October 23, 2024 - Talk to your code

The Breakpoint

Hey all, welcome back to The Breakpoint — our weekly roundup of the most interesting full-stack developer tools that have launched on the site. In this week’s edition: An npm package that lets you edit your codebase using natural language.

The Latest

Five of the coolest dev tools that have launched recently

JSX.Design: A no-code editor for React development. 

JSX.Design is a no-code WYSIWYG editor for React that lets you visually build responsive UIs by dragging and dropping components, customizing styles, and syncing code. It supports Typescript, Next.js, CRA and other React-based frameworks and generates raw JSX in real-time. 

Manicode: An npm package that lets you edit your codebase using natural language. 

Manicode is an npm package that is portable to any development environment. It lets you edit your codebase using natural language prompts in your CLI, automatically pulling any files it needs as context and running any terminal commands or tests you request. 

Trag: An AI code review companion that can lint patterns. 

Trag does one simple thing: it matches written rules to code. You give it a set of plain English rules, and it enforces these rules on every pull request. Think of it as a “superlinter,” or as an extra teammate who already knows exactly which errors or vulnerabilities to look for. 

Stacktape: Automates the deployment, scaling and management of AWS infrastructure. 

Stacktape claims it can get you to a production-grade AWS setup with no DevOps expertise in a day. It uses Infrastructure-as-Code to automate deployment, scaling and monitoring, enabling faster iterations and easier cloud management. 

Treblle 3.0: A platform for building, shipping, and managing APIs. 

Treblle is designed to help teams build, ship, and govern APIs in one place. It comes with advanced API log aggregation, observability, docs, and debugging in order to allow teams ship with confidence.

The Big Idea

We asked Alex Gap, one of our cracked engineers (they’re all cracked, ftr — we’re a stacked team), to give us his thoughts on a couple of the dev tools launches this week. Here’s what he had to say about Trag and JSX.Design.

Trag: In theory, I like the idea of enforcing linting and best practice rules that are too complicated for linters to enforce. In practice, Trag didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I tried setting up a few basic rules that ended up in a bunch of false positives and added noise to our PRs.

That said, the rules I used were pretty generic, which is probably why the results were underwhelming. I could see Trag being more useful if I spent time crafting more specific rules. There’s probably a sweet spot for rules for trag: things that are too complex for a linter but not as intricate as architecture or design. 

JSX.Design: This could be helpful for prototyping and putting together a UI as a starting point for a project, but it’s not a replacement for your code editor. It will let you quickly build a UI, but eventually you’ll need to write some code to make that UI do something useful. 

Bonus

Did you know we publish fantastic articles every week on the site? Check out some of the latest pieces:

A Founder’s Guide to AI Fine-Tuning, by Kyle Corbitt (Founder and CEO of OpenPipe). 

“This is for busy founders or engineers building a Gen AI-powered feature. You’ve heard about fine-tuning but don’t have deep ML expertise. You might already have a problem you think fine-tuning can solve (lower costs? higher quality?) or might just be getting ready for the future.”

A Better Way to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers, by Chris Bakke (Founder of Laskie and Interviewed). 

“How many ‘generically-personalized’ cold emails do you receive every day? How many of those products have you actually bought in the last year? For me, the answers are ‘lots’ and ‘zero.’

So what makes you believe you’re going to be the one to break through this noise and scale and start landing sales?

Here’s a different approach.

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