The Breakpoint

The Latest

Five of the coolest dev tools that have launched recently

Gait: Git-Blame for AI-generated code. 

Gait is an open-source Cursor and VS code extension that lets you view the prompt that created a block of AI-generated code. It automatically reads and saves your chat history and codebase edits into a shareable .gait folder. 

Chat with your database:  AI that knows your database

Chat with your database is kind of like your own Clippy but for solving database issues. It’s an AI assistant that lets you ask questions about things like SQL performance. It gets to know your database intimately, and it’s entirely open source. 

Jam for Customer Support: Record customer bugs with dev logs.

Jam’s newest integration allows your users to record bugs right from their support window with a single click. Once done, it uses AI to generate bug notes to pass on to developers. No more back and forth between developers, support, and users.

Theneo: Automatically generate clean docs. 

Theneo uses AI to automatically generate clean documentation that you and your team can more easily collaborate on. You can even test APIs within the docs and automate updates to them as you ship. 

Octomind QA Agent: AI-powered end-to-end testing.

Octomind is kind of like your own personal junior QA assistant but i instead of a human, it’s AI. It builds all your tests from scratch and runs them automatically to test your app for bugs. 

The Big Idea

Ken Miller, a senior engineer here at Product Hunt, spent last week chatting with tons of dev tools makers and helping them think through their upcoming launches. He’s distilled the conversations into a few key comms and industry landscape takeaways:

Drop the jargon, explain the value. 

Many dev tools makers have a tendency to speak in jargon, which limits their audience to only those who are as deep as they are. There are plenty of “better mousetrap”-type products that improve some aspect of development, but don’t do a good job of explaining concretely why they’re better and whose problem that solves. They’re proud of what they’ve made and think it’s a huge improvement (which it might be), but don’t articulate why an observer should care. 

That said, most of them, once we were in conversation, were able to explain their products to me in a way that I — a generalist engineer from their point of view — could understand what they were about. So, I think the jargon problem is more a function of feedback and coaching than raw communication ability. 

Takeaway: Take time to explain your product to educated generalists — you’ll probably find their questions or comments will help you refine your tagline and pitch. 

TypeScript rules the webdev space. 

I noticed a lot of people are working in the TypeScript ecosystem specifically, perhaps due to the rise of Node and the incredible gravity well it created. TS+Node+React have all but taken over the webdev space for new projects, and even people like me who generally hate JavaScript will have a hard time resisting its dominance. I think it’s an increasingly safe choice to target TypeScript exclusively. 

15 years ago, when Node first evolved out of Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, I predicted the future would be JavaScript on the front and back end. It took them a few years to bring that to fruition, but now that it’s stable, it’s very, very hard to resist end-to-end typing. 

Rust is a distant second overall, but very popular in more systems-level backend infrastructure, where it’s positioned as a service rather than a dev tool or framework. AI infrastructure is coming along, but I think AI is overexposed in general and it will be a long road before those tools are mature. 

Takeaway: You can bet on TypeScript dominance for the foreseeable future, but keep an eye out for emergent AI infra players. 

Tips and Tricks

— When using Warp, use Cmd + K to clear the terminal and reset the session without restarting the app and Cmd + P to run a fuzzy search for commands and files. 

— When using Raycast, use Cmd + K to view and execute your most recent commands and Cmd + Space to search apps, scripts, or actions quickly. 

That’s it for this week, folks. Hope you enjoyed this redesigned newsletter. As usual, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] with any questions or feedback.