift to on-device inference, in many cases using so-called small language models (SLMs). Google is leading the charge on this, with its “Web AI” initiative and technology such as LiteRT.js, its Web AI runtime. But this trend toward processing inference on the user’s … Read more

When I went to the first AI Engineer Summit in October 2023, AI agents were a joke. At that point, agents hadn’t proven they could consistently do even basic tasks. But fast forward just two years, and agentic technology has made big strides — albeit it’s still relatively unproven as completely autonomous software. Regardless, agents … Read more

This week, Google launched A2UI, an open source project to help developers build “agentic user interfaces.” It’s the latest in what’s becoming a regular release cycle of new standards and protocols for building a user interface in AI agents and chatbots. First, there was MCP-UI, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem project closely aligned with … Read more

There was a further shift away from complexity in web development this year, with frontend frameworks like Astro and Svelte gaining popularity as more developers looked for solutions beyond the React ecosystem. Meanwhile, native web platform features proved they’re up to the job of building sophisticated web applications — with CSS in particular improving over … Read more

OpenAI’s Apps SDK launched in early October, enabling developers to build mini web apps for ChatGPT. While we haven’t yet seen the promised ChatGPT app store, third-party developers have already begun to experiment with the SDK. For instance, TELUS Digital has built a proof-of-concept ChatGPT app, “a stock and news tracker with market data, interactive … Read more

Last week Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, published an article explaining why Mozilla is “doing for AI what we did for the web.” He also pointed to a new strategy document that is “focused just as much on AI as it is on the web.” Part of Mozilla’s new AI-centric strategy is an … Read more

At this month’s Google Web AI summit, the primary focus was client-side AI in the browser — but we also heard a lot about Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its web variant, WebMCP, agents, and how “compute abstractions” like WebGPU and WebNN are enabling web developers to access device hardware. After an introduction by Google’s … Read more

The Google Web AI summit was held earlier this month as an invite-only event in Sunnyvale, Calif. After the event, I caught up with the organizer, Jason Mayes, who leads Web AI initiatives at Google. The last time I’d interviewed Mayes was February 2023, when our main topic of conversation was TensorFlow.js — a JavaScript … Read more

Microsoft Research has just launched an open source environment for studying agentic markets, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Kamar’s research group had previously developed AutoGen, an agentic development framework that has become popular with Python developers — … Read more

For Vercel’s Andrew Qu, OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Apps platform presented a challenge. “ChatGPT initially designed their apps to be static HTML pages, cached, so they can deliver a consistent but static experience to everyone,” he told The New Stack. “But the web has progressed all this time to make things more dynamic… so to sort … Read more