Journalism

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

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